Hambruna En El Mundo

International Organizations
April 30, 2012

WORLD HUNGER

Today we live in world of abundance of food, it is produced food for twelve billion of persons, when we are seven billion of persons in the planet, is not true that there is no food to satisfy the needs of the world population at low prices. Large part of the world's arable land remains idle. Scientific advances in seed production,modern machinery and new farming technologies, doubling and tripling the performance of the crop fields. Current technological development could create real gardens in deserts. The problem is who produces, what produces and for what purpose, and particularly, to whom belongs the lands, the agro-industrial companies and the agricultural production. How can we explain that 1 of every 6 persons in theword suffer of hunger? In fact the famine in the horn of Africa has shown the dramatic impact of the hunger in a lot of countries of the south, but what are the causes of hunger? The food has become today into merchandise, a commodity in hands of the highest bidder, the capitalist system has impacted the food in a dramatic way, therefore today if someone does not have the money to pay for theprice of food that every day is more expensive or if someone does not have access to the means of production, water, land, seeds, he cannot eat. When we talk about the starvation that suffer many countries in the horn of Africa it is said that is consequence of the drought or meteorological phenomena but instead there are other countries like Australia, like The United States that periodically sufferof important droughts and this do not produce massive hunger episodes, therefore the drought can exacerbate food problems in many countries but it is clear that it does not explain the causes of hunger in the world, to explain such causes we have to ask, who has control of the natural resources? In whose hands water, land and seeds are? Who is benefited by the agricultural and food policies? Wefound global financial institutions like the International Monetary Found and the World Bank, institutions that have been hegemonized by the U.S. capitalism and since the 70s crisis they have been applied neo-liberal policies and structural adjustments to the “third world” countries. Has been carried out through decades a deliberate strategy of social transformation in a global scale. A clearexample is Haiti. This country was one of the largest producers of grain and could export. The IMF assistance plan consisted in a setting that led the country to import grain. Today over 82% of the population live in conditions of absolute precarity and their export income now has to be used to cover basic needs. For example Somalia in the 70s was a self-sufficient country talking about food production,and it could produce enough food for all its population, but consequence of the 80s, 90s crisis and the application of many programs and structural adjustment of taxes policies by The World Bank and the International Monetary Found, now countries like Somalia and many others of the south were forced to implement a number of adjustment policies, policies that in the agricultural and alimentaryaspect were the opening of their markets to the inversions of big foreign multinationals like U.S. companies and Europeans, involving trade liberalization, this was used by the big multinationals to start to sell to this countries wheat, rice and other products that were produced fully subsidized below the cost price and therefore making unfair competition with the autochthonous producers. Thepolicies applied systematically through thirty years have implicated the lack of food production in these countries, are countries that had lost their “alimentary sovereignty”, their capacity to decide about their agricultural and alimentary policies, and their farmers and peasants have not been able to compete against the subsidized products of the big multinationals since they have had to abandon...