Opinion: The hunger metrics mirage: There's been less progress on hunger reduction than it appears.

As the timeframe for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) came to an end in 2015, the United Nations lauded great progress, calling its MDG campaign the “most successful anti-poverty movement in history” (1). In its final progress report, the United Nations states that poverty has decreased by half and hunger has fallen dramatically (1). Sixty countries are said to have achieved the hunger-reduction target since 1990. Among the achievers are a strikingly large number of the so-called “least developed countries,” and many of them are the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa. There is no doubt that much of the developing world made significant progress in enhancing food supplies and reducing hunger over the past 25 years. However, tracking progress by country and across countries has been marred by the ambiguity of the metrics that have been used. The MDGs are internationally agreed goals that were adopted in 2001 to operationalize the Millennium Declaration, a commitment made in 2000 by representatives of 189 nations to fight extreme poverty in its many dimensions. Under this declaration, nation states pledged “to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger” (2), which later became the first (MDG 1) of eight total MDGs. To monitor progress toward each goal, a set of specific targets and indicators were adopted by the United Nations. Among these is the hunger target (MDG 1c) of halving the prevalence of undernourished, or the proportion of people below the minimum level of dietary consumption, between 1990 and 2015 (3). A reduction in prevalence is an important metric; it shows progress being made toward hunger reduction, especially at a global level. But it could also overstate the relative achievement of individual countries with high fertility rates. The year 2015 also marked the end of the monitoring period for the World Food Summit (WFS) goal, which preceded the MDGs. At the WFS in Rome in 1996, representatives of 182 nations pledged, “to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the absolute number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015” (4). The number of undernourished would be those who fall below the minimum level of dietary consumption for a given country and year (3). The WFS goal has been monitored by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, over the same 25-year reference period as the MDGs, from 1990 to 2015.