Billions going hungry despite enough food to go around

Peter Phillips

Billions of people go hungry each day even though the world produces enough food to go around. While poverty is the main cause of hunger, lack of political will to tackle the global market for food which is controlled by large corporations is also to blame.

A new report (9/2/08) from The World Bank admits that in 2005 three billion one hundred and forty million people live on less than $2.50 a day and about 44 per cent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas.

Simple items like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.

Starvation.net logs the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (85 per cent children under 5) die of malnutrition, curable diseases and starvation. The numbers of unnecessary deaths has exceeded 300 million people over the past forty years.

These are the people who David Rothkopf in his book Super class calls the unlucky. “If you happen to be born in the wrong place, like sub-Saharan Africa, …that is bad luck,” Rothkopf writes.

Rothkopf goes on to describe how the top 10 per cent of the adults worldwide own 84 per cent of the wealth and the bottom half owns barely 1per cent. Included in the top 10 per cent of wealth holders are the one thousand global billionaires. But is such a contrast of wealth inequality really the result of luck, or are there policies, supported by political elites, that protect the few at the expense of the many?

Farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up 4 per cent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article ‘Making a killing from hunger.’

It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86 per cent above 2007.

World food prices grew 22 per cent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. The result is wild food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.

- Third World Network Features