What is Causing World Hunger?

What is Causing World Hunger?
By: Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

Why is it that continents with the highest levels of biodiversity, abundant land masses and regular monsoon seasons such as Africa and Asia, suffer from one of the highest levels of food poverty on the planet? Why is it that the people who are growing our food and live in agriculturally rich communities in the 3rd world, are the ones starving and fighting to receive adequate daily nutrition?
The problem here lies in the way that the world’s agribusiness has made food production highly reliant on expensive chemicals and costly seeds that together form a recipe for disaster and are creating food poverty. This situation is further exacerbated by companies that effectively control the world seed market, genetically modifying them to produce ‘terminator seeds’ that produce one-off yields to increase seed sales which is a multibillion dollar industry. Farmers are caught in a vicious cycle where they are battling to pay for expensive raw materials in a bid to make profit so that they sell their crops and feed themselves and their families. Food has become a commodity and a big lucrative business.
Unfortunately, due to the industrialization of food, modern farming practices use chemicals and promote monocultures to produce a lot of one crop for industrial agriculture. This creates nutritionally impoverished yield, making the produce  more susceptible to disease, as well as pest outbreaks which affects the overall biodiversity. It seems that farmers of the past were wise to grow numerous crops in a polyculture setup, creating a rich environment where pests are naturally controlled by other predators and where crops compliment each other to produce more nutritious soil conditions. Using more ecological methods could significantly increase soil nutrition and in turn improve yields. It seems that farming using current practices for industrial farming practices to sell in international markets is a major reason for food scarcity in local communities.
I believe that we need to go back to promoting sustainable, local production for most of our food needs rather than relying of imports for our staples. We can see what reliance on foreign food sources has done with the war in Ukraine; limiting supply of essential food products and sending their prices soaring. We have become reliant on imports with little concern for where they come from, which poses a threat to the stability of nations across the world as no nation can go without food.
Unfortunately, it has been the policy of certain nations to deliberately control the supply of staple foods. This is a highly effective weapon to achieve control of countries through foreign policies deliberately causing food shortages and local hunger. If you control a country’s food supply you control its decision making abilities.
The real culprit of hunger is the weaponization of food, the agendas of inhumane governments and the supply of it as a commodity which is carefully controlled by the agribusiness giants.
Food production needs to go back to basics to become a local and a sustainable affair as there is plenty of food being produced to ensure that no one goes hungry. Ecological farming techniques should be taught with the availability of good quality, cheap seeds and fertilizers. Access to food is a fundamental human right and must be de-politicized so that it becomes available to everybody in a sustainable manner.