Ending hunger - the rich world holds the keys - Comment - The Ecologist
▻http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2333245/ending_hunger_the_rich_world_holds_the_keys.html
The global marketplace is brutally efficient at allocating resources to the highest bidder - as opposed to where they are needed.
Its simple magic allows large areas of farmland in developing countries to be used to cultivate feedstocks for fuelling cars, or for feeding the livestock that will satisfy burgeoning meat consumption in the West.
According to some estimates, as much as six million hectares of African land were bought up by EU biofuels companies alone between 2009 and 2013. The ’virtual land’ embodied in the EU’s imports of protein crops to feed animals represented 20 million hectares in 2010 - the equivalent of almost 10% of the EU’s own farmland.
Meanwhile, rather than be consumed directly by local populations, smaller species of fish are shipped thousands of kilometers to fish farms where they command more money as feed for the salmon and trout rich consumers will buy.
#Olivier_De_Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. his second three-year mandate comes to an end in May 2014.