In World Hunger. A Reference Handbook (Patricia L. Kutzner, Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1991), the author gives a stark description of the problem of hunger in today's world:
"With more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, hundreds of millions of men, women, and children still go hungry" (p. ix).
It is not the first time in history that starvation and famine affect people all over the world. What is new is the scale of the problem, affecting well over one billion human beings. In June, 1974, in the Assessment of the World Food Situation, commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the situation was described in terms still unchanged: "The causes of inadequate nutrition are many and closely interrelated, including ecological, sanitary, and cultural constraints, but the principal cause is poverty. This in turn results from socioeconomic development patterns that in most of the poorer countries have been characterized by a high degree of concentration of power, wealth, and incomes in the hands of relatively small elites of national and foreign individuals or groups. […] The percentage of undernourished is highest in Africa, the Far East, and Latin America; the hunger distribution is highest in the Far East (in the range of 60%). Of the hungry, the majority (up to 90%) is in rural areas.
Data is collected and managed by the World Food Council. The Bellagio Declaration, Overcoming hunger in the 1990's, adopted by a group of 23 prominent development and food policy planners, development practitioners, and scientists noticed that 14 million children under the age of five years die annually from hunger related causes.
Among the organizations created to help feed the world are CARE, Food for Peace, OXFAM, Action Hunger, The Hunger Project, Save the Children, World Vision, the Heifer Project. This list does not include the many national and local organizations that feed the hungry in their respective countries and cities.
Science and Philosophy: More Questions than Answers
T.S. Elliot. Burnt Norton, in V. Four Quartets. London: Faber &
Faber, 1936.
For information on the development of science and philosophy in early civilizations, see:
Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin, Editors. Chinese Science:
Exploration of an Ancient Tradition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973.
Karl W. Butzer. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: a Study in
Cultural Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.