I assume someone in the 5th percentile of wealth is going to have very negative wealth which is only really possible in developed countries, eg an American medical student or a doctor who is part-way through paying off their loans, or someone suffering from massive credit card debt / car loans. (I think this isn’t really what you were thinking of though. I think the poorest people in the world still live, in many ways like medieval peasants except with much lower infant mortality and somewhat net food security)
where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.
My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".
So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".
(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)
And malnutrition isn't only about lack of food, it's also about mediocre quality of food:
> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.
Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.
How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.
I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.
