Abstract
World hunger is a very general topic; we can ponder over the reasons of world hunger. Did we finally end up accepting it? What could the solutions be? How can we fight it? Why is it that the world is capable of feeding everyone but there are still people dying owing to poverty and lack of food? Indeed we are now in the 21st century, and people are still dying of hunger, lots of authors such as Sylvie Brunel, Amartya Sen, Jean Ziegler, Josué de Castro, have written about it and propose different causes and solutions as the reasons change and evolve. As Sylvie Brunel wrote in her book “Hunger in the world” nowadays famine never just comes out of the blue. When there is food penury it does not appear overnight, there are signs and they are well known: food reserves disappear, men leave and children start to shows signs of malnutrition. In the years to come, we need to highlight the priority of food access as the most important human right, and we need to impose it through international juridical structure, treaties and norms. In the next few pages we are going to see why if the world produces enough food to feed 12billion people (according to the FAO), there are still famines and world hunger persists?
The first main cause is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow or income to purchase enough food. Different regions in the world are facing problems related to food, for example, nearly half of hungry people are located in the South Asian continent. If we look at India, there is currently a booming growth, but a significant part of the population, is not part of it, especially people living in rural areas that do not have access to food and thus cannot feed their children. To illustrate this, there are figures which reveal that in India, out of 130 million children under the age of 5, half are affected by malnutrition, with a majority of girls, children from low caste and Dalit branded “untouchable” (UNICEF, 2009). We can wonder how many of them, in 2050, will still be alive? Amartya Sen, who received the Economic Nobel Prize in 1998 and who is originally from India wrote that there are “numerous factors that lead to famine, both economical and social such as falling wages, unemployment, rise in food prices and poverty of the system which distributes food”.
