What is Hunger?
Hunger shouldn’t exist. This statement is more than a moral opinion, it’s a literal interpretation of international food production.Hunger has never been about the amount of food available; we have enough of it to feed the world. Data suggests that we have enough food to feed 10 billion people, but that 30–40% of all agricultural products are wasted. Moreover, Western countries consume 70% of the world’s calories. The World Bank’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (2009) is a report that aimed to “assess the impacts of past, present and future agricultural knowledge, science and technology on the — reduction of hunger and poverty, — improvement of rural livelihoods and human health, and — equitable, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development.” The report concluded that industrial agriculture cannot sustain itself in the future; we need to move towards small-scale farms that practice regenerative agriculture. Additionally, according to Amartya Sen, Nobel-Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences, global famines are caused by inequalities that exist within a country’s socio-economic framework rather than production limitations. Hunger, like many other social issues, is completely manufactured by capitalistic systems that have significant human and environmental externalities.
Hunger is chiefly caused by two things: lack of financial resources and the inability to access food. Hunger is often posed as an infliction exclusively suffered by poor people. Although, it has recently become clear that it is common even for employed, hardworking individuals that live in the United States. The definition of hunger transcends just an uncomfortable feeling in your stomach because one can be chronically malnourished but still overeat. In my opinion, food insecurity is term used by governments as a euphemism for hunger, and hunger is often a euphemism for malnutrition. Low-income communities are more likely to have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic non-communicable diseases influenced by diet but also simultaneously be hungry.
Hunger manifests itself by making people have to choose between various necessities at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. It forces households and individuals to choose between housing, nutritionally-adequate food, education, affordable healthcare, family, and employment. Tangible expressions of hunger include physically debilitating the most vulnerable. People experiencing homelessness are more likely to experience hunger and malnutrition, as a result, they are also more likely to be susceptible to communicable diseases like tuberculosis, diarrhea and upper respiratory diseases. The cycle of poverty and disease is taught in many of my public health classes, yet global health donor agencies I’m supposed to want to work for focus on quick solutions to disease control that ignore social factors.
Our current food system is weak because it’s not resilience for crises; Market volatility directly affects food global insecurity rates, as we’ve seen with the coronavirus pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis. Hunger is intimately tied to class, yet politicians still believe it’s an issue that can be solved through better farming technologies and international grain/oil subsidies. The political contradiction of food defined as an international market commodity and also a human right is one that creates conflicts of interest between multi-national agribusiness corporations, Bretton Woods organizations, The United Nations, and international non-governmental agencies pursuing global health and equity. These conflicts of interest result in political polarization and fractures within agencies on how the problem of hunger should be addressed at the international level. Is hunger a technical problem or a social and political one? I think it’s quite obviously the latter.
Accepting industrial agriculture as the norm and investing in new technologies that ignore ecological processes to fight worldwide hunger is to be complacent. It is complacent to the human externalities that negatively affect health, economy, productivity, social capital, social justice, and environmental sustainability. Industrial agriculture and the under regulation of corporate food interests have systematically oppressed marginalized communities all over the world and created what we call “hunger”. It’s so ironic to me that agribusiness limits itself in the long term by diminishing the resources it uses to turn profit; it’s such an irresponsible and childish business model. We need bottom-up solutions that focus on regenerative agricultural practices instead of mono-cropping using synthetic fertilizers that deplete soil nutrients, increase the need for irrigation, poison communities, and kill the soil microbiome. We need to drastically change the destructive environmental farming practice that agribusiness prioritizes for short-term profits. We need to support food sovereignty movements that empower marginalized communities. We need to be able to sustainably eat closer to home.
