We read that 300 food experts attended a two day conference hosted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP). which reached the conclusion that we have all the answers to address human hunger - we only lack the political will.
Hunger, concluded participants at the conference, is not just caused by environmental conditions, such as drought, which impact how much food can be produced. Hunger is also caused by "insufficient political will to address key food security concerns, structural problems, and weak governance."
“The State of Food Insecurity,” produced by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), explains that the sharp increase in global hunger is not the result of poor harvest or natural disasters, but the man-made causes of high food costs, growing unemployment, and declining incomes. “Even before the food crisis and the economic crisis, the number of hungry people had been increasing slowly but steadily,” the report notes. Although extreme hunger is most intense in less developed nations, social misery is on the rise among workers and the poor in the advanced economies, where the report estimates 15 million will have experienced undernourishment by the end of 2009. In the US alone, 36.2 million people lived in households defined as facing “food insecurity” in 2007—before the onset of the economic crisis— among them 12 million children, according to statistical analysis of US Department of Agriculture and Census Bureau data.
There was a world goal set in 2000 to cut global hunger by one-half by the year 2015. Instead of nearing that goal, there are more hungry people than ever before. At present, there are 1 billion people in the world who are hungry, the highest number ever , an increase of 100 million in just over a year, one sixth of humanity. A child dies every six seconds of malnutrition. In India 47 percent of its children under the age of six malnourished.
It is expected that next month's meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization will see a new goal to eliminate hunger by 2025 adopted.
SOYMB sadly can only say that this too will be a failure since all those experts are incapable of seeing the wood for the trees . It is capitalism , the profit-making system , that is in existence throughout the world that is the root problem of world hunger . Instead we have a failure to comprehend what capitalism is .
“We have the economic and technical means to make hunger disappear,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. “What is missing is a stronger political will to eradicate hunger forever.”
This statement is only half true. While it is certainly the case that science and technique have increased agricultural productivity to the point that all the world’s population could be easily fed, what stands in the way is not a lack of “political will,” but a system of social organization—capitalism—that subordinates social need to the profit drive of the rich.
“It’s the role of the state and not the level of wealth, that determines progress on hunger,” said Anne Jellema, ActionAid’s policy director, launching the scorecard report Who’s Really Fighting Hunger? “Every six seconds a child dies from hunger, but this scandal could easily be ended if all governments took determined action.”
The state exists to protect and promote the creation of wealth in the interest of the few at the cost of the many . The wealth of the capitalists arises directly from the impoverishment of the great majority . What we have seen here are the effects of a system that is structured for the benefit of a few corporations at the expense of the many. Inevitably the food crisis will continue to grow for an ever-increasing number of the world's population unless and until the causes of the crisis are eliminated.
Politicians of diverse leanings, human rights advocacy groups and pundits of various persuasions offer a medley of fixes. Level the playing field. Fair trade, not free trade. Restore national sovereignty to international trade. Limit the power of global corporations. Strengthen human rights laws to prevent eviction of people from their land. Allow landless peasants access to and ownership of privately owned, unused land. Make the international institutions more accountable to citizens not to capital. Increase regulation of outsourcing. Force companies despoiling the environment to clean up the mess and pay compensation. Implement tougher environmental standards at all levels. The problem common to these and other 'solutions' is that none of them are comprehensive, none are for all time and none are for all people. Unlike the UN and numerous international agreements, all those multi-lateral accords and protocols which are repeatedly undermined by one or more powerful states consistently overruling decisions and agreements the ethic of socialism is rooted in the people. As more and more of the common wealth is taken from the people more and more people experience the food crisis first hand. Cause and effect. Removing money, the incentive and purpose of accumulation (the raison d’être of capitalism) and transforming world society into one of free access and common ownership – the world belonging to all and to none – will be to eliminate the causes of hunger and to effect an end to further speculation about a world food crisis.
For more see How We Could Feed The World
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