When was the last time you were hungry? Not the pang of a missed breakfast or delayed lunch, but the gnawing obsession of a hunger that has lasted 24 hours? For me, it was 25 years ago — when, for days I lived off one bowl of gruel a day for breakfast. The memory of the desperate desire for food followed by a debilitating weakness has lasted quarter of a century. But while my experience was a lifestyle choice, for the villagers of the rural district of Katine, in Uganda, it is their everyday life.

Uganda, with the help of debt relief and increased aid, may have got 5 million extra children into school, but a significant number of them turn up with empty stomachs before they return home for their one meal a day. Meanwhile, their mothers’ health is worn down by inadequate nutrition as they exhaust themselves working their fields and providing for their children. Katine’s struggle with hunger is typical; a third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished.

In recent years, headlines have been dominated by the western plague of obesity, but now hunger has re-emerged to take prominence in the minds of global decision-makers. The spike in food prices has mobilised much-needed attention — there is nothing like the threat of hunger prompting rioting and political instability to focus politicians’ minds. There is nothing like rising food prices to prompt Malthusian panic about need outstripping food supply. The food-price spike is laced with a particular guilt as biofuels snatch food from the mouths of hungry babies to feed SUV fuel tanks, and richer countries’ taste for meat gobbles up global grain supplies. But what is arguably the biggest cause of Africa’s failure to feed its peoples is monumental economic incompetence, and self-interest on the part of western donors and advisers.

The agenda can’t be all about growing roses in Ethiopia and beans in Zambia, but must include how to invest in the millions of smallholders who feed the continent. Kofi Annan heads up a Gates- and Rockefeller-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which is investing in research into crops resistant to disease and water shortage, to suit the diversity of conditions across Africa. It’s late but, let’s hope, not too late.

There are reasons to be cheerful, because tucked into the overall picture of decline are some remarkable successes, which are proof of the potential to significantly increase yields. Improving access to fertiliser reaps considerable benefits. The spectacular expansion of mobile phones in Africa could help farmers market their surpluses. One of the most extraordinary instances of the shrewdness and determination of African farmers has been the near eradication of rinderpest, a livestock disease, in the past 20 years.

Africa’s population is projected to carry on increasing dramatically; there will be millions more mouths to feed, and by 2050 the impacts of climate change could put an additional 60 million at risk of hunger. There is an urgent need to develop the systems of water management that could ensure Africans can feed themselves. That’s what makes the decades of ideologically driven or politically determined ineffectual policies so outrageous: we have lost valuable time in adapting a system of agriculture that will be hit harder than anywhere else in the world by climate change. — The Guardian