The World Food Problem

Abstract

Historically, people have tried to deny their own culpability for mass human suffering by assigning responsibility to external forces beyond their control. For example, although the Black Death in the Middle Ages was largely the result of unwillingness of a class society to extend sanitation to the masses, it was nevertheless pronounced Divine retribution by the churches. Today the causes of hunger are similarly misattributed. Current widespread climatic disasters have made it especially easy to accept forces as the sufficient reason for starvation. If we accept the conclusion of many contemporary analysts that the faces a Malthusian foodpopulation squeeze, then persons are indeed blameless. According to this analysis, food problems are a function of the finite limits of Earth's resources, the vagaries of climate and an inexorable rate of population growth-all natural agencies, human ones. Our response to this diagnosis is inevitably one of resignation to the apparent truth that there is simply not enough to go around. Only if this apersonal model is true, are we freed from having to confront the human role in generating and sustaining a world food problem. My contention is that hunger is now, above all, a political and economic problem to which we directly contribute. What Malthus neglected to appreciate in the late 18th century was that economic imbalance,