U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laid out this sobering statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on world food security Monday in Rome.
"Today, more than one billion people are hungry," he told the assembled leaders. Six million children die of hunger every year -- 17,000 every day, he said.
Here's how the overwhelming scale of the problem was described in an article at GlobalPost:
According to the United Nations the number of hungry people this year reached 1.02 billion. That's one in six human beings. Moreover, that figure has been growing each year for more than a decade, while the ravages of the global economic crisis are making matters worse in nearly every corner of the world.
So what's the root of the problem? There are many, of course -- endemic poverty, conflict, climate change, bad governance and on and on. But according to the U.N.'s chief food honcho Jacques Diouf, the biggest factor is an economic one: under-investment in agriculture and rural development.
"If people go hungry today it is not because the world is not producing enough food but because it is not produced in the countries where 70 percent of the world's poor live and whose livelihoods depend on farming activities," Diouf said at a U.N. food conference in Geneva. "The challenge is not only to ensure food security for the one billion hungry people today, which is certainly an enormous task, but also to be able to feed a world population that is expected to reach 9.1 billion in 2050," he said.
Note the key statement in the paragraph above: People go hungry today not because the world can't produce enough food.
As we all know, plenty of food is being produced. Everyone could be fed and no one needs to go hungry or die horribly of starvation.
The problem is neither economic nor agricultural nor even demographic (too many people). It's not for lack of technology. The problem is political. It's politics.
We have the food and we have the capacity to distribute it fairly. What we lack is the political will to make it happen.
Is the solution to be found in emerging technologies? Hardly.
Recall the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, made possible by the wholesale application of irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers. New chemicals, processes, and machinery -- emerging technologies -- led to huge increases in food production worldwide. It was even thought for a time that hunger might be eradicated everywhere.
Alas, what happened was not what most people expected or hoped for. Instead of that surplus being used to dramatically reduce hunger and malnutrition, it actually ended up fueling a population explosion.
And today, with more starving people in the world than ever before -- where a child dies of hunger every five seconds while, ironically, food production is at an all-time high -- projections are not that we will succeed in ending starvation any time soon.
No, it seems that too much of that food will go into the stomachs of already chubby Americans:
No, it seems that If current obesity trends continue, more than 40 percent of adults in the United States will be obese and spending on the epidemic will quadruple to $344 billion by 2018, according to a new study. . . Since 1985 obesity levels have doubled.
What is required, then, is not that we develop miraculous new technologies to make more food. What is needed -- what has always been needed -- is an adjustment in human nature. More empathy. Less apathy.
Is that something that emerging technologies can provide? Or is it an ethical challenge that can only be met by looking within ourselves?