Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people are dying of hunger.

If enough food is produced to feed 11.000 billion people, why do so many of the 8.000 billion people on our planet still go hungry?

VIJAY PRASHAD

I've written this article before. In fact, I could write it every year when it's published. a new Global Report on Food CrisesThe report is based on four points:

1. The number of people suffering from hunger is higher now than last year.
2. The amount of food produced this year is greater than that produced last year.
3. There is enough food to feed the entire world's population, and more.
4. How do we explain why there are people who suffer from hunger?

Let's add the data.

Point No. 1: 733 million people suffered from chronic hunger in 2023, according to studies by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the United Nations Children's Fund.

Point No. 2: The world's farmers and agricultural companies produced 11 billion metric tons of food (including meat, fish, and 9600 billion metric tons of primary crops such as maize, rice, and wheat) in 2022, according to FAO.

Point #3 is made clear with a simple calculation based on one premise.

Premise: A person consumes one ton or 1000 kilograms of food per year ( The FAO standard for average world food consumption is 2800 kilocalories per person per day.).

Calculation: If one ton of food is needed for one person and 11 billion tons of food are produced, then there is enough food for 000 billion people.

Conclusion: There are currently 8000 billion people on the planet. Therefore, there is enough food for the entire planet's population, with enough surplus to feed 3000 billion more.

Point #4: How do we explain why people are starving?

There are many reasons for the severity of hunger, but none of them can be attributed to a lack of food due to population growth, as Malthusians claim, believing that population growth outstrips food production.

There are at least three reasons why famine persists in many parts of the world.

First, wars destroy agricultural and food distribution systems. This is the most obvious cause of hunger. This is why There is famine in Sudan, a country that has the largest agricultural area in all of Africa and which, if there were no war, could become Africa's breadbasket. Despite the war, Sudan is the world's largest exporter of oilseeds (peanuts, safflower, sesame, soybeans, and sunflowers). Around 80% of the world's gum arabic is produced in Sudan's countryside. However, most fields cannot be cultivated, and many farmers have been forced to abandon their land or take up arms due to the war.

Secondly, we still have the ugly habit of wasting. One-fifth of all our food is lost or wasted (the equivalent of one billion meals a day), two-thirds of all consumer-level waste occurs in the richest countries, and 60% of global food waste occurs at the household level. In richer countries, most food waste occurs at the retail and consumption stages, largely due to the high level of processing and packaging, as well as waste in homes and restaurants. In poorer countries, most food waste occurs at the point of production (due to adverse weather, pests, and disease) and in storage (due to poor facilities, inadequate refrigeration, and inefficient transport systems).

Third, the main reason people don't eat is that they don't have the money to do so. In other words, inequality is the driving force of hunger. Let's review the data again:

• More than 700 million people in the world live on less than $2,15 a day. and cannot afford to buy food.
• 3400 billion people live on less than $5,50 a day, making it unlikely they can afford to eat.
• In 2023, The total wealth of the world was approximately 432 trillion dollarsOf that amount, the richest 1% of the global adult population collectively owned 47,5% of the world's total wealth, equivalent to $213,8 trillion (an average of $2,7 million per person). The poorest 50%, or 4.000 billion people, owned less than 1% of the world's wealth, or $4,5 trillion ($1125 per person). The enormous wealth inequality gap continues to widen every year.
• People on lower incomes simply can't afford to eat because food and fuel price inflation eats into their budgets.
• Hunger rates among women they are higher than among men Because when there is less food in a household, women eat less. In female-headed households, hunger rates are higher.
• Although indigenous peoples constitute less than 5% of the world's population, represent 15% of the extremely poor and suffer higher rates of hunger than other communities.

As FAO argued in 2021, "Poverty remains the leading cause of food insecurity worldwide, as people lack the resources to access adequate food, even when it is available."

An informative article like this, based on statistics, cannot explain the damage that poverty causes to the human spirit. The melancholy of poverty produces a kind of fatalism that makes it difficult for the impoverished person to explain their situation. Cold statistics alone do not explain to the impoverished the reality of their circumstances, which they already know very well. Sometimes, it is poetry that can best articulate the capitalist structure of poverty and the impact it has on the human spirit.

Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989) was one of Cuba's greatest poets, both before and after the revolution. In 1931, he published the poem "Caña" in his collection Sóngoro Cosongo, a title based on the sound of Afro-Cuban drums:

The black
next to the sugarcane field. The Yankee
on the cane field. The land
under the cane field. Blood
that is leaving us!

Isn't that the truth?

If we want to end hunger, we must end poverty. In 2021, the Chinese people ended absolute poverty in their country. By November 2025, the people of Kerala, India, will have ended extreme poverty, one year ahead of schedule. Vietnam is on track to eliminate absolute poverty.

This was also Burkina Faso's ambition under Thomas Sankara (1949-1987), and it has been reborn under the country's new leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré. Not through charity or foreign aid, but through self-sufficiency. At the National Conference of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution held in Ouagadougou on April 4, 1986, Sankara declared: "We must succeed in producing more, producing more, because it is natural that whoever feeds you also imposes his will on you."

In 2023, Traoré evoked the spirit of Sankara and said"Our predecessors taught us one thing: a slave who cannot accept his own rebellion deserves no compassion. We do not pity ourselves, we do not ask anyone to pity us. The people of Burkina Faso have decided to fight, to fight against terrorism, to relaunch their development." The people of Burkina Faso, he added, are asking themselves the following questions today:

"We don't understand how Africa, with so much wealth in our soil, with generous nature, abundant water and sunshine, is today the poorest continent. Africa is a hungry continent. And how is it possible that there are heads of state all over the world begging? These are the questions we ask ourselves and for which, so far, we have no answers."

But soon they will have answers, and when they do, new questions will arise, and then the story will move on.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Director of the Social Research Institute tricontinental. He has written more than 20 books. The last one in collaboration with Noam Chomsky: "The retreat. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the fragility of US power., reviewed by David Bollero at Globalter.

This article was published in tricontinental.