Problem of food supply, or hunger

One of the most acute contemporary global problems, affecting more than one and a half billion human beings worldwide, especially in the developing countries (*) and, most critically, in the 26 least developed countries of Africa, in Haiti, Nicaragua, Albania, India, China and North Korea. Over fifty million people die of hunger each year. At times the principal factor in the problem of hunger is observed in the imbalance between limited food resources and unregulated population growth, especially in developing countries. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s food production grew at an annual rate of 2.8%, while annual population growth was 1.8%. Thus, the principal factors of hunger are rooted in the vices of our civilization; they are determined by deficiencies of social organization at the national and international levels; they are the fruit of the unjust distribution of social wealth and the indigence of hundreds of millions of human beings ― periodization, massive unemployment, illiteracy and low labor productivity in the underdeveloped countries ―the product of the colonialist legacy and of ill-conceived social experiments. The p. of h. are an integral part of underdevelopment and cannot be solved without a restructuring of the productive system, the modernization of social life, the elimination of zones of poverty, and the reorganization of the international system of economic relations. Hunger can only be overcome through the worldwide distribution of social, scientific, environmental and spiritual progress― in short, through the humanization of our Earth.