Nearly 1 Billion of World's People Face Chronic Hunger
Oliver Richards
The number of undernourished people in the world has increased from 923 million in 2007 to 963 million in 2008. This disturbing figure comes from a report on world hunger released on December 9 by the Rome-based UN Agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), entitled The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008.
The report notes that the number of chronically hungry people rose by 75 million in 2007, while the 2008 figure shows an increase of 40 million. The recent increase in the number of hungry people has been exacerbated by high food prices, especially in developing countries.
In a news release on the FAO web site, FAO Assistant Director-General Hafez Ghanem underscored the difficulties being faced by people in the developing world:
"For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream. The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality."
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"The world food crisis and the capitalist market," the sources of the current food crisis "lie in economic and political processes of privatization and price speculation that have unfolded over the past three decades and are bound up with the globalization of capitalist agriculture."
The world is presently reeling from a gigantic "socio-economic shock," in the form of a developing global financial crisis, which will inevitably exacerbate the world hunger crisis, as millions of people find themselves jobless, homeless, and are thrust deeper into poverty.
That nearly 1 billion people are suffering from hunger is yet another testament to the irrational allocation of resources under capitalism. As the foreword to the report notes: "Hunger has increased as the world has grown richer and produced more food than ever in the last decade."
While the capitalist mode of production has revolutionized the productive forces, developing the capacity to feed every person on earth and eliminate hunger, the social relations of production have become a fetter upon the realization of this goal. The FAO's The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008 documents the devastating impact of the growth of social inequality—in the form of chronic hunger—on large numbers of the world's population.