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The time has come to cash in overdue peace dividends
The vast majority (490 million) of hungry people on the planet live in countries affected by conflict; 122 out of 155 million stunted children in the world do as well.
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After steadily declining for over a decade, global hunger is on the rise again, affecting 815 million people in 2016, or 11 percent of the global population. That’s 38 million more people than the previous year. (Shutterstock/File)
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couple of decades ago the wall that was on everybody’s mind was in Berlin. Then it came crashing down, pushed over by a wave of reform and renewal that seemed to promise the dawn of a new era for our troubled globe.
At that time, there was much talk of “a peace dividend” that would see large amounts of public money freed up from military spending. No longer needed to wage the Cold War, these funds would be used for loftier purposes.
But the push for peace, paradoxically, has faltered in the post-Cold War era. Fast-forward a decade or two, and we find that while wars between nations have decreased in frequency, conflict and violence continue to plague and undermine human progress.
Recently we have witnessed violence and conflict — some of it involving governments, some of it not — surge to a record high. Data indicate that non-state conflicts have increased by 125 percent since 2010, surpassing all other types of conflict. State-based conflict also rose by over 60 percent in the same period.
Meanwhile, civil wars and internal conflicts have surpassed the number of interstate clashes, marking a shift away from violence between nations to violence within nations.
Yet despite this self-defeating discord, we as a global family have scored successes in bending the arc of human development in a better direction.
We forged a groundbreaking global deal to finally take action to face the threat of climate change. At the global level, most of the commitments made under the UN Millennium Development Goals were fulfilled, lifting millions of people out of poverty and hunger. And we upped our game via the bold and visionary 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which aims inter alia at the total eradication of hunger and malnutrition.
