The Secretary General of the United Nations has described the coming famine around the world as a “hurricane of hunger.” Many experts are saying that hundreds of millions of people could be in serious danger of dying. If even just 60 million of these people were to die, this would be the worst famine in human history.

To solve a problem efficiently, we must first understand its cause. First of all, we must realize that this disaster has been brewing for at least the last 20 years. Before the year 2010, famines in Africa rarely affected more than 10 million people. By 2017, when the U.N. declared a famine in Africa and Yemen, 20 million people were in serious need of food aid, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). By 2020, that number had risen to 40 million in Africa alone. This last year, it rose to 60 million people. However, this monstrous number of people was almost totally fed by the World Food Programme, so few people elsewhere realized what was happening. Nevertheless, I could see, for months before the harvest each year in Tanzania and Malawi, growing lines of people pushing bicycles along village roads, each with a 100 pound sack or two of donated grain on the back of the bike.

In other words, this “hurricane of hunger” was not caused by the war in Ukraine or the sanctions put in place to try to end that war. Furthermore, while food aid can prevent some people from dying in the short term, it is not a solution to the problem. It may feed some people now, but it only masks the problem, allowing it to grow larger and larger. Food aid is not a cure; it is only a short-term band-aid.

The fact that this “hurricane of hunger” has been growing worse and worse for over two decades is, in fact, consistent with what is most widely believed to be causing the crippling droughts across the developing world: that of climate change. But we have convincing evidence that climate change is only about 20 percent of the problem. The actual rainfall across Africa has not decreased by more than 5 percent. Such a small decrease could not be causing the devastating droughts that are now occurring every second or third year across most of sub-Saharan Africa.

But even more convincingly, we have been working the last decade on a technology called green manure/cover crops (gm/ccs).

Read the full article about the global hunger crisis by Roland Bunch at Food Tank.