A hungry planet

Dispatches on food and power

In the year 2000, representatives of 189 U.N. member states committed, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, “to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger” worldwide by 2015. Despite some significant early gains, that ultimately did not happen, and in May 2023, the U.N.-administered World Food Programme noted that acute hunger had actually increased globally for the fourth consecutive year in 2022. So much for the arc of progress.

These days, as officially-designated famines rage in Palestine and Sudan and the U.S. government wages war inside and outside its borders, it is especially clear that the world’s failure to feed its people is inseparable from the failure of the liberal international order, which was widely touted in the moment after the end of the Cold War. In our Issue Sixteen Dispatches, we asked eleven writers for their thoughts on the relationship between food — its production, distribution, and restriction — and power. In the section, you’ll find:

• Joelle M. Abi Rached on Israel’s nearly two-decades-long siege of Gaza

• Luis Feliz Leon on U.S. farm workers under threat from ICE

• Olatunji Olaigbe on USAID and food security in developing countries

• Hamada Shaqura on trying to feed his community in Gaza at the height of the famine

• Andy Cawley on soy production in Brazil and its devastating environmental consequences

• Sara G. Kielly on the stringent and arbitrary restriction of food packages in New York prisons

• Shahad Elfaki on the use of food access as a weapon in the war in Sudan

• Zeead Yaghi on the Dubaification of Beirut

• Vivian Hu on Ozempic and “doubling down on pharmaceutical weight loss as ‘wellness’”

• Pranay Somayajula on Venezuela’s ongoing food crisis and U.S. sanctions

• Abubaker Abed on the experience of being starved in Gaza

I can’t say these pieces will do much to restore the optimism that characterized the turn of the millennium. What they will provide, instead, is the bitter taste of reality.

Shreya Chattopadhyay is The Drift’s Editorial Assistant.

Dignity and Access | On Food and Power

There is enough food grown each year to feed ten billion people. And yet, with an agricultural system structured by unequal exchange and exploitative class relations, the global economy is simply not getting everyone fed.

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Image credit: Ivy Sanders Schneider