The Tools to Conquer Hunger Include Family Planning

Washington, DC - October 2, 2006

In the 1950s and 60s, the first Green Revolution utilized scientific advances in agriculture to double the world’s food production. Now, as we face famine in areas where the population is still growing rapidly, expanded funding for family planning programs can make permanent inroads into world hunger. Otherwise, as PAI Council member and father of the Green Revolution Norman Borlaug said in his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture, “…the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf has called for a second Green Revolution stating: “In the next few decades, a major international effort is needed to feed the world when the population soars from six to nine billion.” The number of malnourished people in sub-Saharan Africa has skyrocketed from 88 million in 1970 to more than 200 million today. Feeding the hungry may be an unending battle if we don’t address population growth by giving women and couples in the developing world the tools they need to achieve the family size they desire: comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, including contraceptives. When people can determine the number of children they have, they are better able to feed their families.

Despite the huge impact expanded family planning programs could have on curbing world hunger, the U.S. currently spends much more on emergency “band-aid” solutions than on longer-term and ultimately more effective investments. As countries such as Ethiopia and Niger are projected to double in population over the next thirty years, hunger will likely continue to increase. Moving the Green Revolution forward is crucial to feeding the millions of hungry people in the developing the world. However, unless more is done to provide family planning services to the millions of women in those regions who desperately wish to delay or end childbearing, reducing world hunger will continue to remain elusive.

Population Action International (PAI) works to improve individual well-being and preserve global resources by mobilizing political and financial support for population, family planning and reproductive health policies and programs.