After two centuries of industrial revolution and half a century of aid to development, under-industrialization and poverty continue to prevail in more than half the world. After a quarter of a century of freedom of movement of capital and goods, if not people, regional financial crises continue to erupt in ever-closer succession. And after a century of agricultural revolution, half a century of green revolution and food aid, under-resourcing, extreme poverty and dietary inadequacies (undernutrition and nutrient deficiencies) continue to be the daily lot of most of the world's small farmers and rural poor.
It would therefore seem difficult to view the poorest regions of the world merely as residual pockets of underdevelopment that have been bypassed by advancing modernization. And if we wish to tackle and eliminate the root causes of these ills instead of constantly seeking to mitigate their fiercest symptoms by providing targeted aid that is always insufficient, then we must try to identify the organizational and operational features of the world economy that maintain, replicate, produce and sometimes even heighten the situation of extreme poverty and undernutrition. That is the objective of this paper.
We begin by briefly analysing how the present state of food and agriculture in the world is untenable and by summarizing the possible reasons for such a situation, before looking more closely at the following issues:
