AHORA QUE se suele citar a la carestía de los alimentos como una de los factores detrás de las revueltas de Oriente Medio, la pregunta es pertinente: ¿hay suficiente comida en el mundo?

IN HIS 1981 essay, “Poverty and Famines”, Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, argued that the 1943 Bengal famine, in which 3m people died, was not caused by any exceptional fall in the harvest and pointed out that food was still being exported from the state while millions perished. He concluded that the main reason for famines is not a shortage of basic food. Other factors—wages, distribution, even democracy—matter more.

In 1996 the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimated that the world was producing enough food to provide every man, woman and child with 2,700 calories a day, several hundred more than most adults are thought to need (around 2,100 a day). The Lancet, a medical journal, reckons people need no more than 90 grammes of meat a day. On average they eat more than that now. As Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says, “we live in a world that is capable of feeding every person that lives on the planet.”

Indeed, the world produces more than just enough to go round. Allowing for all the food that could be eaten but is turned into biofuels, and the staggering amounts wasted on the way, farmers are already producing much more than is required—more than twice the minimum nutritional needs by some measures. If there is a food problem, it does not look like a technical or biological one.

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