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Poverty is the main reason why babies are not vaccinated, why clean water and sanitation are not provided, why curative drugs and other treatments are unavailable and why mothers die in childbirth. It is the underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicaps, disability and starvation. Poverty is a major contributor to mental illness, stress, suicide, family disintegration and substance abuse. Every year in the developing world 12.2 million children under 5 years die, most of them from causes which could be prevented for just a few US cents per child. They die largely because of world indifference, but most of all they die because they are poor. At the end of World War II public officials and scientists from all over the world predicted that with advances in modern technology it would be possible by the end of the century to end poverty, famine, and endemic hunger in the world. Freed from colonial domination and assisted by new global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, the impoverished countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, people assumed, would fole paths to economic development blazed by the core countries.Today these optimistic projections have been replaced by hopelessness and resignation as perhaps one-fifth of the world’s people live in absolute poverty, with incomes of less than $700 per year. Estimates of the number of people with insufficient food range from 600 million to over a billion, virtually one-fifth of the world’s population. Children are particularly vulnerable; food aid organizations estimate that 250,000 children per week, almost 1,500 per hour, die from inadequate diets and the diseases that thrive on malnourished bodies. And hunger is not just a problem of the poor countries of the world. Estimates of the number of Americans living in hunger rose from 20 million in 1985 to 30 million in 1992, and with recent cutbacks in social assistance these numbers promise to become even greater.Common misunderstandings about world hunger should be quickly dispelled. First, world hunger is not the result of insufficient food production. There is enough food in the world to feed 120 percent of the world’s population on a vegetarian diet, although probably not enough to feed the world on the diet of the core countries. Even in countries where people are starving, there is either more than enough food for everyone or the capacity to produce it. Second, famine is not the most common reason for hunger. While famines such as those in recent years in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Chad receive the most press coverage, endemic hunger—daily insufficiencies in food—is far more common.Third, famine itself is rarely caused by food insufficiency. When hundreds of thousands starved to death in Bangladesh in 1974, it was not because of lack of food. In fact, there was more food than there had been in the years leading up to the disaster and more food than was produced in the years following. The starvation resulted from massive unemployment brought on by flooded farmland and high food prices brought on by a fear of food shortages. People starved to death because they couldn’t afford to buy food and had no land to grow their own. Finally, hunger is not caused by overpopulation. While growing populations may require more food, there is no evidence that the food could not be produced and delivered if people had the means to pay for it. This does not mean population and food availability play no role in world hunger, but that the relationship is far more complex than it appears.The questions, then, are why do people continue to starve to death in the midst of plenty? More important, is it still possible to believe that poverty and hunger can be eliminated? If so, how? To answer these questions we need to know about the nature and history of food production and to understand the reasons why people are hungry. There is a prevailing view that hunger is inevitable, but that need not be the case. We will examine some possible solutions to world hunger, and how specific countries, some rich and some poor, have tried to ensure that people have adequate food.
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