Food Production and Poverty Essay

Worldwide a huge number of people go hungry every day. They go hungry as a result of the lack of food production and poverty. Some related causes to these issues include but are not limited to: land rights and ownership, increasing emphasis on export oriented agriculture, inefficient agricultural practices, and the introduction of Bio fuels. We always hear that people would like to end world hunger or be able to feed the world and at least help alleviate the suffering associated with said world hunger problems. Unfortunately alleviation of hunger in the long run is a long way from being achieved 100% because hunger is another problem caused by poverty so if efforts are only directed at providing food or improving food production or distribution the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency will always remain. Consequentialy the relationship between food production and poverty in the world are defined by economic, political and social relationships. Two inter-related factors influencing hunger and that are often ignored are land ownership and who controls land. The hunger in underdeveloped countries today is tragic because their European colonizers understood well that ownership of land give the owner of control over what society produced. So the most powerful redistributed land titles to themselves doing away with the old traditions of common use. As for export-oriented agriculture’s where food is grown mainly for exports leaves people to go hungry because they are growing the food to export for the money that is to be earned so in short wealthier nations benefit while while poor countries lose out. Now lastly inefficient agricultural practices and the increasing use of Bio fuels go hand in hand in which that simply put the use of Bio fuels diverts land away from food production to growing crops for fuels such as ethanol, and for a long time it was thought and believed that bio fuels would have an impact on agriculture and hunger but the rich countries interfered once again and played down there impact. Bibliography Global Issues Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All