With hundreds of millions of people still facing hunger, the livestock sector deserves greater recognition for providing the foods from which we can best obtain and easily digest key nutrients.

When the United Nations (UN) launched its famous Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, goal number two was one of those that received the most attention. Goal two has a completely unambiguous aim: zero hunger by 2030. It talks of ending all forms of malnutrition by that date and includes commitments to prioritising the needs of children under five, the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, of pregnant and breast-feeding women and older people. Alas, it now looks certain that meeting it will remain out of reach.

Since 1999, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has published, with a group of partner agencies, an annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report. It launched SOFI 2024 in Brazil in July during a meeting of the finance ministers of the G20 group of most-developed economies. The SOFI report made for sobering reading.

It stated that, last year, 733 million people across the world faced hunger. This is the mid-point between the FAO’s lowest and highest estimates. It equates to one person in 11 globally; the figure for Africa is one person in five. Frequent and severe price inflation, conflicts in various parts of the world and economic downturns were the main reasons FAO offered for the numbers still being so high. It mentioned climate as another factor affecting Africa in particular.

Off track

Ten years ago, immediately before the launch of the SDGs, the number of people facing undernourishment was just under 540 million, making the 2023 figure worse by 35%. There were slight ups and downs across the years of the second half of the last decade, culminating in a figure of 581.3 million people in 2019. In the 2020s, however, the numbers have become much higher.

There was a sharp rise when the pandemic hit, FAO says, and undernourishment has now persisted at nearly the same level for the last three years. With regard to meeting SDG2, “the world is far off track”, the agency adds.

Pessimistic projection

FAO chief economist, Dr Máximo Torero, shares a projection that in 2030 there will still be 582 million in the world who are chronically undernourished; a return to 2019 levels but still far indeed from zero hunger. “We need to change,” he says. “We only have six years left and we want to get as close as possible to the target. That means accelerating the process of moving people out of hunger.”

He explains that Africa remains the region that is most affected by hunger, but suggests that improvements in South America may offer hope. In South America, Dr Torero explains, governments are now spending “significant amounts of money” on social protection programmes. These allow governments to carry out what he calls “efficient, targeted interventions” in the face of incidents of food insecurity, making sure help quickly reaches the people who need it most, moving them away from hunger. Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Chile are all countries that are good at this, he says. Across South America, more than 5 million people have been able to put chronic hunger behind them in the last three years.

“We have not observed this social protection in Africa,” the FAO chief economist continues. “And Africa is the region with the biggest number of countries in food crisis.” The three main drivers of this are conflict, climate and economic downturns, in that order. Africa is also the region in which access to finance is the most difficult. Many countries there are also in debt crisis, he says, and this means their governments are unable to put in place policies that will accelerate the eradication of hunger.

Healthy diet at minimum cost

Money also plays a major part in stopping people from accessing not just food, but the right food to have a healthy diet. “What we mean by this is a diet that is diverse and has all the macro- and micro-nutrients that we need to avoid problems of chronic undernourishment. This diet is also necessary for people to avoid problems of excess weight or obesity.” At the moment, by Dr Torero’s reckoning, there are 2.8 billion people in the world who do not have sufficient access to the most important nutrients because the foods that contain them are unaffordable.

“This figure, 2.8 billion people, is extremely high and it has not improved relative to previous years,” he insists. “We need people to have access to a minimum-cost healthy diet. We need to change the paradigm of countries where the prices are so high that they don’t allow people to consume what they need.”

Access to nutrients

Meat and milk are among the foods that can make all the difference in the world in helping people overcome hunger. Since 2020, an interdisciplinary scientific consortium of academics has been presenting information about the importance for human nutrition of animal protein on an online platform called Aleph 2020. They describe the website as “a dynamic white paper” and as “an imperfect work in progress”. It is ‘pro bono’; it receives no funding and offers no financial incentive to the people who share information on the platform.

The founder of this information resource, Frédéric Leroy, is a professor in food science and biotechnology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. He is also one of the initiators of the Dublin Declaration, a pledge that scientists at a meeting in the Irish capital in October 2022 signed. In doing so, they committed themselves to supporting and contributing to efforts to show scientifically that livestock farming brings benefits to society. Within a year, more than 1,000 figures from the global scientific community had signed the pledge. By July 2024, the figure had risen to 1,210.

Aleph’s founding principles are similar to those that the Dublin Declaration espouses. The name Aleph comes from: Animal source foods, Livestock, Ethics, Planet, and Health. The team behind the platform says its motivation came from dismay at the way some, especially people in the urban centres of high-income countries, had come to regard animal source foods. A symbol of strength, health and generosity since ancient times, consumption of meat is “increasingly represented as unethical and harmful to our health and the planet”, the platform says. 

Not all calories are equal

Going from ‘pro bono’ to ‘cui bono’, or who stands to gain, it adds that prominent, well funded bodies that now advocate a diet without animal source foods, or with only very low amounts of them, are making “astonishing claims”. These claims are counter-intuitive, the Aleph team says, based on scientific foundations that are being misinterpreted or presented out of context. It presents ten arguments for including “more nuance” in the debate.

For this article, in which the focus is not on boardrooms or stock exchanges or Ted Talks or social media likes, but on the stark reality of the effects of ongoing undernourishment on millions of children, women and men, we shall explore one of the ten.

In keeping with Dr Máximo Torero’s point about the importance of access to an affordable and available healthy diet, Aleph argues that not all calories are equal. Calorific efficiency and adequate essential nutrition are sometimes different things. It states its case clearly: “Protein and key micronutrient levels are crucial for optimal health, and many of these key essential nutrients are best obtained from animal source foods.” It says ‘best obtained’ because of the digestibility of the amino acids, zinc, calcium, iodine, vitamins B12, A, and D, and other nutrients these foods contain.

Carbon tunnel-vision

Aleph is highly critical of a tendency among many anti-meat campaigners to present climate impact as the main reason for a move away from livestock, meat and dairy products. Nutrient-dense foods have an environmental footprint; all foods do. Aleph’s position is that the greater the nutritional value of food products, the greater the offset of their environmental impact should be.

“Using CO₂-equivalent per kilo of protein is not a suitable basis for comparing foods with different nutritional profiles,” the platform insists. “Applying such metrics in dietary scenarios aimed at reducing climate impact may compromise micronutrient supply and promote ultra-processed food solutions, both of which are harmful for health. Dietary policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions should never be nutritionally harmful or incomplete.”

An incomplete focus of this kind, which Aleph has referred to as “carbon tunnel-vision”, can logically lead to the conclusion that sugar, seed-oils and starch would be our best dietary bets, while meat and milk would be at the opposite end of the spectrum. This is not quoted on the Aleph platform, but Professor Frédéric Leroy has described this position as nonsense.

Children helping to manage livestock in South Sudan.
Credit: FAO/Eduardo Soteras

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