This raft of agro-industrial policies and practices saw food production increase by around 9% while hunger increased by around 10%. A simply example of how indistrialisation of food production can actually increase rather solve issues of hunger is 'The Green Revolution' in India. The common defense that intensive agriculture increases yields is of little import when you consider the fact that distribution rather than production is leads to global global hunger. The American dust bowl of the 1930s is only one particularly evocative example of how industrial agriculture leads to pollution and desertification. Industrial food production is ironically eroding our common resources of soil, water and ecosystems through its use of monocultures, uniform seeds, petro-chemical fertalisers and biocides etc. Whilst I've used a historic example to make the point, the same market logic is exacerbating food shortages the world over today, the 2012 humanitarian crises in West Africa being a key example.Īgro-Industrial methods of food production are unsustainable and yet perversely associated with progress. All of the latter however were exported to English consumers because they had greater buying power than their less wealthy Irish neighbors. The 'famine years' of 18 saw the failure of the potato crop but adequate harvests of grains, meat and dairy.
A simple historical example of this which well engages the British imagination is the Irish potato famine. This is why poor people can and do starve to death in countries of plenty simply because they do not have the money to access the food that is being produced. These shocking realties are the result of a system that distributes food on the basis of markets, rather than on human need. Approximately one half of all food produced in wasted before its eaten.
Enough food is produced to feed around 15 billion people and yet almost 1 billion are malnurished, whilst another billion suffer ill health from over consumption of high sugar, fat and salty diets.
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