EDUCATING FOR CAPABILITY FOR INCLUSIVE WELL-BEING

Abstract

In the short time that it will take you, the reader, to read to the bottom of this page, countless numbers of people across the world will die of starvation. A very high proportion of them will be infants and young children. Even as you read on, many millions of others will be suffering from such acute under-nutrition and/or malnutrition that they will soon fall victim to one fatal infectious disease or another. And even as I type the following words into the computer in front of me, an unforgivably large percentage of the total human population on earth is suffering the unbearable pain and disabling effects of acute hunger. From a technical perspective, this is a very difficult situation to explain, and certainly, to justify. In this era of hi-tech scientific agriculture, of the transnational flow of goods and services and ‘global free trade’, and of the world wide web of available information, such circumstances seem both inexcusable and, technically at least, essentially preventable. From such a perspective, poverty and hunger are functions of scientific ignorance. Once people come to understand the nature of science, and learn about its application in modern agricultural technologies, then, so the argument goes, more food could be grown, economic production could flourish, poverty can be alleviated and hunger could be a thing of the past. This could even be true in those parts of the world where conditions of soil, climate and water, etc., are less than optimal for food production, where conditions, either temporarily or permanently do not allow particular people access to secure and sustainable sources of food in their own locale, then the issue simply becomes one of distribution from locations elsewhere, where food could be grown in surplus amounts. Either way the solution, from this perspective, comes down to better education in the sciences and technologies of food production and distribution. At base, the issue of what we might call the agri-food system, is thus merely a matter of matching the physical needs for food on the one hand with the means to both produce and distribute it on the other. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that, for the foreseeable future at least, there is more than sufficient production and distribution capacities on the planet to supply food to every one of its six billion inhabitants on a sustainable basis. With so many hundreds of millions of human beings suffering from food deprivation across the world, however—and with so many nations apparently unable to assure their citizens a secure and sustainable source of food—the situation is clearly much more complex than the technical picture alone would indicate: For if it were otherwise, the problem would not exist at all.