We live in a world of plenty. Today it is produced food for 12,000 million people, according to the Organization of the United Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO), when the planet inhabited 7,000. Food, there is. So why one of every seven people worldwide is going hungry?

The food emergency that affects over 10 million people in the Horn of Africa has now come back into the fate of a catastrophe that has nothing natural. Droughts, floods, wars … serve to exacerbate a situation of extreme food vulnerability, but are not the only factors that explain it.

The famine in the Horn of Africa is not new. Somalia is experiencing a situation of food insecurity for 20 years. And, periodically, the media removed our comfortable sofas and remind us of the dramatic impact of world hunger. In 1984, nearly one million people died in Ethiopia in 1992, 300,000 Somalis died of hunger in 2005, almost five million people on the brink of death in Malawi, just to name a few.

Hunger is not inevitable, inevitably affects certain countries. The causes of hunger are political. Who controls the natural resources (land, water, seeds) that enable the production of food? Who benefits from agricultural and food policies? Today, food has become a commodity and its main function, feed, has been in the background.

It points to the drought, with consequent loss of crops and livestock as a major trigger of famine in the Horn of Africa, but how is it that countries like the U.S. and Australia, suffered severe droughts periodically, not suffering from extreme hunger? Obviously, the weather can exacerbate food problems, but not enough to explain the causes of hunger. In regard to food production, control of natural resources is key to understanding who and what it produces.

In many countries of the Horn of Africa, access to land is a scarce commodity. The bulk purchase of fertile soil by foreign investors (agro-industry, governments, hedge funds…) has led to the expulsion of thousands of peasants from their lands, decreasing the ability of these countries to feed themselves. Thus, while the World Food Program tries to feed millions of refugees in Sudan is a paradox that foreign governments (Kuwait, UAE, Korea…) are buying land to produce and export food for their populations.

Also, remember that Somalia, despite recurrent drought, was a self-sufficient in food production until the late seventies. Its food was taken in later decades. Since the eighties, the policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank for the country to pay its debt to the Paris Club, forced the implementation of a set of adjustment measures. In regard to agriculture, this implied a policy of trade liberalization and opening its markets, allowing the massive influx of subsidized products like rice and wheat in North American and European agribusiness multinationals, who began to sell their products below its cost price and making unfair competition to local producers. Periodic devaluations of the Somali currency also generated rising input prices and encouraging a policy of export monoculture forced gradually to abandon the field. Similar tales were not only in Africa, but also in Latin America and Asia.

The rising price of staple cereals is one of the elements identified as a trigger for famine in the Horn of Africa. In Somalia, the price of corn and red sorghum increased by 106% and 180% respectively in just one year. In Ethiopia, the cost of wheat rose by 85% over the previous year. In Kenya, maize reached a value 55% higher than 2010. A rally that has become inaccessible to these foods. But what are the reasons for the escalation of prices? Several signs point to financial speculation with raw food materials as a major cause.

The price of food is determined by the stock exchanges, the most important of which, worldwide, is to Chicago, while in Europe the food sold in the futures exchanges in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. But today, most of the purchase and sale of these goods does not correspond to real trade flows. It is estimated that in the words of Mike Masters, hedge fund Masters Capital Management, a 75% financial investment in the agricultural sector is speculative. We buy and sell commodities in order to speculate and do business, affecting eventually raise the price of food in the consumer. The same banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, which caused the subprime mortgage crisis are those who speculate with food today, taking advantage of a deep global markets deregulated and highly profitable.

The global food crisis and famine in the Horn of Africa in particular are the result of food globalization in the service of private interests. The production, distribution and consumption of food is in the hands of a few multinationals who put their individual interests to collective needs and over recent decades have eroded the support of international financial institutions, the ability the southern states to determine their agricultural and food policies.

Returning to the beginning, why is there hunger in a world of abundance? Food production has tripled since the sixties, while the global population has only doubled since then. We are facing a problem of food production, but a problem of access. As noted by the UN reporter for the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, told El Pais: “Hunger is a political problem. Is a matter of social justice and redistribution policies.”

If we want to end hunger in the world is urgently go for other food and agricultural policies that place in your heart to people, their needs, those who work the land and the ecosystem. Betting that the international movement La Via Campesina calls “food sovereignty” and regain the ability to decide what we eat. Borrowing one of the most popular slogans of the Movement 15-M, is necessary a “real democracy, and” in agriculture and nutrition.

- Esther Vivas, Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University Pompeu Fabra, is the author of "From field to plate. The circuits of production and distribution of food".
**Article published in the Spanish newspaper El País, 30.07.2011.
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