Three centuries ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus predicted that without birth control, the world would starve to death. “Population, when unbridled, grows in geometric progression. Subsistence grows only in arithmetic progression. A little knowledge of mathematics will show the immensity of the first power compared to the second,” he writes in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population. “, 1798.
The thesis still resonates today when world population hits 8 billion, ten times the father of demographics and influenced the environmental movement in conservative sectors, which appropriated the argument to defend antiimmigration agendas, for example.
Malthus’ prediction was wrong since at least the 1960s, food production, aided by technological innovation, has outpaced global population growth year after year.
Nevertheless, hunger has not left mankind. The latest report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) shows that the proportion of people suffering from malnutrition worldwide has only increased in recent years, from 8% in 2019 to 9.3% in 2020 and 9.8%. in 2021. This means that between 702 million and 828 million people will not have access to the minimum calories needed for an active and healthy life.
The problem, says Carlo Cafiero, an economist and FAO statistician, lies in economic inequality, since it is money that drives food procurement. “Basically, a hungerfree world is possible today because there is enough food. It’s about the political will to give the topic the relevance it has. Governments must walk the talk,” he says.
The researcher adds that even the impact of extreme events on indices such as malnutrition and food insecurity has more to do with their impact on people’s wallets and less to do with potential obstacles to growing or distributing food.
Such is the case with the Covid19 pandemic, which has left 150 million more than expected suffering from malnutrition, according to the FAO. Even the Ukraine war that has plagued world leaders for the past eight months has had a relative impact on food production this year, as much of the region’s wheat harvest was carried out before the conflict began. Cafiero suggests that the surge in electricity bills in Europe, motivated by the halt in Russian natural gas supplies, is affecting the continent’s population much more than the conflict itself.
Professor of sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and head of the Food for Justice research group, researcher Renata Motta, says the two crises have also exposed the vulnerability of the global food system, which emphasizes free trade and the comparative advantages of both Region meant that the local diet became impoverished and based on few raw materials such as wheat, corn and soy. So if an extreme event affects the production or distribution of one of these products, the entire system collapses.
Motta gives the example of wheat. Grain production was subsidized by the United States, which began selling the surplus to developing countries as international aid. These in turn wiped out their local food systems by incorporating the product turning themselves into dependent markets. “Today we see several African countries dependent on wheat imports from Ukraine, and that wasn’t even part of their food culture,” says the researcher.
However, according to her, this dependency helps perpetuate an “imbalance of responsibility” between those who contribute most to global problems and those who are most affected by them. Africa, which FAO forecasts will be home to the most malnourished people by 2030 and will overtake Asia, is not among the top ten emitters of CO2 in the world, but is far more vulnerable to crop failures due to climate change, for example.
Not that rich countries are safe from hunger. Motta notes that since the advent of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and, even more so, since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a major setback in the process of social inclusion and poverty reduction that had taken place in the Global North since the end of the Second World War world war world war.
In any case, the researcher sees a solution to hunger in the resumption of local production where the cultivation of food or animal husbandry is close to consumption and labor relations are fairer. In her opinion, the data shows that the majority of the population is actually fed by small and mediumsized family producers and not by the huge monoculture fields that, to top it all off, have great ecological and social impacts.
Motta also argues that solutions aimed at the individual consumer, such as the FAO recommendation to lower taxes on the final price of food, or conscious consumption trends are not enough to solve the bottlenecks in the production system. The same applies to “plantbased meat”, which was developed from plants. “There is no technology that will save us if we do not fundamentally change the forms of production and consumption that have led to the current situation,” he says.
FAO’s Cafiero notes that in this sense at least part of the Malthusian theory is still valid. Natural resources must be conserved because they are not always renewable. “If we continue to encourage growth at all costs and enlarge a pie within the reach of few, we will not achieve security. And in some cases it’s possible that hunger will be reborn where we didn’t expect it.”