Hunger and the Experience of Being Well: Absolute and Relative Concerns

The lessening of hunger is central to the development agenda; however, there is little research on how it ends up impacting on people’s experience of being well. Research on this impact is crucial for the design of hunger alleviation programs as well as for the measurement and understanding of hunger. It is also important to understand people’s motivation and reaction to interventions. This paper studies the impact of hunger on four different experiences of being well: evaluative, positive affects, negative affects, and sensory. The paper distinguishes between absolute and relative effects of hunger on people’s well-being. Information from the Gallup World Poll 2006 for 88 countries in the world is used to quantitatively study the well-being relevance of hunger. It is found that hunger is highly detrimental to people’s well-being, which provides a justification for making substantial efforts to alleviate it. In addition, relative effects are important in the evaluative and negative-affect experiences; which means that hunger alleviation programs do not only impact positively on the well-being of those benefiting from the programs but also negatively on the well-being of those who—out of different reasons—are left behind. Thus, counting success on the number of people who are getting out of hunger does not provide the complete well-being picture, because those who are left behind may also be negatively affected by these programs. In consequence, in order to enhance their well-being impact it is important for hunger alleviation programs to be broadly inclusive, aiming not to leave anybody behind.