Víctor M. Toledo
C
We have indicated it in previous deliveries, the figures on hunger and bad nutrition according to FAO leave 700 to 800 million people hungry and more than one billion with problems of obesity and overweight (https://www.fao.org/publications/fao-flagship-publications/the-state-of-food-secury-and-nutrition-in-the-world/en)
Today, however, we have a new statistics, the World Food Crisis report published annually with information from the Food Security Information Network, both initiatives promoted by the European Union.
Among the conclusions of that report published in May 2025, the following stand out: in 2024, more than 295 million people from 53 countries and territories suffered acute hunger, which represents an increase of almost 14 million compared to 2023, while the number of people who faced catastrophic hunghttps://www.fightfoodcrises.net/who-we-are).
Despite proposing Sustainable solutions
none of these reports from international institutions address in detail the production, circulation, transformation and consumption systems, food metabolism, that is, they are acritic and superficial.
We consider that there are four major issues that explain the global food crisis. The first has to do with agrarian justice. Although there are studies of national scale, the only global resource is the one provided by FAO decade after decade since 1950. Its latest report is from 2014 and analyzes 570 million productive units. Fortunately, as we point out in an earlier essay, there is a detailed analysis of the agricultural structure at the global scale made by Sarah K. Lowder and colleagues (2016, 2019 and 2021), which provides data on 11 property sizes from one to a thousand hectares.
The panorama that reveals that study is that of a tremendous agrarian injustice: while the traditional producers
With one at 20 hectares they represent 96 percent and only hold 26 percent of the property, the remaining 4 percent, which are the medium and large Modern owners
(most with between 100 and more than a thousand hectares), have 74 percent of agricultural and livestock lands.
The second factor is the deformation of the global food system, a topic that is rarely taken into account. According to Richtie and Roser (2019), of the total agricultural surface of the world, 80 percent are aimed at producing meat and dairy products and only 20 percent is for plant foods, of which only one third are fresh foods for human consumption.
The third factor is related to world food trade, which has increased considerably in the last 40 years. This has caused excessive use of energy, the increase in the use of agrochemicals to preserve food while traveling, and its consequent impact on global warming (climate crisis).
Finally the last theme is that of energy costs. Since it is impossible to produce food in properties greater than 20 hectares without the use of machinery and industrial supplies (synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, tractors, electrical implements, seeds and fodder) the amounts of energy invested in the three quarters of the food production units is huge. To the above we must add the negative balances between inverted energy and energy obtained in the agribusiness systems, and the projected exhaustion in two or three decades of fossil fuels (first oil and gas later).
