Global Hunger: The Price We Pay For Food

In poorer nations, buying the ingredients for a single meal can use up a significant portion of a person’s earnings. Where there is conflict or economic collapse, it can exceed these earnings outright. Researchers involved with the World Food Programme propose what should be done to ensure true food security

In New York, the baseline for the World Food Programme’s (WFP) comparative cost analysis, a simple plate of bean stew costs US$1,20 (about R16) to make, or 0,6% of a New Yorker’s average daily income. Using this as a baseline, the WFP then determined how much an average person in New York would have to pay for the stew if he or she spent the same proportion of daily income as someone in another country. To determine the cost of a plate of bean stew in various countries, WFP economists calculated the cost of a standard meal of beans and pulses in the respective countries, paired with a locally preferred carbohydrate such as rice or cassava, priced it on a local scale, then compared it with the average daily budget derived from national GDP per capita figures.

Thus, if a New Yorker had to spend the equivalent proportion of income as someone in South Sudan, for example, the same meal would cost him/her US$321,70 (R4 400). The reason for this is that 155% of Sudanese average daily income is needed to buy a simple plate of food!

Similarly, in Nigeria, the stew costs 121% of average daily income, the equivalent of US$200,32 (R3 000). In Deir Ezzor, Syria, it is 115% of average daily income, or US$190,11 (R2 600) for the New Yorker, while in Malawi, the bean stew would cost 45% of the average daily income, or US$94,43 (R1 300).

There are many reasons the same plate of food might cost a day’s wages in one country and a handful of small change in another. Most relate to the complex network of relationships that form pathways along which food travels from the people who grow, raise or catch it, to those who buy, cook and eat it. These networks can be characterised as ‘food systems’.