The 17th annual World Food Day teleconference, Poverty and Hunger: the Tragic Link, will feature the observations of Professor Amartya Sen, the celebrated Indian scholar who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics for his study of poverty and hunger issues.

The world hunger tragedy is more easily recounted than explained. Over the past few decades the world has produced enough food to provide an adequate diet for every person on earth, but millions upon millions of people are too poor to buy or produce enough food for a safe, adequate diet. While some progress has been made to close the diet gap, millions of people, at a time of unprecedented wealth and technological advance, remain chronically undernourished.

Further, the gap is widening between the have-mores and the have-lesses in many parts of the world. The issue of worldwide poverty-driven hunger is especially important in light of new inter- national economic and social standards under the rubric of globalization. With the addition of Professor Sen's perspectives we will review basic hunger and poverty issues and possible solutions.

First, where do we stand today? The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), according to its latest world survey, estimates that 790 million people are chronically undernourished in the developing world. Another 34 million people in the industrialized world, mostly in the former Soviet Union, are said to suffer a similar fate. And millions of marginalized people in poor areas live in constant fear of natural disasters, wars and sudden economic dislocations that could cause famine.

Amartya Sen; / have argued elsewhere that hunger is best seen in terms of failure of people's entitlements, that is their failure to establish command over an adequate amount of food and other necessities. A person may have little means of commanding food if he or she has no job, no other sources of income, no social security. The hunger that will result can coexist with a plentiful supply of food in the economy and the markets.

Food production is now slowing while the world anticipates another 3 billion people to feed from now until 2050. From 1984 and 1998, for instance, grain production fell off by 7 percent. Farmers will need to produce 40 percent more grain by 2020, predicts FAO, to meet the needs of the growing population and the unmet needs of millions of people today.

Prospects for the future, however, are not sanguine. The 1996 World Food Summit in Rome set a target, considered unconscionably low by many delegates, of reducing the number of hungry people by 20 million per year. Since 1996 the number of hungry people has fallen by only 8 mil- lion annually. At today's pace of reduction, millions upon millions will remain hungry for the fore- seeable future.

One third of the population of the developing world, or nearly 1.3 billion people, exist on less than one dollar per day. One World Bank report estimates that 1.9 billion people may be under the dollar-a-day line by 2015. About two thirds of all poor people are women. In the industrialized world 100 million people live below the poverty line, more than 5 million are homeless and 40 mil- lion are jobless. In its latest World Employment Report the International Labor Organization estimated that out of a world labor force of 3 billion people, 25 to 30 percent are underemployed and roughly 150 million workers are completely without work.

In 80-odd extremely poor developing countries and in poverty pockets in industrial countries people are poor in the fullest sense - devoid of good health, education, access to credit, arable land, safety nets and any real opportunity to find employment that could change their lot. About two thirds of poor people are still found in rural areas of development countries.

In recent years two developmental strategies have emerged. Taken to their extremes, one calls for investments that create wealth and technological advances that will eventually reach the poor; the other is based on direct investments in people's social and economic betterment, thereby empowering the individuals to become full and successful members of society.

The end of the Cold War opened the way for capitalists to globalize the world economy. A capitalist regime of increased free trade, private investments, structural adjustment of national economies, mechanization, new technologies and downsized traditional work forces created high tech employment and economic opportunities.

Also, it reduced official foreign aid and national safety nets on the basis that the private sector would become the benefactor for people's needs. The creation of wealth would eventually reach all people, free-enterprise advocates argued, by instituting a global capitalist strategy, especially if accompanied by civil liberties. Implicit is the though that the most poor people in most cases will have to wait until nations make structural adjustments and capitalize before wide-scale benefits reach them.

For the social activists, the end of the Cold War released pent-up concerns about how the world was addressing social problems. A series of high-level international meetings - on the environment, population, poverty, women's issues, food security - raised new perspectives on the state of the world. Fresh focus was put on the lot and hopes of the disadvantaged and such issues as the environment, social equity, entitlements, debt relief for poor countries, women's rights, concerns about the new technologies and fair trade openly arrived at.

In the new era of global reach and technological advances, clearly humankind has the capacity to successfully address hunger and poverty, if the right strategies are applied. Amartya Sen argues "that not only is the problem of world hunger decisively solvable, but that one of the greatest barriers to achieving that solution lies in the widely shared skepticism about such a solution, the defeatist and baseless fear that we shall not succeed against so big a challenge....Defeatism often masquerades as hard-headed realism." 

Professor Sen's basic tenet is that starving people should be entitled to food but presently they don't have the ability to "command" food because of poverty, lack of education, undemocratic regimes, discrimination and other social and economic disadvantages. What is your response to the following four assertions by Professor Sen:

• "Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat."
• "What makes widespread hunger even more of a tragedy is the way that we have come to accept and tolerate it as an integral part of the modern world as if it is a tragedy that is essentially unpreventable."
• "For the bulk of humanity about the only substantial asset that a person has is his or her ability to work, i.e. labor power."
• "It is not surprising that no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a function- ing democracy...."