Here's a fact that should keep you up at night: the world currently produces enough food to feed about 10 billion people. We have 8 billion. Yet roughly 735 million people faced chronic hunger in 2022, and that number is rising.

This isn't a problem of scarcity. It never really was. The story of global hunger since World War II is a story of abundance alongside starvation, of food mountains rotting in one country while children die of malnutrition in another. Understanding how we got here—and why it persists—reveals something uncomfortable about how our global food system actually works.

Every year, roughly one-third of all food produced globally—about 1.3 billion tons—gets lost or wasted. In wealthy nations, perfectly edible produce gets plowed back into fields because it's slightly misshapen. Supermarkets throw away mountains of food approaching sell-by dates. Restaurants discard enough each day to feed small towns.

The math is brutal. The United Nations estimates that food waste in industrialized countries alone (222 million tons annually) nearly equals the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa. Americans throw away about 40% of their food. Meanwhile, the Horn of Africa experienced its worst drought in 40 years in 2022, pushing 22 million people toward starvation.

This isn't an accident or oversight. It's the logical outcome of a system that treats food as a commodity rather than a necessity. Food gets produced where it's profitable, distributed where people can pay, and wasted when selling it costs more than discarding it. The market efficiently allocates resources toward profit. Feeding hungry people who can't pay isn't profitable.

Takeaway

Hunger in a world of abundance isn't a production problem—it's a distribution problem. Food follows money, not need.

Here's a pattern that repeats across decades and continents: a country experiences famine while simultaneously exporting food. Ethiopia exported coffee during its 1984 famine. Today, many sub-Saharan nations export cash crops—cocoa, coffee, cotton, flowers—while importing the food their populations need to survive.

This isn't irrational. It's the legacy of colonial economic structures that never really ended. European powers organized colonies to export raw materials and agricultural products. After independence, these new nations inherited economies built entirely around serving foreign markets. They also inherited debts, and international lenders demanded they earn foreign currency to repay them.

The World Bank and IMF pushed "structural adjustment" programs throughout the 1980s and 1990s that required developing nations to focus on export agriculture. Grow cash crops, earn dollars, repay debts, import food. This made countries dependent on global commodity prices they couldn't control. When coffee prices collapse or fertilizer costs spike, nations find themselves unable to afford the food their own soil could have grown.

Takeaway

Many hungry nations aren't failing to produce food—they're producing the wrong food for the wrong people, locked into global market structures they didn't design.

The Arab Spring didn't begin with ideology. It began with bread. When a Russian heat wave in 2010 destroyed wheat harvests and Moscow banned exports, global wheat prices doubled. Egypt, the world's largest wheat importer, suddenly couldn't afford to subsidize bread. The resulting food price spikes helped ignite protests that toppled governments across the Middle East.

Climate change has transformed weather from a local agricultural concern into a global political destabilizer. Droughts, floods, and heat waves in major producing regions now ripple through commodity markets within days, hitting the poorest consumers hardest. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine—blocking grain exports from one of the world's breadbaskets—demonstrated how quickly regional disruptions become global hunger crises.

What's changed since 1945 isn't just the climate—it's how interconnected our food systems have become. A drought in Brazil affects coffee drinkers in Seattle and subsistence farmers in Vietnam who abandoned food crops for coffee exports. Rising temperatures don't just reduce yields; they create volatility that makes planning impossible for farmers and governments alike.

Takeaway

In a globalized food system, extreme weather anywhere becomes hunger everywhere. Climate instability doesn't just threaten harvests—it threatens political stability.

Understanding the hunger paradox historically changes how we think about solutions. The problem isn't convincing farmers to grow more food—it's restructuring systems that treat hunger as an acceptable market externality rather than a solvable crisis.

Every famine of the past seventy years occurred not because food didn't exist, but because it didn't reach the people who needed it. That's not a failure of agriculture. It's a choice embedded in how we've organized global food distribution. Recognizing it as a choice is the first step toward making different ones.