How the World Hunger Problem Was not Solved

Abstract

The world food crisis (1972–1975) gave rise to new development concepts. To eradicate world hunger, small peasants were supposed to use ‘modern’ inputs like high-yielding seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation. This would turn subsistence producers into business owners, transform rural areas, invigorate national economies and the crisis-stricken world economy and thus stabilize capitalism. Together with an in-depth account of the world food crisis, this book analyses how this global scheme largely failed. It shows its diverse initiators, their reasoning and motives, its political breakthrough, the degrees to which it was implemented globally and nationally in the following decades and its socioeconomic effects in rural areas. Despite internationally coordinated policies and coercive means, the scheme failed on all levels: situation analysis, design, policies, incapable institutions (including big business), implementation and peasants’ responses. Selective realization in certain regions and for certain crops and the appropriation of funds by local elites often aggravated inequality and hunger. Case studies are about Bangladesh, Indonesia, Tanzania and Mali. The book shows limits to global social engineering, imperialism and state control. It is aimed at students, scholars, activists and non-specialists interested in development and the world food problem.