Why food inflation has skyrocketed out of control
&gt; Fundamentally, the story of golden rice is a metaphor for how tech isn’t the
be-all-and-end-all for the hunger crisis, the web of bureaucrats, NGOs, and
geopolitics is enough to block any sort of disruption into the ecosystem.<p>In truth, the planet produces enough food to feed its billions, but most of this
is produced in affluent, developed nations where supply outstrips demand by a
large margin, so a third of the supply ends in landfills as food waste
(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.un.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;story&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;1048452" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.un.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;story&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;1048452</a>) instead of going where it&#x27;s
needed, particularly Africa and South America where &quot;undernourishment and severe
food insecurity are on the rise&quot; (from the UN article linked earlier).<p>This is not a bureaucratic issue, or an issue with regulations etc. Rather, the
people who make the food that feed us all don&#x27;t make it because they want to
feed us, but because they want to turn a profit. If they can&#x27;t turn a profit,
then they don&#x27;t sell the food. So it&#x27;s a matter of distribution, and economics
and not a matter of regulation, or technology.<p>As to GMOs, green hysteria aside, GMOs address the wrong problem at best, throw
fuel to the fire at worst: where there is a problem of distribution, as in the
developing world, GMOs address a non-existent problem of supply. Where
there is <i>oversupply</i>, as in the developed world, they just exacerbate it.<p>To be perfectly honest I&#x27;m not an expert in any of this and the above is my
clunky, probably half-wrong version of what&#x27;s going on, that I&#x27;ve pieced
together from my patchy knowledge of the food production business (I make
cheese, not for a living, but it has given me a narrow perspective from which I
think I can safely extrapolate, up to a point). The most alarming part of the
truth is that most people -in developed and developing nations alike- do not
understand where their food comes from, who makes it, how they make it and where
it ends up when they don&#x27;t eat it. We have centralised food production, made our
lives in cities far away from wher the food is made, built our societies around
producing all sorts of things we can&#x27;t eat- and now we&#x27;re all paying the price.
Because, what it all comes down to is that human needs food badly and there&#x27;s no
way around that.