A year ago I sat in a room at the Earth Institute at Columbia surrounded by executives from big food companies. One of them, I believe from Unilever, clicked to a slide that read “The solution to global hunger is to turn malnutrition into a market opportunity.” The audience — global development practitioners and academics and other executives — nodded and dutifully wrote it down in their notebooks; I shuddered…
In 2008 more food was grown than ever before in history. In 2008 more people were obese than ever before in history. In 2008 more profit was made by food companies than ever before in history. And in 2008 more people went hungry than ever before in history.
Hunger is not a global production problem. It is a global justice problem.
A thoughtful post from Slow Food USA on the disparity between how much food we can produce and how much food actually gets to people (and how much of the food we produce is actually good, nourishing food).