World Hunger Is Political Rather Than Economic By Bhuwan Thapaliya

An American biologist named Paul Ehrlich had predicted in 1969: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” That never happened, but what he wrote and predicted resembled Thomas Malthus’s prediction.

An early 19th century English economist named Thomas Malthus predicted that people would multiply beyond their capacity to feed themselves. Both of these predictions have repeatedly proved wrong. The world’s population grew much as Malthus expected, but food output more than kept pace. So what actually lead to the food output?

By one estimate, though dubious, the credit goes to the green revolution. According to some experts, as reported by the Economist, Green revolution swept the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s and it saved a billion people from starvation. But that is in itself a paradox given the deteriorating post green revolution agricultural production and its dire effect on the environment.

But according to some researchers, Green Revolution cannot be completely ignored because of the Green Revolution, millions of farmers started using higher yielding hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and weed-killers. The results were breathtaking and it shocked even Paul Ehrlich and his followers, according to the reports.

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