Not Enough Food in the World? Rubbish!

Genetic engineering (GMO food) is promoted as being the solution to famine and starvation which is claimed to be due to a global food shortage. However, there is already more than enough food in the world to feed everyone. It is being wasted:

"One Third of World’s Food Destroyed... A study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, released a week ago, finds that nearly one-third of the world’s food supply - in the United States the figure is 40 per cent - is never consumed because it is wasted. Billions are being spent to develop new chemicals, new genetically altered seeds and new, energy-intensive, unsustainable farming methods that are alleged to increase food production, but the authors of the study expressed surprise that the loss of food, much of which is deliberately thrown away, is drawing no attention... A world that is seeing unprecedented increases in food prices and shortages of food can ill afford to lose a third of its available food to stupidity... " Source: http://www.dailyimpact.net/2011/05/24/one-third-of-worlds-food-destroyed-culprit-found/

"The Global Food Surplus... Starvation is a gruesome way to die... Nearly 25,000 people starve to death every day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)..." That's around 9,125,000 people starving to death each year...
"The number of people living in hunger has risen to one billion, which is the highest it's been since World War II... We've seen a global surplus for over five decades now... While 15 percent of the global population faces hunger, another 20 percent are overweight... The neglect of agricultural development is one of the main reasons why nothing is changing...
It's a vicious circle: Imports of cheap surplus food from the West have destroyed local markets in Asia and Africa, removing financial incentives to plant food, and taking away the income of the poor...
Experts now agree that large plantations and industrial agriculture do not help to stop hunger, but instead create new problems. Monoculture and fertilizers, for instance, have damaged natural diversity, while leaching the soil of its nutrients... We cannot solve the problems with today's industrial line of thought..."
Source: http://www.dw.de/the-global-food-surplus/a-15452289

"There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone. In fact, over the last 20 years, world food production has risen steadily at over 2% a year, while the rate of global population growth has dropped to 1.14% a year. Population is not outstripping food supply. People are too poor to buy the food that is available." Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D., Executive Director of Food First: Institute for Food and Development Policy. See below on this page for a lengthier excerpt of his article.

There are more than enough plant crops grown already to feed billions more humans but so much of it is wasted by feeding it to livestock animals in feedlots and factory farms. This is so some humans can consume unhealthy junkfood like hamburgers, become obese, develop cardiovascular disease and diabetes and become a source of further profit to corporations; as consumers of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs to treat the symptoms of preventable bad-diet-related illnesses.
From the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2003: "The major threat to future survival and to U.S. natural resources is rapid population growth… The amount of grains fed to US livestock is sufficient to feed about 840 million people who follow a plant-based diet [that being several times the current US population] ... The US livestock population consumes more than 7 times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population... The average fossil energy input for all the animal protein production systems studied... is more than 11 times greater than that for grain protein production... Producing 1kg of animal protein requires about 100 times more water than producing 1kg of grain protein... On rangeland for forage production, more than 200,000 liters of water are needed to produce 1kg of beef... Producing 1 kg of fresh beef may require about 13kg of grain and 30kg of hay... Both the meat-based average American diet and the lacto-ovo-vegetarian (dairy and poultry/eggs) diet... are not sustainable in the long term based on heavy fossil energy requirements..." This study amongst others is referenced at: EatingOurFuture.wordpress.com

In 1995 the European Union (EU) ordered the destruction of 2.5 million tonnes of fresh fruit & veges so as to keep prices for farmers artificially high. The EU paid farmers an estimated $987.6 million (Australian dollar amount) for the food, which had to be of marketable quality before it could be accepted for destruction. This is part of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, under which food prices are protected. Source: The Australian newspaper, 19th March 1996.

