Articles by Jomo Kwame Sundaram

About 805 million people - one in nine people worldwide - remain chronically hungry. Ending hunger and malnutrition requires strong political commitment at the highest level, effective coordination among various ministries and partners, and broad-based social participation. Three policy priorities are crucial to ending malnutrition - expansion of social protection; making smallholder agriculture more nutrition sensitive; and focusing on under-fi ve child and maternal nutrition defi ciencies. An integrated approach is needed to ensure that food consumed is nutritious, wholesome, acceptable, safe and affordable, especially to the poorest and most vulnerable.

The protracted global economic slowdown and the deep ecological crisis that the world finds itself in both call for a Global Green New Deal, similar to the New Deal of the United States that tackled the Great Depression. The 21st century New Deal must include developing countries and has to be economically, socially and ecologically sustainable.

Inter-country income inequalities now account for about two-thirds of world inequality, with intra-country inequality accounting for only a third. Global income inequality narrowed in the post-second world war decades before the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions and then the Washington Consensus shifted the balance of power. Recent trends in the functional distribution of income point to a declining share for labour despite strong evidence of rising labour productivity. Evidence of growing wealth concentration in recent decades is consistent with the acceleration of the growth of rentier power.

Only a sustained commitment to prioritising economic recovery can overcome the short-termism dictated by fi nancial markets. Recovery priorities should emphasise job creation as well as enhancing national productive capacities. This necessarily requires ensuring greater coherence of macroeconomic policies with structural transformation goals than seen thus far.

Global food prices continue to rise month after month, driven by longer-term and more recent trends. Financialisation is an important factor among the recent trends. There is strong evidence of correlation among the markets for different financial assets, including stocks/shares, commodities and currencies. Falling asset prices in other financial market segments may thus be more important for explaining the recent surge in food prices than supply constraints or changing demand and other factors underlying longer-term gradual upward price trends.