"Enough: Why the World's Poor Starve in the Age of Plenty' by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman - two journalists explore the current state of world hunger
Starvation is death by deprivation; the absence of one of the essential elements of life. It's not the result of an accident or a spasm of violence, the ravages of diseases or the inevitable decay of old age. It occurs because people are forced to live in the hollow of plenty. For decades, the world has grown enough food to nourish everyone adequately. Satellites can spot budding crop failures; shortages can be avoided. In the modern world, like never before, famine is by and large preventable. When it occurs, it represents civilization's collective failure.
R. Thurow and S. Kilman (2009) Enough: Why the Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
In their recent book "Enough..." Thurow and Kilman set out to explore the reasons why there are still hungry people today, when there is more than enough food in the world. Although the knowledge and capacity is there to prevent famines, the numbers of malnourished people is continually rising. The authors argue "famine is by and large preventable:
...[it is] a man-made catastrophe, caused by one anonymous decision at a time, one day at a time, by people, institutions, and governments doing what they thought was best for themselves or sometimes even what they thought at the time was best for Africa'.
After opening with a detailed discussion on the birth of the Green Revolution (a shift in agricultural practices and technologies which began in Mexico in the 1940s, instigated by American scientist Norman Borlaug, which helped to increase agriculture production around the world), they go on to explore the predictions of famine prevention and an explosion in the global food supply that emerged from this. The big question raised here is - Why did this revolution never reach Africa?
It was around the same time that global agricultural policies began to shift. In times of famine, buying and using local food is much quicker, saves more lives and helps the local economy. The US had been growing large surpluses of grain which they then sold to countries like India and Mexico. But with the emergence of the Green Revolution, these countries no longer needed to buy extra from the US. The government then began to give it away as food aid, despite the fact that it drove local farmers out of business.
According to Thurow and Kilman, it is written into US law that all food aid must be grown in America and that 75% of it be transported on American ships. So the money given to target hunger alleviation was being delivered in the form of foreign grown food - (and, interestingly and questionably all of which was supported by a number of US and international NGOs). When the Bush administration attempted to reform the food aid policies to use more local food, to support local businesses, the aid agencies opposed it strongly. Thurow and Kilman explain how this "neglect and bad policies have kept more than a billion of the world's poorest people hungry'.
Essentially, Africa isn't given the opportunity to subsidise their farmers and businesses - despite the fact that they can supply better produce more efficiently - while the EU and the US spend billions on subsidies unnecessarily, to make their produce more affordable ultimately outdoing the local farmer.
Roger Thurow continues these discussions on his blog "Global Food for Thought'.
If you want to read something current about world hunger, we suggest the above book