Can we end world hunger?

Nearly one billion people on earth go hungry every day, and solving this hunger now proves even more difficult as the long era of cheap food appears to be over.They simply cannot find food, or afford to buy it when they do find it. There is no greater condemnation of the present international system than the shocking disparity between the groaning tables of the rich and the heroic struggle of the world’s poor to feed their children a few scraps of food, even once a day.Can the problem be solved? Evidently, not any time soon.The present crisis - which has sparked food riots from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh, and caused several countries to ration food and ban food exports - is the result of two opposing trends: Farm productivity has slowed down while, at the same time, demand for food has risen sharply, driving prices skywards.Not only are there more mouths to feed in the world, but in countries like China a new middle class is no longer content with the simple diet of the past. It wants to consume more proteins, such as meat and milk. It wants to eat like the Americans.A third reason is that vast agricultural regions - principally in the United States and Brazil - have been converted from producing food to producing raw material for biofuels. This year, the US biofuel industry is estimated to have devoured one-third of the US corn crop. Brazil uses vast amounts of sugarcane to produce ethanol, thus becoming the world’s second producer of biofuels after the US. Whatever the complex reasons for the crisis, world leaders have suddenly awakened to the fact that the era of abundant and cheap food of the past 30 or 40 years is now definitely over. Increasingly, investors - including Arab investors from the Gulf - are turning their attention towards Africa, where the possibility exists to create mega-farms on tens of thousands of hectares of arable land. High food commodity prices are creating tempting opportunities for corporations and sovereign wealth funds.In the world in which we live, apparently, financial greed may, in the end, be the way to put food on the poor man’s table.

Source: Patrick Seale, a leading British writer on the Middle East.