The ‘new normal’: Food, climate change and intellectual property

Abstract

The global food system is broken. Worldwide, 868 million are undernourished. The Asia-Pacific region ranks highest in terms of the number of people that are hungry and sub-Saharan Africa leads on a percentage basis. In Niger, for example, one in two children suffers from malnutrition and one in six dies before the age of five. In July 2011, the United Nations declared Somalia’s food crisis a famine, triggered by the country’s worst drought in 60 years, killing tens of thousands of Somalis from malnutrition-related causes and forcing mass exodus to neighbouring Kenya. Aid agencies estimate that 3.7 million people in Somalia and millions more in neighbouring Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya are close to starvation.