"The destruction, every year, of tens of millions of men, women, and children from hunger is the greatest scandal of our era. Every five seconds, a child under the age of ten dies of hunger — on a planet abounding in wealth and rich in natural resources. In its current state, the global agricultural system would in fact, without any difficulty, be capable of feeding 12 billion people, or twice the world's current population. Hunger is thus in no way inevitable. Every child who starves to death is murdered." So writes Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2000-2008. This Swiss writer is outraged by the many underlying causes of the plight of global hunger and the unwillingness of countries and corporations to end this cruel form of suffering that claims so many child victims.
Among the contending forces in the geography of hunger are the land grabs, the destruction of farmers' unions, the limited budgets of women raising their children in the world's urban shantytowns, armed conflicts, refugees from famines, free trade, food used for fuel, the power of multinational corporations, the machinations of the World Bank, and the failure of market solutions to stem the tide of poverty and hunger. Ziegler concludes: "Today, there is a war being fought between the manioc fields and the sugarcane plantations, between family subsistence agriculture and the agro-industrial corporations — a war without mercy." And guess who is winning? "Nothing less is required than our total solidarity with the millions of human beings whom hunger is destroying."
