October 7th Class Essay

10/7 Essay: I want to introduce you to another source of sociology-focused data: Our World in Data, founded by Max Roser. Select a topic you are curious about from the dropdown “Articles by topic”. Technological Progress, for example. If the topic is lengthy, you can pick just a graph or two. Two cool things about the site are (1) there are concise descriptions of the topics, definitions of terms, and references; and (2) most ( if not all) the plots have their data available for download as a csv. Their COVID plots are some of the best and up-to-date. This one, for example is robust with its many metrics, but it’s simple and easy to manipulate as well.

I decided to look at the “Hunger and Nourishment” topic under the “Food and Agriculture” heading, as that’s what I am currently researching and most interested in at the moment. In respect to total undernourishment globally, the graphs show that in the past decade (from 2007 to 2017, as 2017 is the most up to date that the data reaches) undernourishment has declined, however, within the past couple of years, mainly 2014-2017, undernourishment has started to trend upwards again. This is largely due to an increase in the percentage of undernourished people in Latin and South America, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa, even though undernourishment has decreased in other areas, such as Asia. We can predict, however, that due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have made setbacks in terms of global undernourishment, as it became increasingly difficult to have access to large amounts of food, and especially healthy and nutrient-rich food, with supply chain shortages and rising unemployment. Thus, I predict that trends in the next five years (2017-2022) will depict increasing undernourishment in all regions of the world and thus an even sharper increase in global undernourishment.

Another set of graphs that I looked at were regarding childhood malnutrition and stunting/wasting. Though I knew that there is a general lack of nutrition in some developing countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, combined with disease and infection outbreaks, I did not know how drastic of an effect that these two factors had on childhood stunted growth. There is one map that I was looking and manipulating in order to see the percentage of children under five stunted due to a combination of poor nutrition and repeated infection and I was surprised and horrified to see that in countries such as Bangladesh, these numbers reached as high as 70.9% of children in 1986, and even now, in 2020, as high as 47 percent of children in sub-Saharan Africa that have stunted growth due to poor nutrition and infection. Though the general trends show that stunting is decreasing in countries in South Asia that are developing, likely due to greater access to medicine and food sources, numbers still remain dangerously high in a majority of sub-Saharan countries. This is likely due to the high prevalence of famine in these areas, as well as conflicts that can drive food available to children lower. These numbers have greater effects than just being depressing to an outside viewpoint; having nearly the majority population of stunted or wasted children impacts the workforce in a country, as it is possible these children will not make it to adulthood, and if they do, it will be with severe handicap, as it is proven that stunting and wasting affect the cognitive development of children. This can hold countries back from reaching development, as not only are the basic needs of the population for food not being met, but those responsible for advancing the country forward and providing a workforce are not able to meet those needs.

Lastly, I also looked at food security globally. Food insecurity globally is trending upwards, largely due to a sharp increase in food insecurity in Southern Asia, even though food insecurity is decreasing in other areas of the world, such as Sub-Saharan countries and low-income populations. Since food insecurity is a large cause of poor nutrition, the recent data that shows that food insecurity is decreasing in the worst affected area of Africa is promising: there is the potential for nutritional problems such as wasting and stunting to decrease in subsequent years. However, the global increasing food insecurity is troubling, and with the predicted increase due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a large possibility that we will not be able to meet the UN Sustainable Development goal of zero hunger by 2030.