Will the world achieve food security?
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Such policies and whims have given rise to supermarkets (even in the developing world) that waste food products, especially perishables, the most. (To see how, one needs to just watch veteran French documentary filmmaker Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I.)
If we can save food from being wasted (wasting food is a common phenomenon throughout world, but more intense in the West), and if we can change our unhealthy eating habits, the world may not even have to increase the food production by 70 percent to feed the projected population of more than 9 billion people by 2050. But that would be contrary to the demands of market economy.
Market economy is all about increasing production infinitely and making money. So, if millions of tons of food grains rot in Indian government warehouses, we should let them rot, instead of trying to distribute them among the poor and hungry people of the country. Why? Because distributing food for free goes against the laws of market economy.
Despite what Economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen says, a democratically elected government is no guarantee against famine. Or else how starvation can be explained in a democratic country like India?
Food is no longer dependent on the backbreaking labor of farmers? It is not dependent on the whims of nature or proper irrigation, either? It depends on market laws worked out by international organizations such as the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and multinational corporations. It is their laws and schemes that have forced almost all or most of the African nations to become food-insufficient. It is their plans that force most of the developing world to depend on supplies from the developed countries, which perforce subsidize their agricultural products.
The world today has more than 1 billion hungry people. And even it were to double its food production, as demanded by international organizations, by 2050, it would still have 290 million hungry people.
Where will this cycle of poverty and hunger end? The answer is no one knows, not as long as the Bretton Woods institutes and multinational corporations are allowed to decide the fate of the world.
The author is a senior editor at China Daily. He can be reached at oprana@.hotmail.com.
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