"Russians Proving That Small-Scale, Organic Gardening Can Feed the World: When it's suggested that our food system be comprised of millions of small, organic gardens, there's almost always someone who says that it isn't realistic. And they'll quip something along the lines of, "There's no way you could feed the world's growing population with just gardens, let alone organically."
Really? Has anybody told Russia this? On a total of 8 million hectares (20 million acres) of land, 35 million Russian families grow food in small-scale, organic gardens on their Dachas (a secondary home, often in the extra urban areas). Because growing your own food happens to be a long-lived tradition in Russia, even among the wealthy.
Based on official 1999 statistics, 92% of Russia's potatoes, 77% of its vegetables, 87% of its fruits, 59.4% of its meat, and 49.2% of its milk were produced by these 35 million Dacha families (105 million people, 71% of the country's population).
If Russian families can manage such production in their region's very short growing season (approx. 110 days), imagine the output most parts of the world could manage by comparison. Unfortunately in just the US alone, lawns take up more than twice the amount of land Russia's gardens do (estimated 40-45 million acres).
From http://reclaimgrowsustain.com/content/russians-proving-small-scale-organic-gardening-can-feed-world

The World Food Crisis - What is Behind it and What We Can Do:

A 2017 article titled 8 Critical Factors Behind Every Food Crisis discusses Poverty, Drought and Desertification, Political Pressure, Meat and Dairy Agriculture, Increased Oil and Transportation Costs, Falling World Aid, International Conflicts & Disease at https://businessconnectworld.com/2017/09/13/8-critical-factors-behind-food-crisis/

A paper by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D., Executive Director of Food First: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Excerpts:

"With billions of people at risk of hunger, the current food crisis is certainly massive and destructive... decades of skewed agricultural policies, inequitable trade, and unsustainable development have thrown the world's food systems into a volatile boom and bust cycle and widened the gap between affluence and poverty... the world's recurrent food crises are making a handful of investors and multinational corporations very rich - even as they devastate the poor and put the rest of the planet at severe environmental and economic risk... So-called food "riots" not only in poor countries like Haiti, but in resource-rich countries like Brazil - and even in the industrialized nations of Europe and the United States - reflects the fact that people are not just hungry, they are rebelling against a dangerous and unjust global food system...

The food crisis is affecting over three billion people - half the world's population. The trigger for the present crisis was food price inflation...

There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone. In fact, over the last 20 years, world food production has risen steadily at over 2% a year, while the rate of global population growth has dropped to 1.14% a year. Population is not outstripping food supply. People are too poor to buy the food that is available. "We're seeing more people hungry and at greater numbers than before," said World Hunger Program's executive director Josette Sheeran. "There is food on the shelves but people are priced out of the market."...

The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. The "solutions" they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world's food. For this reason, thus far, there has been little official leadership in the face of the crisis. Nor has there been any informed public debate about the real reasons the numbers of hungry people are growing, or what we can do about it. The future of our food - and fuel - systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies...

To solve the food crisis we need to fix the food system. That entails re-regulating the market, reducing the oligopolistic power of the agri-foods corporations, and building agro-ecologically resilient family agriculture. We need to make food affordable by turning the food system into an engine for local economic development in both rural and urban areas. These tasks are not mutually exclusive - we don't have to wait to fix the food system before making food affordable, marketing fair, or farming viable. In fact, the three need to work in concert, complementing each other...

1) Support domestic food production internationally based on social, ecological, and economic justice and the right to healthy food...

2) Stabilize and guarantee fair prices to farmers, workers, and consumers by re-establishing floor prices and publicly-owned national grain reserves at home and abroad...

3) Halt agrofuels expansion...

4) Re-regulate finance sector investment in food commodities...

5) Promote a return to small-holder farming...

6) Support agro-ecological and locally-based approaches to food production and food system management...

7) Food sovereignty: democratize the food system!..."

Full article at http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/09/editorials/holt-gimenez.htm

So why do corporations want to genetically engineer food?

By modifying organisms they can patent, copyright and own our food supplies. This will give them, a small number of people, enormous power over food availability, food prices and greater control over our lives.

See Genetically Engineered (GMO) Food - Myths & Realities. Excerpts and links to articles about the flaws and myths that are spread by companies and media who stand to profit from GMO food. There has been more than enough food, a food surplus in the world, for many decades; yet millions starve because of national and international economics. Also links to sites that present solutions to hunger and poverty.

Recommended: The Ecologist Magazine www.TheEcologist.org - A magazine with articles on environmental issues, politics, corporate power, government corruption and negligence.