World Hunger: Twelve Myths

World Hunger : 12 Myths

In one of the most incisive looks enveloping the highly charged of World Hunger and various views established and invoked around the world Francis Moore Lappe , Joseph Collins , Peter Rosset with Luis Esparza argue that world Hunger eradication efforts have been going askew primarily because of the misconceptions which they term as Myths . In their book , the authors successfully enumerate various popular opinions that are held as either the cause or a remedy to the issue of World Hunger . In doing so , they also suggest ways , supported by

robust theory and logic , the correction in the approach to this issue and means to deal with this global menace

The traditional approaches have been overly simplistic in outlook and thus the policies and procedures adopted to deal with hunger in any geographic location or any nation always met at best with partial success . In busting the popular myths , the authors have given a framework within which concerted efforts can be focused to deal with Hunger and its offshoots like malnutrition , low life expectancy and quality

In popular parlance , the causes that have led to World hunger have been excuses given by rulers and policy makers or tunnel-view researches which have aided in interpreting available global data to the convenience of the proponent of the theory . The two most pertinent myths tackled in the book are

There 's simply not enough Food

Free Trade is the answer

These two reasons are important because the former deals with the root cause of World Hunger and takes a helpless attitude , which is more often than not found as an excuse offered by ruling class , while the latter deals with the over ambitious economic directions which have ended up not alleviating Hunger

To quote , one of the most widely circulated myth is With food producing resources in so much of the world stretched to the limit there 's simply not enough food to go around . Unfortunately , some people will just have to go hungry (Francis Lappe et al ,p . 8 . But as the authors point out , in a series of well documented examples , the export pattern of the countries facing acute Hunger problem for their populace is ironic if not tragic . There are many ways by which countries , which need not host Hunger deaths are becoming world symbols for Hunger . As an example , Bangladesh , which falls roughly 6 short of its food requirement , has the potential in land fertility and water resource availability , to very effortlessly scale up its production to 300 which would make it a genuine Net exporter . Similarly , in the developing countries , Brazil , reported with 70 million cases of under or mal-nutrition , was a big exporter of Food grain . It would be astounding to know that African and Saharan countries are net exporters in Agricultural products in spite of being the poster countries for malnutrition , Hunger and related deaths also . Therefore it can be safely deduced that the countries which have acute Hunger indices are also the...