FACT: The number of “chronically undernourished” people has grown by 163 million since 2017.

THE NUMBERS: Estimated count of “undernourished” world population –

* UN Food and Agricultural Organization.  

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, marking its 180th anniversary next Tuesday, is more watched on TV than read. The TV versions hold up pretty well to the actual story — after the three Spirits show awful, avaricious Scrooge his past mistakes, his present isolation, and his lonely future grave, he reforms, recovers his own happiness, gives the Cratchits a raise, and so forth. But they do miss some of Dickens’ larger concern, which goes beyond Scrooge’s personal redemption to a more general critique of an affluent society’s indifference to the lives of its poor.  A relevant passage at the end, but first a current parallel in the large, recent, and rapid rise in worldwide “food insecurity”:

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization defines “undernourishment” as follows:

“Undernourishment means that a person is not able to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum dietary energy requirements, over a period of one year. FAO defines hunger as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment.”

FAO’s definition of “minimum dietary energy” varies by age, body size, etc. — an 18-year-old girl on average needs 2,500 calories daily and an 18-year-old boy 3,400 — but is about 2,410 calories across the population. By way of context, Americans get about 3,500 calories per day, and the world average is about 2,960. Alternatively, a standard hamburger delivers about 375 calories, a single chapati 70, a pupusa 300, and a serving of jollof rice 390.

The FAO has published annual estimates of the number of people living beneath this threshold since the late 1990s. Its first “Food Insecurity in the World” report, released in 1999 and covering the year 1996, reported 825 million chronically undernourished people. This was 14.9%, or one in seven, of a world population then estimated at 5.6 billion. Divided regionally, the total included 525 million Asians (177 million in East Asia, 284 million in South Asia, 64 million in Southeast Asia), 180 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 33 million in the Middle East and North Africa, and 34 million in “developed” countries.

Their estimates steadily shrank for nearly two decades. The 2005 report, by then optimistically retitled “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World,” estimated a 12.1% undernourishment rate; the 2010 report found 8.6%; and the 2017 report 7.5%, or 572 million of 7.6 billion people. During this time, FAO’s estimate of undernourishment in East Asia fell to nearly zero, and that for Latin America and the Caribbean dropped to 38 million, South Asia’s to 167 million, and sub-Saharan Africa’s to 150 million.

Between 2010 and 2017, though, the picture of a general decline in hunger worldwide (if at different rates in different places) had grown equivocal. FAO’s estimates for undernourishment in Southeast Asia dropped by about half during these years. The estimates for Africa and the Middle East, though, began to rise. And since 2017, the two-generation retreat of hunger seems to have ended. By 2019, worldwide undernourishment had rebounded to 7.9% of the world’s population (613 million people).  Then, under the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (a large source of corn and wheat in developing countries), the estimate for 2021 came to 9.3% of world population and 739 million people, and the 2022 estimates are only modestly lower at 735 million and 9.2% of the world population. In sum, over the past six years, the count of undernourished people has grown by 163 million, including by 70 million in Africa and 90 million in South Asia.

Back now to Dickens. Most of the Carol’s “Christmas Present” chapter involves the Spirit showing Scrooge the happy parties and friendships he’s missing. Its last passage, though, reveals something that not only Scrooge, but the partiers too, have tried not to see:

From the foldings of its robe, the Spirit brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment. …

Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. 

Scrooge started back, appalled. “Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more. “They are Man’s,” said the Spirit. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both.”

We wish our friends and readers a happy holiday season, grateful for our blessings and mindful of those who have less.

FURTHER READING

Worldwide:

FAO’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023, with archived earlier editions back to 1999.

Why the rise? The report views the COVID-19 pandemic as the largest cause of the recent rise in undernourishment, responsible for raising long-term hunger counts by over 100 million. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the second cause, responsible for another 23 million:

“It is projected that almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030. This is about 119 million more than in a scenario in which neither the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine had occurred, and around 23 million more than if the war in Ukraine had not happened.”

USDA’s map of food and nutrition support programs.

At home:

A PPI report has ideas for improving the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).

USDA’s Economic Research Service estimates about 5.1% of American households, including 12.6% of single-mom households, living with “very low food security” as of 2022.

And the spirit of the season:

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, 180 years later.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: U.S. clothing tariffs are unfair to women.

