Without comment (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade now. the gap between population growth and food production in Africa has been widening. On present trends, says the FAO. the continent will have 650m more people and an annual deficit in cereal supplies of 100m tonnes by the year 2010 — more than the current yearly volume of world trade in wheat. 

Such shortfalls in the developing world have come to seem particularly offensive at a time when industrialised countries are struggling with budget-busting food surpluses that they cannot sell. The contrast between the two is probably the most striking and frustrating paradox of our age. 

It leads many sympathetic people to suggest that the problem is not one of food production, but one of food distribution. Find a way of recycling the food surpluses of the North to the food deficit areas of the South, they argue, and the problem will be on its way to a solution. But that hardly seems an adequate long-term answer to the problems of hunger in countries which are without exception still agriculturally-based, and likely to remain so for many years. 

The conundrum can be put another way. There is a problem of distribution, to be sure, but it is more to do with money than with food. People are not hungry these days because food supplies are not available; they are hungry because they are poor. 

(Financial Times 4 September 1986)