World Food Day, which was initiated by the United Nations along with the founding of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945, is commemorated annually on 16 October as a reminder that there is extensive food insecurity and malnourishment in many countries of the world. According to available reports provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), almost one in ten people globally are undernourished, one in five children under the age of five are stunted as a result of inadequate nutrition, and more than 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

The FAO has been repeatedly saying over these years that governments should re-evaluate their support for agriculture to help improve the sustainable production of more nutritious foods. The FAO also says projections suggest that 670 million people will still be facing hunger in 2030. That’s 8% of the world’s population.

Since 1981, World Food Day has adopted a different theme each year in order to highlight areas needed for action and provide a common focus. However, what is totally being ignored is the main cause of poverty and hunger in most of the countries that suffer from these phenomena.

As a matter of fact, World Food Day was initiated to encourage governments, businesses, the public, and the media to join hands and contribute towards the eradication of hunger and malnutrition so that no one would suffer from phenomena any longer.

It is also said that one of the causes of hunger in the world is war and conflict but what is being ignored is that the United States of America and several European countries have been and are the root cause of the initiation and continuation of wars and civil wars around the world and their main objective is to economically loot other countries by selling them their outdated arms and ammunitions. The proof for this claim includes the Vietnam War, Saddam’s Imposed War on Iran, civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.

Let us also not forget that almost all the countries in which people suffer from the shortage of food, hunger, and malnutrition have, at one point of time in the past four centuries, been subjected to colonialism, and their national wealth was looted by such colonialist countries as France, England, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and…

Western Colonialism and Poverty in the Third World

In its political sense, colonialism means the political, military, economic, or cultural dominance of a powerful nation over a weak nation. By the same token, the word ‘exploitation’ refers to taking over mines, reservoirs, products, and property of the weak by the strong.

The trend of colonialism started in the 16th century and the empires of Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, France, and Germany were great colonialists who gradually conquered a number of Third World societies in Asia, Africa, and Southern America and ruled over them for many years. The most important objectives of colonizers included exploiting the natural resources of the colonized countries and destroying their production capabilities with the aim of making them dependent on the colonial powers. In other words, colonialist countries used various methods to achieve their goals and subjugate other regions of the world as a result of which a large number of people in the previously colonized countries now suffer from poverty and hunger.

Following the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, there was a change in the way the colonialists treated the Third World countries in the sense that besides continuing to exploit their natural resources they made them the target markets for industrial goods produced in the West. In other words, the poverty that most underdeveloped countries are currently facing is largely the result of years of exploitation by the West.

Thus, even though the Western developed countries that talk about humanitarian support introduce poverty and hunger in the world as a social phenomenon (and not an economic one?!) and attribute the cause to the wrong domestic policies of the least developed and developing countries the reality is that most of the less developed and developing countries were at some point in their history under the colonial rule of today’s developed countries and are also currently suffering from unfair relations in the global economic order. Therefore, it would not be wrong to say that the claims of developed countries regarding the alleviation of poverty in the less developed and developing world do not seem realistic and honest.

In other words, the intentions and hidden agenda of Western developed countries with regard to their claims made in the international organizations for being concerned about poverty and hunger in the world can be summarized as follows:

1- Exonerating themselves from the historical responsibility of being the cause of poverty and hunger in the world and, as a result, avoid or at least reduce development aid;

2- Making development aid conditional (removing non-aligned countries from the list of recipients of development aid);

3- Reducing the level of cooperation and development aid to that of charitable and humanitarian aid;

4- Transferring part of their historical responsibility to rich developing countries such as oil exporters;

5- Reducing the development activities of international organizations and directing the limited resources of these organizations towards the priorities of Western countries;

6- Creating obstacles for the activities of international organizations in fostering balance between development and security;

7- Ignoring the facts related to economic growth and social development;

8- Ignoring the requirements and demands of less developed and developing countries.