The Hunger Report

Since the early 1990s, Vietnam has had a tremendous growth spurt. Extreme poverty declined from 58 percent of the population in 1993 to 16 percent in 2006.

Vietnam’s progress is due to a combination of economic reforms and technological innovations in its agricultural sector.

The most significant policy changes include loosening state controls on agriculture while implementing land reforms that provided market incentives to farmers. These were followed by permitting more private sector activity in agricultural processing and marketing. Farmers responded by increasing production, growing two or three successive crops on the same piece of land each year. From 1993 to 2006, per capita food production grew at 3.8 percent per year, equaled or surpassed by only five countries in the world.¹

The last several decades have shown once again that people will seize opportunities to escape poverty. Whole countries have been able to make huge leaps forward. India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, have dramatically reduced poverty and are now major players in the global economy. Because of their size, they receive great attention, but there has also been progress in many other nations. Ghana and Chile, two very different countries, have sharply reduced hunger. Haiti and Uganda, with strong support from donors, are making progress against infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

There is ample proof that large gains can be made in the fight against hunger, poverty and disease. Contrary to what sometimes seems like a never-ending stream of bad news, the situation appears much more positive once we step back to gain a broader perspective. Since 1980, the percentage of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty has fallen from one in two to one in four.² A cursory look at what was accomplished in the second half of the twentieth century is all it takes to regain confidence in the chances for continued progress. The eradication of smallpox, dramatic gains against polio and other diseases, increases in life expectancy, reductions in infant and maternal mortality, hundreds of millions of children now attending school—these and other examples demonstrate that a combination of political will, flexible approaches to development, and the mutual commitment of governments and donors can lead to real results.

Also encouraging has been the growing numbers of people around the world demanding that national leaders raise the plight of poor people to the top of the political agenda. The ONE Campaign in the United States, the Make Poverty History Campaign in the United Kingdom, and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, an international campaign, all have mobilized millions of citizens in support of development. Because of pressure from groups such as these, at the G8 Summit of 2005—a meeting of some of the richest countries in the world—heads of state agreed to double development assistance and expand debt relief for poor countries. Debt relief is a cause that bore fruit because the advocacy community would not let it go. Since 2000, developing countries have been able to redirect $17 billion into anti-poverty programs that otherwise would have gone to pay down debts.³