1 Production: Can we end hunger?
Caroline Krafft
Can we end hunger?
In Yemen, 17 million people are food insecure, which means they do not have enough to eat.[1] There are 3.3 million children and women in Yemen who are so malnourished they require urgent treatment.[2] Two-thirds of children under the age of five in Yemen are so chronically malnourished that their growth has been stunted.[3] This rate is an increase in malnutrition from previous decades, when around half of children were stunted.[4] In the long term, these malnourished children will learn less (if they attend school), earn less when they work, and have poorer health throughout their lives.[5] Conflict in Yemen has moved the country closer to famine.[6]
Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and health lifestyle.
–1996 World Food Summit
In the United States, there are 17 million food insecure households (13 percent of households).[7] There are 7 million children in the United States who are in households where food insecurity is affecting children.[8] Despite programs designed to prevent hunger, such as food stamps, children and families are still suffering from hunger in the United States. These children perform worse in school near the end of the month—when their food stamps have run out.[9]
Although the United States is a much wealthier nation than Yemen, and hunger is a less common issue, both countries still fail to meet the most basic needs of all of their citizens—starting with food. This chapter introduces the economics of production—how countries create and distribute resources—to help us think about what it would take to end hunger.
How can economics help us end hunger?
Economics is the study of how societies allocate their scarce resources. In both Yemen and the United States—and around the world—understanding the allocation of scarce resources is critical to addressing hunger. Food itself is a scarce resource when families go hungry. Producing food depends on a number of different inputs, such as land, water, and seeds, which are also scarce. Economics can help us think about how to allocate food to people so we can reduce or eliminate hunger. One of the ways economics can help end hunger is by helping us allocate not just food, but the inputs that produce food.
Economists think about allocation decisions on two levels. The first is microeconomics, thinking about the behavior of individuals or firms. When thinking about hunger, a microeconomic focus might be on how farmers choose between different crops or decide how much water to allocate to each crop. The second type of economics is macroeconomics, the study of the economy of a nation (or a region or the world) as a whole. Macroeconomics would shift the focus to the output of an entire nation or state. This text covers both macroeconomic and microeconomic topics.
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