As I write this and as you read this, someone is starving. Indeed, many people are starving. Arguably, almost 0.7bn people are starving.
Some of us live in countries where there is little or no starvation, so the problem isn't evident to us. Imagine, though, if someone who badly needed food was right in front of you and you had the means to help them. It would be difficult to resist the desire to do something. Imagine you were eating a large meal while being watched by people who have scarcely anything to eat. It would be impossible to continue eating. Yet distance is all that separates those of us who have more than enough to eat from starving people.
Such distances have come to matter less than they used to, beginning with sea-travel, radio and television, then airliners and now the internet. And, of course, these people always were our fellow human beings, regardless of the distance which separated us. The humanitarian urge significantly predates distance-shrinking technology. Many religions and cultures include almsgiving as a spiritual and social duty. The abolition of poverty isn't just an act of charity but can conduce to social order.
The World Food Programme reports that: "Conflict is driving hunger in nearly all the world’s main food crises. War leads to greater food insecurity. And, in its turn, food insecurity increases the chances of unrest and violence." Thus, conflict resolution is an indirect way of solving the problem of poverty. Just as the UN's poverty-reduction goal was met five years early, the world has also become a more peaceful place. So the trend is good (even though covid has set things back).
What will not go away, however, is the reality of the hundreds of millions who are starving right now. These are the people who are metaphorically sitting across from you at your well-stocked dinner-table. In 2020, the World Food Programme raised $8.4bn, but it needed another $5.3bn, less than a 10th of the $67bn that people spent gambling online. Plainly, to many in the developed world, feeding the starving isn't a priority.
People with enough to eat can successfully argue that their money is theirs to do with what they choose. Also, they are not the cause of poverty and, anyway, their taxes are used by governments to send aid overseas. Furthermore, it is widely believed that some of that aid does not even reach the poor. Forbes has reported a World Bank survey which found that significant amounts of aid money ended up in tax havens. Considerable amounts of UK aid money are tied to social, cultural and political objectives which may not be principally about relieving abject poverty but, rather, placating political lobbies in the donor nations. The Guardian has reported: "Too much of Britain’s aid budget is being spent poorly by Whitehall departments on projects that fail the test of reducing poverty in the world’s poorest countries, [The ONE Group] has said."
United Kingdom aid is scrutinised by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. In a 2019 review of five years' activity, the commission concluded: "UK aid has shown it can deliver in the midst of conflict, in some of the world’s most challenging contexts, giving the UK more flexibility to pursue its objectives and enhance its leadership role in the international response to crises. However, UK aid does not yet have a convincing approach to addressing the long-term drivers of conflict and fragility."
What is one to conclude? Like every human undertaking, famine relief isn't a perfect system; it is open to corruption and human error. One would have to be very cynical, though, to believe that all emergency aid went missing. It is probable that most of it does alleviate suffering. For the current year, the World Food Programme says it needs $12.3bn, yet it expects only to receive $7.4bn (60%). Although government-budgets are understandably stressed because of covid, this missing $5bn is trivial when compared to what mankind might spend this year on gambling (see above), confectionery ($210bn) or alcoholic drinks ($1,640bn). The WFP's projected shortfall is thus equivalent to 0.3% of the world's booze market.
Can we do something about that?