Towards food justice the global-economic material balance analysis of hunger, food security and waste

Abstract

Sustainable development has become a central and key goal for humanity (1 UN: Millenium Development Goals, 2 SDGs). There is no scientific or political consensus, however, about the root cause of unsustainability, so an effective cure is impossible. Nevertheless, unlimited inequality among nations and individuals, extreme poverty, and hunger are always among the most significant problems. It is also often claimed that the world’s current food production would be sufficient to feed all 7.7 billion people on Earth (see Appendix A 1) with a better (more even, ‘just’) distribution. Others use food hunger and poverty data to support claims for increased food production and agricultural output. In this paper we examine the first claim with real data, but from a theoretical perspective: is it true, theoretically, that if all of the produced and wasted food were made available to feed the extremely poor and hungry, we could reach zero hunger-related deaths? We will use food waste, hunger-related (+thirst) death, obesity, and calorie consumption data from the “happy” and “unhappy” parts of the Earth. The cause of food waste is dissonant in different economic systems, so its macro-and microeconomic approach is also completely different in different countries. The relationship between obesity, hunger, and food waste has not yet been explored in a structured framework; data are available but scattered. In this paper we propose a unified framework of comparable data as a first step in mapping the biggest missing, or at least wobbling circle of modern bio-economy: global food supply. Thinking globally is a first step toward progress development in food justice and a solution to UN sustainable development goals (SDG 2, 1, 3, and 10).