The root cause of hunger and famine is rarely crop failure alone. It is about who controls and benefits from the land and its resources. About 1 billion people, or one in six of the global population, go hungry today, even though more food is being produced than ever. And yet, around the same number of people are overweight or obese and likely to have their lives cut short by diet-related disease. We have, in other words, a food system that is failing.
via Famine is the result of a failing food system | Felicity Lawrence | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
Well, I can’t say I’m wild about the obesity comment, as though there’s a relationship between fatness in one country and famine in another—indeed, that seems to undercut the main point of the article. But why give up a chance to blame teh fatties for the world’s ills?
Jonathan Mann, of blessed memory, made the point, in talking about human rights and health, that no reasonably democratic country with a reasonably free press has ever experienced substantial famine. Food shortages, of course, but famine requires a particular political system. (India, for example, experienced multiple famines up until independence [the last in 1943, with independence in 1947], and none since.)