A report from this international organization beginning with a vowel was covered up by someone.

The report warned that the wealthy farmer controlled too much of the food supply, distribution and farming land in the world and by his own actions could determine the prices of many commodities.

U.N.

Bill Gates

The Gates Foundation should fund better solutions to hunger and nutrient deficiencies

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $922 million investment to address global malnutrition and hunger at the controversial United Nations Food Systems Summit this September.

We commend the foundation for investing in nutrition; unfortunately, its focus on food fortification, technical assistance and research into new “high-impact” innovations misses the mark on the root causes of hunger and malnutrition — and the needed solutions.

As articles announcing the foundation’s commitment have noted, rates of hunger increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Seattle Times reported, “Economic downturns in 2020, exacerbated by the pandemic, led to increases in world hunger as more people found it difficult to afford healthful diets … [T]he number of undernourished individuals was more than five times greater in 2020 than it was at any point within the last two decades.”

Let’s read that again — economic downturns were responsible for increased hunger, because people could not afford healthy diets. The issue is not that poor people simply don’t know about maternal nutrition, nor that their flour isn’t “enriched” with vitamins and minerals, but that they cannot afford to purchase the nutritious foods that they and their families need. Critical nutrient deficiencies like vitamin A deficiency and anemia are highly correlated with poverty and food insecurity, and they increase amid economic crises and recessions.

Malnutrition and food insecurity are caused by how we have set up our societies, prioritizing productivity, profits and commodities over ensuring universal access to healthy, nutritious and culturally appropriate food that is produced without negative impacts on the biosphere. They are symptoms of the racialized, gendered and classed structural violence that produces poverty and inequality. This structural violence explains why more than 700 million people still experience hunger, even as the world produces enough food to feed 10 billion (3 billion more than currently live on Earth).

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In the long-term, solving hunger and malnutrition requires dismantling the systems that commodify food and perpetuate processes of exploitation — of both humans and nature. It’s possible that Bill Gates could play a powerful role in advocating for such a process — but we haven’t seen evidence of it yet. – Source

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