In a report released on World Food Day last year, the United Nations showed that nearly 80 percent of all malnourished children in the developing world in the early 1990s lived in countries that boasted food surpluses. In other words, people often go hungry even where food is readily available. The more important feature common to these hungry countries is pervasive poverty, which limits people's access to food in the market or to land, credit, and other resources needed to produce food. Poverty also means poor access to non-food services, including health care, education, and a clean living environment, which increases the likelihood of hunger. Medical conditions like diarrhea, for instance, which is usually the result of an unclean water supply, prevent a child from absorbing available nutrients.
Poverty often strikes hardest among women, the nutritional gatekeepers in many families.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more than half of the world's food is raised by women, and in rural areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the figure soars to 80 percent. Yet, because women have little or no access to land ownership, credit, agricultural training, education, and social privileges in general, their ability to provide adequate nutrition for their families is handicapped. Eradicating hunger requires elimination of its root causes, including gender discrimination and desperate poverty which prevents access to food or the resources to produce it. This having been said, consider where the majority of investment in agricultural biotechnology is going. Global area now stands at 39.9 million hectares compared to 1.7 million hectares in 1996.