Political Factors -- Cause of Hunger in Developing Countries and International Response
Political Factors -- Cause of Hunger in Developing Countries and International Response
I. Introduction
Hunger is one of the long-lasting international problems that have attracted continuous attention from both scholars and decision makers. Indeed, the history of humanity is “essentially a story of peoples’ attempts to feed themselves.” Unlike climate change, hunger is not a recent problem that people have not dealt with before. Valuable experience is learned from countries that have successfully overcome hunger, or at least those which have reduced the number of hungry people dramatically. As G. Edward Schuh suggests, we know how to solve the world’s food problem and thus to feed a substantially larger global population than we now have. International organizations, like the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, are making every effort possible to eradicate hunger and poverty by using effective food aid, offering financial and technological assistance and sharing information and knowledge among developing countries.
However, even though those international organizations have been trying all the right ways to stop hunger on the systemic level, there are still about 1.02 billion people going to bed hungry every day. This fact draws our attention back to the original question: what are the causes of hunger? According to the introduction by World Food Program, causes of hunger can be generally classified as natural disasters, war, the poverty trap , agricultural infrastructure problem and over-exploitation of the environment.
The main argument I am going to develop in this paper is that among all of the factors leading to hunger, domestic political factors are the most important source, especially in Asian and African developing countries. Even though it has attracted less attention than distribution issues and the poverty trap, political factors are an important cause of hunger as well as a key element in
I. Introduction
Hunger is one of the long-lasting international problems that have attracted continuous attention from both scholars and decision makers. Indeed, the history of humanity is “essentially a story of peoples’ attempts to feed themselves.” Unlike climate change, hunger is not a recent problem that people have not dealt with before. Valuable experience is learned from countries that have successfully overcome hunger, or at least those which have reduced the number of hungry people dramatically. As G. Edward Schuh suggests, we know how to solve the world’s food problem and thus to feed a substantially larger global population than we now have. International organizations, like the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, are making every effort possible to eradicate hunger and poverty by using effective food aid, offering financial and technological assistance and sharing information and knowledge among developing countries.
However, even though those international organizations have been trying all the right ways to stop hunger on the systemic level, there are still about 1.02 billion people going to bed hungry every day. This fact draws our attention back to the original question: what are the causes of hunger? According to the introduction by World Food Program, causes of hunger can be generally classified as natural disasters, war, the poverty trap , agricultural infrastructure problem and over-exploitation of the environment.
The main argument I am going to develop in this paper is that among all of the factors leading to hunger, domestic political factors are the most important source, especially in Asian and African developing countries. Even though it has attracted less attention than distribution issues and the poverty trap, political factors are an important cause of hunger as well as a key element in