The people who need the food must be able to buy it and consume it. And that is precisely the problem. Thirty million people a year die of hunger. And 800 million suffer from chronic malnutrition. Again, there is nothing inevitable about this.
Climatic problems are often predictable.
And yet hunger continues to decimate whole populations. Because hunger has become a political weapon. In today's world, no famine is gratuitous. Hunger is a strategy pursued with unbelievable cynicism by governments and military regimes whom the end of the cold war has deprived of a steady income. In Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, North Korea, Burma and Afghanistan, governments and military leaders are holding innocent people hostage and starving them for political ends, sometimes with appalling cruelty.