When New Internationalist first began four decades ago, one of its driving forces was a sense of passionate indignation that hunger could still exist in a world capable of putting someone on the moon. We have repeatedly returned to this theme because it needs patiently explaining to each new generation. As Dinyar Godrej put it 20 years ago this month: ‘The news media chases famine, hooked onto a perverse aesthetics of death. People with chronic, everyday hunger, who work and go about their business with a hole inside, aren’t quite sexy enough. Famines have the “advantage” of coming and going, of being, in retrospect, controllable. The hungry, on the other hand, are always with us. And yet there is no reason why this should be so – more than enough food is produced in our world to feed everyone’ (nin.tl/hungerandplenty).
The year after he was writing the World Food Summit set a target of reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half within 20 years. The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, was beside himself with outrage: ‘What kind of cosmetic solutions are we going to provide so that 20 years from now there will be 400 instead of 800 million starving people? The very modesty of these goals is shameful.’
