Despite a worldwide effort to cut the number of hungry people around the world, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, the number of hungry people worldwide rose more than 100 million to 1.02 billion people. Thus, more than one in seven people on the planet have serious food security issues. According to researchers, food production needs to be increased by 50% to meet the needs of the growing global population. I am a bit surprised by this fact as I had long been of the understanding that food distribution, and not production, was the issue.
Read also about the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, designed to monitor food security in 23 countries.
Comments
if you’re going to write articles about daylight saving time, you should at least get your facts straight: “The change to Daylight Saving Time allows us to use less energy in lighting our homes by taking advantage of the longer and later daylight hours.” this statement is absolutely false; the daylight hours in the northern hemisphere are not longer during these months, they are shorter. while they may be later, there is less light during winter than in summer, regardless of the time change. get your facts straight, you global warming, tree-hugging, enviro-wienie!
There are two food problems here.
1. To many people. And the population of the countries least able to feed their people is increasing faster than anyone can hope to feed them. The poor countries of the world need strong and if necessary forced birth control. Otherwise any attempt to solve world hunger is wasted effort.
2. Ethanol. The burning of food for fuel is crazy in a world with hungry people. Any logical look at ethanol production shows it neither reduces green house gasses nor saves oil.
Not political but true.
I just read a brand-new book, which is getting excellent reviews on Amazon, etc: “ENOUGH: WHY THE WORLD’s POOREST STARVE IN AN AGE OF PLENTY.” It explains how the “Green Revolution” of Nobel-winning plant geneticist Norman Borlaug (who died in September) started in Mexico, moved through Asia successfully, but then stumbled a bit in Africa. Grain crop yields at first grew amazingly, but then Africa’s absence of a social and physical infrastructure (the continent’s roads and rails were originally built only to carry coffee, cocoa, rubber, copper, diamonds to coastal ports, rather than serve its people) make it difficult to establish modern, wealth-creating, efficient agriculture. Billions in aid money was siphoned off by greedy African leaders such as Congo’s notorious Mobutu (who was praised by U.S. leaders) and this aid money paid to shippers for carrying American grain to Africa (the American growers were subsidized by generous U.S.D.A. price supports), instead of buying the same grain much cheaper from local African farmers, which furthermore would have gotten it to the starving people, several months sooner. American grain price artificial subsidies make it impossible for African farmers to compete. The farmers, in desperation, eat their carefully-bred hybrid seed corn rather than plant it. American Presidents and Congressmen from both political parties are afraid of voting against the powerful farm lobby. The book does offer some hope that these injustices will eventually be corrected, and food aid delivered more effectively.
” instead of buying the same grain much cheaper from local African farmers”
If African farmers have lots of grain, why should American taxpayers even give grain, or money for grain, to African governments. Let the African governments feed their on people! We here in America have plenty of uses for that money and grain.
It’s the same way with clothing. Africans used to wear authentic native-designed, African-made clothing, but now they mostly wear clothing cast-off by Americans, labeled with American designer names and sports teams, etc. Thousands of African textile workers are unemployed. And Mexicans buy USA grain at artificially low prices due to USDA price supports, and Mexican-grown grain cannot compete. Thousands of Mexican farmers as a result are unemployed. And we wonder why they inundate the USA – that’s part of the reason.
Matt: The problem WAS distrbution, mostly due to politics of starving ‘enemy’ populations as a weapon of civil war or political-cultural domination. But today it is, indeed, also an issue of quantity.
In the last two years, food prices have doubled — worldwide. Fact. Why? Supply & Demand, and cost of growing what supply is left.
In the USA, we converted a third of our cropland to ethanol crops, mostly displacing food crops. Most other countries around the world have followed this enviro-socialist agenda of supposedly combatting Anthropologic Global Warming (or whatever “imminnet threat” those propagandists are calling it today).
Gee. We sharply reduce food crops, no matter how stupid it is in its own right, and then have a nerve to complain the poor are still hungry?
Let’s put the blame where it belongs: radical environmentalists, and decision makers we’ve allowed to be influenced by them.
The worldwide pandemic of starvation isn’t caused by the lack of production of food; it’s caused by the lack of a decent dispersal system. The US alone has enough food to feed the world, but getting this food to the right places, making sure it reaches everyone’s mouths, and trying to dance our way around strict cultural systems and corrupt governments is what’s causing countries across the planet to suffer from this hunger. An equal or possibly even greater problem resides in places where the food IS getting to, but the needy have no way to buy it. Hundreds of millions of people subsist on the equivalent of one dollar a day, and this is not a substantial amount of money when it comes to purchasing their food. Malnutrition prevails in areas of intense poverty, poor sanitation, and crooked governments. As they struggle to survive on the bugs that they extract from the dirt and the microscopic crumbs that they find, here we are, chowing down on our 99 cent Big Mac.