In previous articles we have discussed a certain (involuntary or deliberate) tendency to refer to certain realities by their antonym. If gathered to discuss the issue of health, we will invariably speak of illnesses; if it’s work we are discussing, the issue addressed will be unemployment; and when education is the main point on the agenda, speakers will most certainly focus on illiteracy. So continuing with this trend, today, on World Food Day, we paradoxically find ourselves discussing hunger.

Hunger continues its steady growth unperturbed as humanity shamefully looks on. On October 16, 2007 we denounced that the number of hungry people in the world had reached the staggering figure of 852 million people. Now, only two years later, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announces that the ranks of the world’s hungry has climbed past one billion - 1.02 billion, to be exact. That’s one in every six people in the world. So as we celebrate FAO’s 64^th birthday and commemorate (?) World Food Day, hunger - far from decreasing - continues to increase at an alarming rate.

The situation is so critical - every six seconds somewhere in the world a child dies of malnutrition - that those who contribute to perpetuate it can no longer deny it. “The present situation of world food insecurity cannot leave us indifferent,” FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. “We have the economic and technical means to make hunger disappear, what is missing is a stronger political will to eradicate hunger forever,” he said. But naturally, Mr. Diouf couldn’t help but add: “World leaders have reacted forcefully to the financial and economic crisis and succeeded in mobilizing billions of dollars in a short time period. The same strong action is needed now to combat hunger and poverty.”

So, which one is it Mr. Diouf? You can’t contradict yourself so shamelessly in the same report. Is the problem political or is it economic? When I read that your solution to the problem was to be found in greater political commitment, I said to myself: Finally somebody is recognizing that the root problem of hunger is political! That would entail recognizing that it is the result of a system designed to place everything - from seeds to basic foodstuff - in the hand of a handful of companies. Do the names Monsanto, Cargill, Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart or Carrefour - just to mention a few transnational corporations - say anything to you?

Mr. Diouf cannot ignore that no more than 10 transnational corporations control 67 percent of the proprietary seeds market, 89 percent of the global market of agrotoxic chemicals, 26 percent of direct sales to consumers around the world, 63 percent of animal pharmaceutics, and 66 percent of the biotech industry.¹ Neither can he deny that the agro-food model imposed since the mid twentieth century - epitomized in the so-called “green revolution”- is a huge consumer of non-renewable resources, especially oil. And he must also know that the Dutch foundation Water Footprint Network introduced the “water footprint” as an indicator of human impact on water systems, revealing that 16,000 liters of water are needed to produce just one kilogram of beef, 1,000 liters of water are required to produce one liter of bottled milk, 3,000 liters of water for one kilo of rice, 1,350 liters of water for one kilo of wheat, and 900 liters of water for one kilo of corn.

In the face of this reality, Mr. Diouf tries to convince us that solving the hunger problem only requires a political commitment to raise “billions of dollars.” But the question is: will those dollars go to feed these companies and their model of production? When they are both responsible not only for hunger, but for so many of today’s dire problems, including a mass rural exodus, ecological devastation, soil contamination, water and air pollution, the poisoning and death of so many by agrotoxic chemicals, human epidemics caused by genetic transferring of animal diseases (mad cow, bird flu, swine flu), and a long etcetera? In sum, let’s not get our hopes up, the solution to world hunger does not lie with FAO.

The solution is up to our fellow workers

Meanwhile, millions of men and women around the world are working in the fields, fishing in seas and rivers, and processing and distributing food. Many of them are working for meager wages, being persecuted or jailed for trying to organize themselves in unions, or suffering under harsh working conditions, falling victim of repetitive stress injuries caused by the fast pace of work in assembly lines; others are subjected to near slavery conditions or poisoned with the chemicals they spray, conditions that are not even acknowledged as occupational illnesses.

On this October 16, we extend our fraternal greeting and call on all these workers. Because the solution to hunger and so many other injustices in the world lies necessarily with them and their organized struggle.