Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Sources: United States, England, and France:Our World in Data, Roser 2016d, based on data from Fogel 2004. China, India, and the World: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data.

The numbers plotted in figure 7-1 are averages, and they would be a misleading index of well-being if they were just lifted by rich people scarfing down more calories (if no one was getting fat except Mama Cass). Fortunately, the numbers reflect an increase in the availability of calories throughout the range, including the bottom. When children are underfed, their growth is stunted, and throughout their lives they have a higher risk of getting sick and dying. Figure 7-2 shows the proportion of children who are stunted in a representative sample of countries which have data for the longest spans of time. Though the proportion of stunted children in poor countries like Kenya and Bangladesh is deplorable, we see that in just two decades the rate of stunting has been cut in half. Countries like Colombia and China also had high rates of stunting not long ago and have managed to bring them even lower.

Figure 7-2: Childhood stunting, 1966–2014

Source:Our World in Data, Roser 2016j, based on data from the World Health Organization’s Nutrition Landscape Information System, http://www.who.int/nutrition/nlis/en/.

Figure 7-3 offers another look at how the world has been feeding the hungry. It shows the rate of undernourishment (a year or more of insufficient food) for developing countries in five regions and for the world as a whole. In developed countries, which are not included in the estimates, the rate of undernourishment was less than 5 percent during the entire period, statistically indistinguishable from zero. Though 13 percent of people in the developing world being undernourished is far too much, it’s better than 35 percent, which was the level forty-five years earlier, or for that matter 50 percent, an estimate for the entire world in 1947 (not shown on the graph).⁷ Remember that these figures are proportions. The world added almost five billion people in those seventy years, which means that as the world was reducing the rate of hunger it was also feeding billions of additional mouths.

Figure 7-3: Undernourishment, 1970–2015

Source:Our World in Data, Roser 2016j, based on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization 2014, also reported in http://www.fao.org/economic/ess/ess-fs/ess-fadata/en/.

Not only has chronic undernourishment been in decline, but so have catastrophic famines—the crises that kill people in large numbers and cause widespread wasting (the condition of being two standard deviations below one’s expected weight) and kwashiorkor (the protein deficiency which causes the swollen bellies of the children in photographs that have become icons of famine).⁸ Figure 7-4 shows the number of deaths in major famines in each decade for the past 150 years, scaled by world population at the time.

Writing in 2000, the economist Stephen Devereux summarized the world’s progress in the 20th century:

Vulnerability to famine appears to have been virtually eradicated from all regions outside Africa. . . . Famine as an endemic problem in Asia and Europe seems to have been consigned to history. The grim label “land of famine” has left China, Russia, India and Bangladesh, and since the 1970s has resided only in Ethiopia and Sudan.

[In addition,] the link from crop failure to famine has been broken. Most recent drought- or flood-triggered food crises have been adequately met by a combination of local and international humanitarian response. . . .

If this trend continues, the 20th century should go down as the last during which tens of millions of people died for lack of access to food.⁹

Figure 7-4: Famine deaths, 1860–2016

Sources:Our World in Data, Hasell & Roser 2017, based on data from Devereux 2000; Ó Gráda 2009; White 2011, and EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, http://www.emdat.be/; and other sources. “Famine” is defined as in Ó Gráda 2009.

So far, the trend has continued. There is still hunger (including among the poor in developed countries), and there were famines in East Africa in 2011, the Sahel in 2012, and South Sudan in 2016, together with near-famines in Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen. But they did not kill on the scale of the catastrophes that were regular occurrences in earlier centuries.