Relevance: Sociology: Challenges of Social Transformation :Crisis of development: displacement, environmental problems and sustainability. Poverty, deprivation and inequalities.
WHAT IS THE GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX?
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is published annually as part of a partnership between Concern Worldwide, Ireland’s largest aid and humanitarian agency that says it is “dedicated to tackling poverty and suffering in the world’s poorest countries”, and Welthungerhilfe, which describes itself as “one of the largest private aid organisations in Germany, independent of politics and religion”.
WHY HAS INDIA OBJECTED TO THE 2021 RANKING?
India came out strongly against the publishers of the annual Global Hunger Index over the questions of methodology and data sources amid a decline in the country’s ranking, which slid from 94 in 2020 to 101 in 2021, which puts it behind its neighbours Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
While the country has seen consistent improvement in terms of its score, it is reported to have demonstrated mixed performance on the representative indicators.
Terming the FAO methodology “unscientific”, it said that “the scientific measurement of undernourishment would require measurement of weight and height, whereas the methodology involved here is based on Gallup poll based on pure telephonic estimate of the population.
The ministry further said that the “report completely disregards government’s massive effort to ensure food security of the entire population during the Covid period, verifiable data on which are available”.
Referring to the FAO report, ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021’, the ministry said it is “noted with surprise… that other four countries of this region — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka — have not been affected at all by Covid-19 pandemic induced loss of job/business and reduction in income levels, rather they have been able to improve their position on the indicator…
Hunger and Sociological Perspective
- Scarcity is a compelling, common-sense perspective that dominates both popular perceptions and public policy.
- But, while food concerns may start with limited supply, there’s much more to world hunger than that.
- A good deal of thinking and research in sociology, building off the ideas of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, suggests that world hunger has less to do with the shortage of food than with a shortage of affordable or accessible food.
- Sociologists have found that social inequalities, distribution systems, and other economic and political factors create barriers to food access.
- Hunger, in this sociological conception, is part of the broader concept of “food security,” which the World Bank describes as the inability to acquire the food necessary to sustain an active and healthy life. A central sociological element of this is “food poverty.”
- Poverty, though, is only one form of inequality. Gender, ethnic, and other types of stratification have contributed considerably to hunger as well.
- Women are disproportionately likely to suffer from hunger, and in fact constitute approximately 60 percent of the world’s hungry.
- This is particularly troubling given that women do as much as 80 percent of the world’s agricultural labor, working land that in more than a few places they may not be legally entitled to own.
Yes I have come across protein malnutrition in large sections of rural population. Certainly a large section of people across all domains i.e urban & rural areas could not access proper two square meals. So the GHI of India recorded unimpressive.
A lot of emphasis need to be laid to execute various existing government schemes to bring down hunger in the country