THE NUMBERS: Average U.S. tariff rates* for clothing by gender, 2022 – 

* Tariff revenue divided by import value.  These calculations includes tariff revenue collected from both imports subject to MFN tariff rates, and from Chinese products subject to “301” tariffs (which often add 7.5% to existing rates). Import value includes clothing from MFN tariff sources, from China, and from countries exempted from tariffs under FTAs and trade preference programs.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

The House New Democrat Coalition’s eight-point trade policy plan — out last month from the NDC’s 11-member Trade Task Force, headed by Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) and co-chaired by Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) — has lots of ideas on digital trade, the China relationship, free trade agreements, farm exports, and more.  Included in the NDC’s list is a hope to “advance equity in trade policy by considering solutions to reduce gender bias and regressivity in the tariff system.” Here’s some background on the gender piece:

Our Valentine’s Day Trade Fact last February pointed out the strange fact that the U.S. tariff system taxes women’s underwear more heavily than men’s. Examination of the tariff schedules and import data across the clothing universe over the past few months shows that this underwear diss of women is not a weird anomaly.  Rather, it is a specific case of a larger systemic issue, which the NDC is very right to highlight: the tariff system in general taxes women’s clothing more heavily than men’s, imposing special charge on American women likely extracting above $2 billion per year. Here are the facts:

1. Tariff rates on average are higher on women’s clothes than on men’s: The U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule divides goods into 11,414 “lines,” each with a tariff rate. Chapters 61 and 62 cover clothes. Unique in the Tariff Schedule, they divide most clothes by gender and freely impose different tariff rates for similar items based on this division. For instance, men’s and boys’ cotton suit jackets under line 61033200 are taxed at 13.5%. The corresponding cotton jackets in the women and girls’ heading, at line 61043200, at 14.9%. More generally, 17 “headings” in Chapters 61 and 62 cover comparable clothes divided by gender:  men’s overcoats, women’s overcoats, men’s “suits and ensembles,” women’s “suits and ensembles,” men’s “shirts and blouses,” women’s “shirts and blouses,” men’s underwear, and women’s underwear. Here are the tariff rates in 2017* for these items, derived by dividing total tariff revenue by import value:

 *  Data is calculated using 2017 tariff revenue. The rates for 2022 would be higher, since additional tariffs on China have raised rates overall.

So in each category, tariff rates are higher on women’s clothes than on men’s. Combining all the categories, tariff rates on women’s clothing are on average 16.7%, 2.9 percentage points higher than the 13.6% average for men’s.

2. Free Trade Agreements Don’t Help Much and Might Accidentally Amplify Disparity: In theory, the U.S.’ free trade agreements and duty-free preference programs for developing countries should moderate and in some cases eliminate this disparity, by eliminating tariffs on both men’s and women’s clothes.  In practice, though, FTAs usually have clothing “rules of origin” so complex as to make them difficult to use, meaning they have less impact than most probably guess. Overall, the 14 U.S. FTAs provide 10% of American clothing imports, and the “CBI” and “AGOA” programs, which waive tariffs on Caribbean- and African-produced clothing, another 2%. So about 90% of the clothing brought into the U.S. comes with full tariff payments. Since 96% of clothing sold in American stores is imported, that means the large majority of garments include tariff costs. And on top of this, a group of researchers from the U.S International Trade Commission found that the FTA countries in practice ship more men’s clothing than women’s, meaning that the FTAs are likely saving men more money than women.

3. Women Therefore Pay More than Men for Similar Things: What does this all mean in practice? Last year’s tariff payments totaled $4.7 billion on $31.1 billion worth of women’s clothes, and $3.1 billion for $24.2 billion worth of men’s clothes. Or, in more direct terms, markups and U.S. transport and overhead costs mean that the cost of an average shirt or coat roughly quadruples from arrival at the border to the cashier, the tariff system appears to be raising the price women pay for clothes, relative to men, by an average of an extra dollar per garment. Looking at this another way, a 2018 working paper from the U.S International Trade Commission concluded that the higher rates on women’s clothes — their finding, pre-“301” tariff, was 14.9% for women’s clothes and 12.0% for men’s — plus the fact that women on average tend to purchase more clothing than men, meant that buyers of women clothes shouldered an additional $2.77 billion in tariff burden than buyers of men’s clothes. Gender bias in the tariff system accounted for about $1.8 billion extra burden on buyers of women’s clothing as of 2015, and presumably somewhat more now.

Conclusion: In sum, the US tariff schedule explicitly taxes women more heavily than men for the same sorts of things.  In doing so, it imposes a kind of gender surcharge of at least $2 billion a year.  This appears to be the only federal tax in which rates differ based on gender.  Our V-Day conclusion on U.S. underwear policy — “Seriously?! Boo! Do better! ???????????? — applies in this larger case too. And Rep. Fletcher and the NDC’s Trade Task Force earn enthusiastic applause for bringing this into the Congressional debate.

Special Note: Research and drafting for this Trade Fact by PPI 2023 Policy Fellow Elaine Wei.

FURTHER READING

House New Democrat Coalition’s trade agenda.

Our previous Trade Fact on underwear tariffs.

Mosbacher Institute on the gender bias in tariffs.

Gailes et al. (2019) on the gender bias in tariff burdens.

Katica Roy proposes a solution for the different tariff rates.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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