insecurity, and their interrelationships, and what might be done to reduce and
eventually eradicate them in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
approved at the UN in 2000. The MDGs have become an international reference
for measuring and tracking improvements in the human condition in developing
countries. They offer a comprehensive and multidimensional development frame-
work and set clear quantifiable targets to be achieved by 2015.
nized food security as one of the most fundamental of human rights. It has also
been agreed that the world possesses enough resources and know-how to eradicate
hunger and malnutrition. Achieving food security has been the subject of count-
less international conventions, declarations, compacts and resolutions. According
to one calculation, more than 120 have been addressed on various issues relating
to the right to food since the League of Nations was founded (Pinstrup-Andersen
et al., 1995). Yet despite some progress, it is estimated that 852 million people
worldwide were undernourished in the period 200002, most of them women and
children (FAO, 2004). This figure includes 815 million in the developing countries,
28 million in countries in transition and 9 million in the industrialized countries
(see Table 41.1). Hunger and malnutrition kill more people every year than AIDS,
malaria and tuberculosis combined. More people die silently from hunger than
in wars. And malnutrition often leads to disease, devastating the lives of hungry
poor people. Some 150 million children under the age of five in the developing
countries are affected by chronic protein-energy malnutrition (Table 41.2). One
child dies every five second from hunger-related causes.
as the large-scale humanitarian disasters that occurred in the genocide in Rwanda,
the Asian tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, and the on-going humanitarian
catastrophe in Darfur, Sudan, have shown. After each event, the interna-
tional community has said `never again', but C. P. Snow's dire prophesy made
in 1968 continues to unfold. Four steps should be taken to handle future
humanitarian catastrophes (Shaw, 2004a). First, agreement should be reached at
the United Nations to give the UN secretary-general the power to take whatever
speedy action is necessary in accordance with Article VII of the UN Charter on
`Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of
aggression'. Article 99 of the Charter authorizes the UN secretary-general to bring
to the attention of the UN Security Council any matter which, in his opinion, may
threaten the maintenance of peace and security (which could involve voicing the
wishes of the people against its government). He already has authority to request
the UN World Food Programme to provide emergency humanitarian assistance to
people caught up in war and civil conflict if the government concerned does not
make a request to do so.