For decades, public opinion has been convinced that the fight against world hunger must be fought by increasing agricultural production: in this way practically everything was justified, from the Green Revolution to the GMOs.
For some time, however, the voices of scientists and technicians have risen to deny this theory, which is actually promoted by the world's major agro-industrial conglomerates, particularly in the American world, which use this ideology to support their productivistic approach based on the combination of industrialized agriculture, engineered seeds and chemical inputs.

The aggressive commercial policies of the large agri-food multinationals that push exports of their productivist mix to monopolize the globalized market for food raw materials are motivated by the problem of world hunger.
In a recent article, Timothy A. Wise, director of the Land & Food Rights Program at the Small Planet Institute, returns to this issue, fundamental for the future of the world, starting from the new FAO document on world agriculture 2019, according to which hunger affects still 820 million people in the world, while almost 2 billion human beings living without the security to feed themselves sufficiently.

All that while we are accumulating surpluses of cereals that do not find buyers, so that world prices collapse, impoverishing even the farmers of rich countries, as we also know in the last decade.

Wise lucidly argues with Richard Linton, rector of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences of North Carolina State University, when the latter states: «We need to find a way to feed the world, doubling food production. (...) And we all know that if we don't produce enough food the result is: war, competition.»
Wise observes: «More than 70% of the food consumed in developing countries, where hunger is pervasive, is grown in those countries, the majority of it by small-scale farmers. Those farmers are the main people doing the feeding now. And they’re only using 30% of agricultural resources to do it. (That means industrial agriculture is using 70% of the resources to feed 30% of the population.)»

Recalling the well-known studies of Amartya Sen and Frances Moore Lappé, he notes that it is therefore not the world of rich industrialized agriculture that can solve the problem of world hunger, but it is the producers at local level who are the real protagonists of the struggle to give everyone humans enough food to feed properly.
Taking into consideration the case of Iowa, one of the American states most characterized by the industrialized agriculture model, Wise highlights how
«The state’s agriculture is mainly rain-fed, but the Jordan and Dakota aquifers are being pumped at unreplenishable rates. It takes five gallons of water a day to raise a hog; with 20 million hogs, that’s more than 30 billion gallons of water a year. It takes three to distill a gallon of ethanol from corn; that’s more than 12 billion gallons of water annually. If ethanol and meat production grow at projected rates, those huge aquifers will eventually run dry».

This reckless consumption of irreplaceable resources such as water, to produce not food for human beings but for fuels and feed for livestock, does not entail benefits for world hunger, but rather for the emerging middle classes of the world in the process of development, which can be allowed to eat at lower costs ... All at the price of environmental imbalances that can even affect climate change.

The current agricultural production, according to the scholar, is already sufficient to feed at least 10 billion people, 3 billion more than the current population: it is therefore against food waste, against unused surpluses, against the use of raw materials foodstuffs for different uses (fuels, energy) from those of human nutrition that we should all commit to.

Wise, in conclusion, proposes an extremely clear recipe: «if we’re worried about the overall availability of food, we in the rich world should stop doubling down on industrial agriculture and immediately take two simple measures: First, reduce food waste, which squanders one-third or more of the food the world produces. Second, stop diverting food and land to biofuel production».