The world must feed its hungry?

Question

As we agonise about the recession, we should remember that humanity’s greatest economic problem is more basic: how to get enough food, a challenge still faced by millions.

This weekend the Group of Eight leading countries gathers in Italy for its first ever meeting of agriculture ministers. Their goal must be to move food policy up the global political agenda to a position where it is treated as the vital international security matter it is.

Last year’s record-high food commodity prices sparked riots as 100m people needed help from the World Food Programme. Thousands of desperate people in dozens of countries took to the streets in upheavals potentially far more destabilising than any reactions the financial meltdown has yet provoked. This danger will not go away.

Prices have come down, but remain higher than in decades. Even short disruptions cast long shadows: malnutrition in infancy can permanently impair children’s physical and cognitive development. Climate change, decades of declining investment in agriculture, and current policy mistakes conspire to make the crisis structural.

All countries share an interest in food security – their own, and for the sake of stability, that of others. But they must not confuse security with self-sufficiency. The world can produce enough food for all: as the economist Amartya Sen points out, famines are caused not by lack of food but by income inequality. The poor must get help – in ways that do not undermine food production.

Food exporters and importers alike need well-functioning international markets in food, which encourage efficient global production patterns. The responses to the crisis, sadly, have been in the opposite direction: export bans, land grabs of arable territory and secretive bilateral barter deals. These policies must stop. They are self-destructive and costly, and for poor countries ruinous. They do harm to others, as they undermine trading systems that benefit all.

Governments must provide global public goods. Research is needed to boost productivity, especially for African crops, and must not be hampered by opposition to genetically modified food. Mechanisms must be found to hedge against price volatility that discourages production even when prices are high.

The G8 has rightly invited important emerging countries to the table. But are agricultural ministers, who usually see their job as helping their own farmers, up to the task? Food security is the greatest threat to human well-being today. It should not be lost in quibbles about the branding of Parma ham.

MikeGolf · Accepted Answer

Feeding the hungry will - at best - do nothing more than delay the inevitable.

If you pay close attention to where people are starving you will notice that they all share certian common characteristics: Namely a govremental/social structure that in ineffective at supporting a viable economy.

And the only people who can fix that problem - is the people who live there.

B.Kevorkian · Answer

Actually, 'feeding the hungry' is prettymuch a self-defeating goal.  I'm not just saying that because so many altruistic people have been trying to do so for so long, and there's still so much hunger.  No, it's more logical and fundamental than that.  If you feed an organism, it grows.  If you feed a population of people - the same thing happens, the population grows.  That is, the death rate falls and the birth rate rises until the latter is greater than the former.  Net result, a larger population that is even less able to feed itself.

Neptune.Sky · Answer

I dont know about your government, but MY government only has the constitutional authority to coin money, provide freeways and a military defense...there is nothing that requires my country to feed the globe. we are already bankrupt from policing the world (oh, another unconstitutional thing)

Its not that I do not care...but just realize that there is more than enough food in the world to feed every human being on the face of the planet...there is just corporate greed and those big walmart trucks dont deliver to 3rd world ountries...there is also the issue that many governments do not care for the people they govern over, and would not distribute the food to the most needy.

If africa was only allowed to grow their own food...opposed to starbucks coffee beans.....an example of people who are oppressed by their government who reeps the profit.

NONO Monsanto.  We do not know what happens to humans when we digest generically modified foods.  our bodies did not evolve to digest it.  It is best to feed the human population foods that naturally grow on this planet...it ay look like a apple, it may taste like apple..but it has about the same nutritional content as a cardboard box.

Anonymous · Answer

1st of all: B. kev is right, Increase food supply= increased population so your double screwed

From a pure robotic and inhuman standpoint (I force myself to look at things this way to explain world ethics sometimes)

Just as learned in Biology, when population exceeds production of food or natural sustenance. the Population must lower or even out.

We are trying to sustain to many people with too little food. The only way to fix this is Population control. 

Second of all, we have an effing surplus of corn!

Third of all: We cannot produce more food without destroying more natural habitats. It's a lose-lose situation.

4th: What the Heck? GM crops will destroy the human populous, not cure it. GM foods are patented and owned by private companies such as Monsanto!
You have to pay them to grow their crops!
And most have multiple negative unintended consequences such as decimating the population of Monarch butterflies and honey bees, plus some mistakes in the GM world have led to worsening the health of the people who ate them. Cancer anyone?

atkison · Answer

properly the community meals economic employer or pantry, frequently contained in the form of canned products as they do no longer elect to settle for issues in containers. This 300 and sixty 5 days, they have made multiple exceptions, even taking stuff close to expiration. multiple human beings are underemployed, unemployed, residing of their autos with their childrens attempting desperately to sidestep being caught that way (they do no longer elect their toddlers taken to foster care). There additionally are quite a few non-denominational church homes around, extremely the U.Unitarians who try very hard to take human beings in and feed them too. Whoever happens to get what i can provide, and gets it first is obviously going to distribute it to somebody who desires it.

socialistpb · Answer

There is plenty of food produced, but the starving don't constitute a viable market for it, hence their demands don't count. How can anybody support a world where millions die of starvation or have their lives blighted while there is enough food for everyone?

? · Answer

Better to teach the hungry how to feed themselves

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The world must feed its hungry?

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