Ten years after the General Assembly resolved for 'Zero Hunger', where does India and the rest of the world stand?
Governments around the world are obligated to eradicate hunger, an inextricable facet of global impoverishment and inequality. Ten years ago, the UN General Assembly resolved to achieve ‘Zero Hunger’ by 2030. Long before that, India enacted the National Food Security Act. Yet over 700 million people worldwide go hungry every day, and famines have ravaged India even in the 21st century. A timely, collective reflection could save us.
Mohan V Katarki
6 March 2025
ZERO hunger may sound metaphorical. However, as one of the seventeen targeted Sustainable Development Goals (‘SDG’) declared in 2015 by the General Assembly of the United Nations ‘Zero Hunger’ conveys the seriousness with which the global community has sought to address global food security and eliminate hunger by 2030. But where are we in 2025?
Let's explore the concept and its achievability.
Hunger is a primary economic problem. Amartya Sen, the welfare economist, views hunger primarily as a failure of entitlement rather than a lack of food. By saying that hunger is an entitlement failure, Sen has placed primary responsibility for providing food and the blame for its scarcity on the State. In India, it is said colloquially—“Mai-baap sarkar”! However, on a serious note, what Sen’s idea advocates is the rights-based approach as a preventive measure for achieving ‘Zero Hunger’.
By saying that hunger is an entitlement failure, Sen has placed primary responsibility for providing food and the blame for its scarcity on the State.
The UN’s conception of ‘Zero Hunger’ conveys two sets of international obligations:
Firstly, ‘Zero Hunger’ imposes an affirmative duty on the State to provide food and prevent hunger, starvation and death.
Secondly, ‘Zero Hunger’ imposes obligations on the rich or developed nations to assist the poorer nations as a part of cooperation to provide food and to discharge their responsibility to eliminate hunger.
It places an affirmative duty on the State by attempting to enforce the obligations binding on the party States by Article 2(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 1966 (ICESCR) and achieve “progressively the full realization of the rights” recognized in the convention which prominently include right to be “free from hunger” and right to “adequate food” in Article 11 read with the earlier declaration in Article 25 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 (UDHR); and in Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989.
Secondly, it seeks to promote international cooperation by
(i) enforcing the Food Assistance Convention of 2012, under which some 36 nations have undertaken to provide food to poor nations;
(ii) realizing the objects of the World Food Program of 1961 (WFP) established by the General Assembly of the UN “to respond to food emergencies and help combat hunger worldwide”.