By Robert Pore

As many Americans struggle to make ends meet, according to Cody Willard’s MarketWatch Blog, the $140 billion in Wall Street bonuses being award would be enough to buy 29 million Americans full health insurance.

Still Congress, which generously bailed out Wall Street when it collapsed from its own greed, struggles to provide a national, comprehensive health plan for Americans.

The economic crisis is having another horrible consequence, according to the United Nation’s Food Agriculture Organization (FAO).

According to FAO, the economic crisis has driven up the number of hungry people in the world to 1.02 billion.

And the FAO said the global economic crisis, driven in part by unsustainable globalism, is “revealing a fragile world food system in urgent need of reform.”

Nearly all the world’s undernourished live in developing countries, according to FAO. In Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 642 million people are suffering from chronic hunger; in Sub-Saharan Africa 265 million; in Latin America and the Caribbean 53 million; in the Near East and North Africa 42 million; and in developed countries 15 million, according FAO’s annual hunger report.

Even before the recent crises, the FAO report said the number of undernourished people in the world had been increasing slowly but steadily for the past decade.

The report said that good progress was made in the 1980s and early 1990s in reducing chronic hunger. That was due to increased investment in agriculture following the global food crisis of the early 1970s, according to FAO.

But between 1995-97 and 2004-06, as agriculture investment declined substantially, the number of hungry people increased in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean, the FAO report said. Gains in hunger reduction were later reversed in this region as well, as a result of the food and economic crises.

The FAO report said the rise in the number of hungry people during both periods of low prices and economic prosperity and the very sharp rises in periods of price spikes and economic downturns shows the weakness of the global food security governance system.

“World leaders have reacted forcefully to the financial and economic crisis and succeeded in mobilizing billions of dollars in a short time period. The same strong action is needed now to combat hunger and poverty,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf.

Diouf said the rising number of hungry people is “intolerable”.

“We have the economic and technical means to make hunger disappear, what is missing is a stronger political will to eradicate hunger forever,” he said. “Investing in agriculture in developing countries is key as a healthy agricultural sector is essential not only to overcome hunger and poverty but also to ensure overall economic growth and peace and stability in the world.”

According to Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, “It is unacceptable in the 21st century that almost one in six of the world’s population is now going hungry.”

“At a time when there are more hungry people in the world than ever before, there is less food aid than we have seen in living memory,” Sheeran said. “We know what is needed to meet urgent hunger needs — we just need the resources and the international commitment to do the job.”

According to FAO, several factors have conspired to make the current crisis particularly devastating for poor households in developing countries.

— First, the crisis is affecting large parts of the world simultaneously, reducing the scope for traditional coping mechanisms such as currency devaluation, borrowing or increased use of official development assistance or migrant remittances.

— Second, the economic crisis comes on top of a food crisis that has already strained the coping strategies of the poor, hitting those most vulnerable to food insecurity when they are down. Faced with high domestic food prices, reduced incomes and employment and having already sold off assets, reduced food consumption and cut spending on essential items such as health care and education, these families risk falling deeper into destitution and the hunger-poverty trap.

— The third factor that differentiates this crisis from those of the past is that developing countries have become more integrated, both financially and commercially, into the world economy than they were 20 years ago, making them more vulnerable to changes in international markets.

According to the FAO report, many countries have experienced across-the-board drops in their trade and financial inflows, and have seen their export earnings, foreign investment, development aid and remittances falling.

“This not only reduces employment opportunities, but also reduces the money available to governments for programs promoting growth and supporting those in need,” the report said.

The 17 largest Latin American economies, for example, received $184 billion in financial inflows in 2007, which was roughly halved in 2008 to $89 billion and is expected to be halved again to $43 billion in 2009, the report said. This means, the report said, that consumption must be reduced, and for some low-income food-deficit countries, adjusting consumption may mean reducing badly needed food imports and other imported items such as health-care equipment and medicines.

The report includes case studies compiled by WFP in five countries — Armenia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Nicaragua and Zambia — showing how households are affected by the fall in remittances and other impacts of the economic downturn and how governments are responding to the crisis by investing in agriculture and infrastructure and expanding safety nets.

But, FAO acknowledges, “…much more needs to be done.”

“Small-scale farmers need access to high-quality seeds, fertilizers, feed and technologies to be able to boost productivity and production,” Diouf said. “And their governments need economic and policy tools to ensure that their countries’ agriculture sectors are both more productive and more resilient in the face of crises.”

The technology is available to feed the world. We have the ability to feed much more than the more than 6 billion that inhabit the planet. Unobstructed by politics and superstition, technology will have the ability to feed more than the 9.2 billion people that are projected by the middle of the century.

Pope Benedict XVI, in a message to the recent World Food Day celebrations, called for the “international community and its institutions to intervene in a more suitable and decisive manner.”

“It is my wish that such actions will favour the kind of cooperation that aims to protect farming methods adapted to the soils of each region and avoids a thoughtless waste of natural resources,” he said in a statement read out to the World Food Day celebrations.

“I also wish that this cooperation will preserve the values of rural people and the fundamental rights of those who toil on the land.”

Access to food was a fundamental human right and that the “drama” of hunger could only be eliminated by “removing the structural causes” and by investing in agricultural development in poor countries, the Pope said.

The Pope has it right, but it’s the structural causes that will be the biggest obstacle in providing the food the world needs.