Increasing the world's food supply won't end hunger

An article by Jill Richardson of the Organic Consumers Association makes interesting reading and confirms much of the socialist case.

Some extracts  

Every October, world leaders and corporate executives gather in Iowa to present the World Food Prize to celebrate those who make the largest contributions to increasing the world’s food supply. The corporations that fund the World Food Prize may not entirely drive its agenda, but they certainly influence it. By focusing on the sheer volume of food in the world, they aim to reduce global hunger to a simple matter of science. Then they sell us on the idea that we need their products to increase the amount of food farmers harvest from each acre. But producing more food doesn’t always mean feeding more hungry mouths.  Ending hunger is not a simple matter of growing more food. It involves social science as well as physical science.

When a farmer produces an extra ten bushels of crops from each acre of land, perhaps more people will eat — or maybe not. Americans don’t have to travel around the world to see this, we must only ask our grandparents. During the Great Depression, farmers grew a great surplus of food, and food prices crashed. Both farmers and consumers suffered, as farmers went into bankruptcy while the urban poor starved. Today, we grow more food than we need — and then throw 40 percent of it away. Meanwhile, many Americans can afford to eat enough calories but only by buying cheap junk food that will ultimately make them sick. And that’s just in America, a wealthy nation. What about poor countries?

If we aim to make any real progress toward ending poverty and hunger, we must start by challenging the inequality in our world today.