What the Global Hunger Index won’t say

How did the GHI decide whether a country qualified for the “moderate,” “alarming,” “serious,” or “extremely alarming” hunger level in 2016? It ranked 118 countries in the developing world on these four measures (or in reportspeak, “key indicators”): undernourishment, child mortality, child wasting and child stunting. Almost half of those countries, says the report, have “serious” or “alarming” hunger levels. Did you take in that last line? Hard to, after you read the previous one, yes? Characterizations like “serious” and “alarming” can quickly induce numbness, despite the fact that they are based on clinical, unflinching terms like “child wasting” and “child stunting.” Why is it that the diction of these kinds of reports seems inevitably to devolve into the bloodless?

Then there’s a second detour in the GHI report (and, for that matter, other reports just like it): a crucial detail buried way down deep that hints at what, in the race to zero hunger, is just as important as nourishment. In order to target their relief efforts, aid organizations need data. And data is really hard to gather precisely in the conflict zones like South Sudan and the Syrian Arab Republic.

What’s the one thing reports like the GHI tend to recommend with any urgency? Well, here are two conventional words you’ll be familiar with: “political will.” But that anemic phrasing doesn’t say much of anything. What the report should say is that hunger crises are rarely about food itself. Hunger crises are about large-scale political issues that demand political action—action that will incite confrontation and conflict of the congressional or diplomatic sort. What the report should say is not “political will” or even, “commitments to conflict resolution and prevention.” What is required, pure and simple, is “intervention.”

There. Is that so hard to say?