Most people believe hunger is caused by food scarcity, however this is wrong. There is currently more than enough food available to feed our global population of 7.9 billion, yet over 800 million still go hungry. How can this be?

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world farms, grazes or fishes more than 1.5 times enough food to feed a planet populated by 10 billion people, which is the number the UN projects will inhabit the Earth by 2050.

But people making less than $2 a day — most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating un-viably small plots of land — cannot afford to buy this food, states an article in the “Journal of Sustainable Agriculture’.

In other words, hunger is caused by poverty, not scarcity. More on that below. For now we should point out, only recently has hunger started rising again, after declining for a whole decade.

The second half of the 20th century saw the biggest population increase in human history. Since 1950, the world’s population has gone from 2.5 billion people to 7.7 billion. According to the United Nations, the  population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, with two-thirds of the growth over the next 30 years forecast to take place in Africa.

In a 2013 article, National Geographic poses the question: “Science prevented the last food crisis. Can it save us again?”  The long-running natural sciences publication believes another green revolution is possible by continuing Borlaug’s work of breeding better crops but with modern genetic techniques; and that the negatives of commercial farming can be partially offset through organic food production.

To the first point, scientists can now identify and manipulate a large variety of plant genes for traits like disease resistance and drought tolerance, making farming more productive and crops more resilient.

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This is an excerpt. Read the original post here.