Access to food is severely limited by profit-taking by the world’s elite

By APRN | October 16, 2024

World Hunger Day, or World Food Day according to the UN, is celebrated annually on 16 October to celebrate the founding of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). With this year’s theme of “Right to foods for a better life and a better future”,  it is more proper to commemorate “World Hunger Day” to emphasize the broad, systemic problem that unnecessarily  affects billions of people; a problem that requires systemic solutions, attention, and decisive action from governments and other stakeholders all over the world.

The FAO estimates that nearly 55% of the world’s population affected by hunger lives in Asia, with around 402 million. Moreover,  the prevalence of moderate and severe food insecurity in Asia is at 24.2 percent, or roughly 1.2 billion people. It is projected that almost 600 million people in the world will be chronically undernourished by 2030. 

Enjoyment of the right to food goes beyond merely producing enough food to meet the recommended caloric and nutrient intake necessary for life. In fact, the world’s farmers and fisherfolk harvest more than enough food to enable every person to live healthy and productive lives. The Right to Food more importantly involves ensuring that safe and diverse food is affordable and accessible to all people.

However, access to food is severely limited by profit-taking by the world’s elite. Transnational corporations routinely engage in unabated land-grabbing to produce cash crops for export that leave subsistence farmers–the poorest of the poor– unable to feed themselves; or tear up ancestral arable land to plunder natural and mineral resources Lack of genuine land reform concentrates arable land in the hands of the political and economic elite. Big fishing operations with the latest technology leaves less advanced small-scale fisherfolk with fewer and fewer fish each day. Armed conflict impacts food security not just in the disruption of food production and distribution systems, but in the misallocation of governments of limited resources towards the military.

These threats to food security need comprehensive action from citizens of the world and civil society organizations. Through participatory people-centered research, we can come up with feasible solutions and advocate for policies that would ensure food for better life and better future for all.

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