Bidzina, Mshia!

The FINANCIAL — Most understand that the quality of life for the poorest Georgians is quite bad.

It would be reasonable, though, to think that the situation has been improving with the seemingly steady growth in GDP, right?  Unfortunately, this is quite untrue. The poor of Georgia are among the hungriest in the world, at least by self-assessment.

Georgian Opinion Research business International, with partners around the globe, carried out the most recent Global Barometer survey for WIN-Gallup International.  We asked respondents whether they had problems feeding themselves at any point over the last 12 months.  Worldwide, 12% of respondents said they often had too little to eat (3%) or that it was a problem sometimes (9%).  Georgians fared worse than that with a 62% “freedom from hunger,” a rate higher than only five other countries.

These numbers may seem radical, but we can find corroborating evidence in many surveys. GORBI has many times asked the question, “Which of the following best describes your family's financial situation?” In 2005, over half of respondents said they had enough money for food, but not for clothing; another 20% said they hadn’t enough money even for food.  These numbers have not improved, either.  In fact, 43% of respondents said they didn’t have enough money for clothing in 2012, and 37% had times where they could not afford enough food.

Wealth — The global distribution of this hunger is somewhat surprising, and has far less to do with wealth than you might expect.  Virtually all of some countries’ citizens feel they had enough to eat last year, such as Hong Kong (99%), Tunisia (99%), and Azerbaijan (96%).  Other countries have much more trouble feeding their citizens, such as Cameroon (49%), Palestine (48%), and the terribly hungry South Sudan (20%).

This “felt-hunger” rate seems to be completely unrelated to the strength of a country’s economy.  The countries in this poll were categorized into high, middle, and low income countries (based on local purchasing power), and there was virtually no difference in the average felt-hunger by income strata.  The US, with a per capita GDP of $48,442, scored a 78% on the felt-hunger index.  However, Vietnamese earning $3,435 a year on average, less than Georgians, had virtually no problems eating in the last 12 months (96%). 

The reason this is worth mentioning: this is one of a series of examples clearly showing that GDP growth does not solve socioeconomic problems like hunger and extreme poverty; the researchers who worked on this study suggest that felt-Hunger likely has social roots beyond poverty. Especially in countries like Georgia, different kinds of economic and social reform would be needed to properly address these issues.  

Massive amounts of foreign investment have flowed into the country, and the government has borrowed well over a billion dollars from the IMF to enact economic reform. Because of this, Georgia has enjoyed some very impressive GDP growth since the mid-1990s, repeatedly posting double digit annual growth.  This has not been a robust and inclusive growth, though, as income is distributed less equally in Georgia than in every western country, including the US.

I would suggest the nearly exclusive investment on tourism and viticulture industries is a major factor in this asymmetric growth, especially when combined with cronyism at all levels of government.  If the Georgian government is serious about solving the widespread hunger problems, it will steer foreign and domestic investments to areas which, while not providing big and immediate returns, provide a better foundation for work and security for the poorest and hungriest Georgians.

Self-Assessments — Finally, it’s important to briefly discuss the fact that these numbers come from self-assessment; if we can attribute the persistence of hunger to culture, we could certainly attribute an inclination to over represent felt-hunger and poverty to culture.  Perhaps Georgians aren’t actually so hungry, but rather they like to complain.  Unfortunately for the hopeful, other statistics that don’t rely on self-assessment seem to confirm these numbers. 

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for example, calculates world hunger by estimating the calorie intake of various members of the household and undernourishment in the population.  The total number of hungry people by the FAO’s calculations is 925 million as of 2010, whereas this survey estimates 840 million suffer from felt-hunger. On a country level, the FAO does not place Georgia as far down on the list as our poll has, but it still declares that over one million Georgians suffer from undernourishment, around 25% of the population.

Even with a disagreement on the extent of undernourishment, all agree: Georgia has far too many hungry citizens.