While the quest to solve world hunger permanently may be considered a pipe dream, there are things individuals and governments can do to address the current world hunger problem. Because the world has a finite amount of farmable land and a seemingly infinite new supply of inhabitants who will need to eat, solving world hunger often seems like an insurmountable challenge. However, new food technologies and improvements in the political climate can go a long way towards ending mass starvation and famine.
One way to eliminate world hunger would be to develop new ways to grow food on a worldwide scale. Many people today live in areas of the world which were never capable of producing sufficient food crops or are nearly impossible to irrigate. Some arable land remains underused because it is under the control of rogue governments or is currently too inaccessible for farming. By developing new methods for maximizing crop growth on substandard land, inhabitants can grow enough food to meet their needs.
Another way to solve world hunger would be to improve the food distribution infrastructure. A number of first-world countries have massive surpluses of staple crops and grains, especially wheat, rice and corn. These stockpiles are replenished regularly through subsidized farming. The problem is that poorer countries which could benefit from these surpluses are often controlled by hostile governments which either refuse offers of food or essentially hold the food hostage at vital distribution points.
If relief agencies and government services had better means for proper food distribution, the delivery of surplus food to famine-stricken areas would go a long way towards solving the problem of world hunger. Encouraging populations of poorer countries to move closer to sustainable sources of food would also solve world hunger, but this has proven to be difficult for sociological, religious and logistical reasons.
Creating new farming technologies could also help solve world hunger. If food can be grown in large hydroponic farms, for example, there would less strain put on traditional soil farms. Farmers in poorer countries could be trained to rotate their crops in order to keep the soil healthier season after season. Better seeds with higher yields or resistance to insect or weather damage could help farmers grow more usable crops on the same amount of arable land. A renewed emphasis on agriculture as a career could also encourage more young people to start their own farms and produce more food for others.
The problem of world hunger is always going to remain as long as the world population continues to be substantially higher than the amount of food that farmers are able to produce. Large scale efforts to control population growth have proven to be extremely unpopular and nearly impossible to enforce. Many organizations such as UNICEF have dedicated themselves to the eradication of world hunger and famine, but the only way to eliminate hunger permanently would involve the unified efforts of thousands of agricultural experts and significant amounts of money and material support from hundreds of world leaders.
