TWN Info Service on Sustainable Agriculture
28 August 2025
Third World Network
www.twn.my
Dear Friends and Colleagues
The Real Solution to Hunger – A World That Feeds Itself
The frame for “feeding the world” through the discourse of increased agricultural productivity results in remedies that rely on greater output, cheaper crops, and cheaper food. Increasing production can however lead to increased hunger by exacerbating rural poverty. Moreover, the expansion of capital-intensive monocultures has degraded soils, polluted waterways and oceans, generated massive carbon emissions from land-clearing and fossil fuel use, and destroyed wildlife through habitat disruption.
The deeper truth is that “feeding the world” is not actually about combatting global hunger. A recent journal article, The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World”, provides a historical, empirical, and conceptual critique. It argues that the productivist framework that underwrites the myth both enables capitalist extraction and undermines its purported aim of addressing hunger. The foundations of this discourse has had real-world consequences: nothing less than remaking the purpose of producing food into securing profits instead of nourishing people and sustaining landscapes.
The enduring fantasy of feeding the world weaponizes global hunger to silence the voices of agrarian change and suppresses the real alternative: “a world that feeds itself.” Approaches like agroecology envisage a broader agrarian transition to a food system based on local sovereignty, where smallholders globally regain access to their means of production. Agroecological techniques offer the power of ecology, rather than capital, to give back autonomy to farmers. Envision a world where hunger is addressed through land relations of care instead of domination. These are the relationships that colonialism directly exploits and that a transformative story and politics of food systems must fight to sustain.
With best wishes,
Third World Network