The markets are failing to feed the people or to sustain those who try. Hunger is not caused by a simple shortage in world food stocks, but by the displacement of farmers and peasants, the destruction of local food production systems, the dollarization of food systems, the concentration of land ownership, destructive trade practices, and a focus on production for export. Three dollar wheat is forcing Canadian farmers off the land and it is doing the same to farmers in the Philippines, India, and Africa. These farmers end up in slums surrounding cities, with no money to buy food and no land to grow it. Meanwhile, their former land is used to produce export crops.
Low prices destroy local food production systems in Canada and around the world.
Fair and reasonable prices can foster local production and self-sufficiency. The following year, the ratio increased only slightly. Over the intervening twenty years, every pound of grain that farmers produced, people ate. This does not seem like overproduction. With a population over 6 billion, increasing uncertainty over climate change, and increasing difficulty wringing more production out of a shrinking land base, this does not seem like a burdensome oversupply.