At a camp for displaced people in Democratic Republic of Congo, sacks of grain and jugs of oil await distribution. Photo by Liz Lucas for Oxfam America
I’m on the road doing some reporting and woke this morning still full from a late supper last night: a hefty hamburger, a heap of greasy fries, and a crisp, green salad. Lord knows how many calories I packed away. That’s not the kind of thing I usually think about. But I did this morning when I opened an e-mail from my colleague Ian Mashingaidze in South Africa.
It included a link to a report just issued by the International Food Policy Research Institute: an index measuring the state of hunger globally. It ranks countries using three indicators. One of them is the proportion of people who are calorie deficient, or undernourished.
Called the 2008 Global Hunger Index, it is not a snapshot of what’s happening this moment because its most recent data is from 2006. It does not reflect the current wild gyration in food prices and what that means for the ability of families to feed themselves. But the index does paint a picture of how bad things were for many people—before they began to get worse.
And this is what got me: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 74 percent of the population is calorie deficient. Basically, that means three-quarters of the Congolese people are undernourished.
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