The Pathetic State of World Food Distribution | Extremes of Obesity & Starvation

Welcome to the 21^st century, put on your gas masks and let’s take a tour of the agriculture industry! Technology has advanced to unprecedented levels previously unknown to man. Food production is highly specialized and crops are sowed mechanically, fertilized chemically and showered all year round with highly toxic pesticides. State of the art machinery can plough acres of land in a matter of hours that would otherwise take labor workers days if not weeks. Livestock are no longer free range/organically reared but are inhumanely bred and fattened in ‘factories’ where they are injected with vaccines, antibiotics and hormones to speed up their normal growth. Profit is the name of the game and ever-increasing numbers of cows must be factory bred in order to meet the demands of the mind-numbed and overweight masses. Production has greatly increased since the industrial revolution and people apparently enjoy improved standards of living and higher life expectancies.

But something is terribly askew with the current world food distribution. While some have plenty, others struggle to get by. On the one hand, we have developed nations with ever increasing numbers of obese people while in the other extreme of the world, millions live on less than a dollar a day and are struggling to feed their malnourished children.

The UN claims that there is enough food in the world to feed the global population. Sure, there’s enough food to feed everyone, but there’s one important thing to note – not everyone has access to that food. In 2010, there were 925 million people who simply had nothing to eat, with 239 million of those coming from sub-Saharan Africa (1). In other parts of the world, people simply have too much to eat. In fact, the rising obesity in the US is estimated to cost $344 billion a year on health care. (2) Not surprisingly, the countries with the highest food production are the ones that have the highest obesity rates.

Agriculture is no longer a means of feeding and nourishing humankind. Instead, agriculture has become a profit-making mechanism. A way for the elite to control the production of food crops, in terms of quantity, price and even quality. Genetically modified foods are all about control. Farmers are subsidized with seeds that only germinate for one generation, where by the seeds produced by the planted crop do not have the ability to germinate and multiply. This makes the farmers enslaved to the system, going back to Monsanto on their knees begging for more seeds at higher prices just to make a living.

Increasing populations mean a large output of food is required. In order to produce large quantities of food, expensive machinery, high levels of seed and fertilizer are needed. Recent climatic changes mean that a constant water supply is called for and this requires sophisticated irrigation techniques and nearby water sources. To afford all the inputs required for agriculture, the farmer needs to be able to afford them in the first place. In countries where poverty is rampant and government corruption and oppression are the order of the day, how are farmers supposed to carry out organized food production? Such countries may also lack security and with constantly displaced people and refugees, how are communities supposed to settle down and carry out farming? Addressing these problems in underdeveloped nations would help even out food distribution.

If we could have the compassion to just donate one dollar a day, we could collectively eradicate poverty in the world. But no, we are much too ‘busy’ for that.

Think about this. 127,950 tons of food have been wasted in the America today, yet only 26,670 tons of global food aid have been provided (3). That means for every 1 ton of global food aid, almost 5 tons of food are wasted in America alone. How can we allow this to happen?! We the sheeple stare with glitzy eyes as P. Diddy gets Justin Bieber a $300,000 Lamborghini for his 16^th birthday. We nod in admiration as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie spend over $10 million on their 8^th villa. We are addicted to bigoted, blasphemous, amoral modern music videos that cost over $500,000 to make. That $500,000 could easily feed 18,000 poor American families with food for a day. We enviously admire Kim Kardashian who spent $100,000 on handbags in one day in Paris. I could go on and on with many such of examples. Why are our priorities as humankind in the wrong place? Sure enough, the sheeple are kept busy with lives of celebrities, who don’t give a damn about what goes on in your life. The sheeple are kept engaged with entertainment and their own corporate rat race lives, where they struggle to line the pockets of a few wealthy who control over 90% of the world’s wealth. Yep, humans are really one heck of an ‘advanced’ civilization.

While considering the current truly pathetic state of world food distribution today, a nagging question arises – that perhaps the current global food distribution has been purposely engineered to be exactly the way it is right now - unfair, inhumane and disgraceful. Is the current uneven state of world food distribution a means for the elite to control the global population level?

Along with vaccination as a means of population control, which by the way is endorsed by the one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates, restriction of food access to underdeveloped nations ensures the elite can ‘softly’ control human population growth rate. Considering that over 10 million children die before they reach their 5^th birthday due to hunger (4), controlling food distribution really seems to be doing the trick.

Furthermore, by fueling tribal and ethnic wars, the elite can ensure uneven world food distribution such that communities are starved and prevented from flourishing. Tribal and ethnic wars don’t just help control population, but also enable the elite to make insane profits from selling heavy arms and weaponry…to both sides of the war. You gotta hand it to the elite, they are smart and calculative and they know just how to dumb down the population so that their rule is smooth and problem-free.

It looks like the current uneven state world food distribution is going to remain the way it is, if not get worse, unless we as humankind decide to unite and collectively do something about it.

(1) www.worldhunger.org

(2) www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2009-11-17-future-obesity-costs_N.htm

(3) www.stopthehunger.com/

(4) www.bread.org

All pictures in this hub are sourced from the Commons, Wikimedia.