The Food Shortage is a Lie

It's easy to be confused by the current opposing issues of world hunger and food waste. We seem to hear them everywhere now: Hundreds of millions of people are going hungry! We need to grow more food for our fast-growing population! 30-50% of food produced is not eaten! Huh?!

But this article - How the Great Food War Will Be Won - clears things up thoroughly, and I'd like to urge everyone to read it.

The fact is, we produce an overabundance of food; the stats show it and the World Bank Institute admits we produce enough, globally, for 14 billion people. This isn't exactly new news; I've argued before that we could already produce more than enough food for the global population. But yet industrial agriculture and its supporters - from the UK's National Farmers Union to CropLife International to, of course, Syngenta, Bayer and Monsanto - want us to believe we do not - perhaps cannot - produce enough. The article points out;

The strategic centrepiece of Monsanto’s PR, and also that of just about every major commercial participant in the industrialised food system, is to focus on the promotion of one single overarching idea. The big idea that industrial producers in the food system want you to believe is that only they can produce enough for the future population.

It's a lie. An industry lie, to promote industrial agriculture over small-scale agroecological growing. An industry lie to make money, at great cost to the earth.

...in every single case where industrial agriculture is implemented it leaves landscapes progressively emptier of life. Eventually, the soil turns either into mud that washes into the rivers or into dust that blows away on the wind. Industrial agriculture has no long term future; it is ecological suicide. 

The article goes on to describe how the ecological food movement needs a new strategy; one that involves dismantling this lie and changing perception. Do give it a read:

How the Great Food War Will Be Won