Inequality, hunger, and food production

Abstract

This issue of Revista Katálysis presents a timely, pertinent, and absolutely necessary topic. When approaching inequality and hunger as phenomena inherent to the development of capitalism, we investigate the singularities of the current Brazilian context, identifying its historical determinations in the scope of the dialectical and contradictory relationship between the growth of wealth and pauperization. These processes became more acute with the capitalist crisis and, within it, the health crisis, overthrowing civilizational achievements.We look to the synthesis carried out by Karl Polanyi in his book, A Grande Transformação [The Great Transformation] (Polanyi, 2021, p.172), which identifies the emergence of poverty and hunger as phenomena of the sixteenth century -therefore, in force for five centuries -and that by force of the class struggle, became the object of state intervention, through the constitution of social rights and social security measures in the twentieth century.Polanyi refers to the UK, the heart of the classical industrial revolution. For him, the emergence of modern poverty in the sixteenth century is directly related to the end of feudalism. This process transformed a population without land and means of survival "into a class of free laborers [that] was the combined result of the fierce persecution of vagrancy and the fostering of domestic industry which was powerfully helped by a continuous expansion of foreign trade" (Polanyi, 2021, p. 172).Originally the object of bloodthirsty laws (Marx, 2017, p. 805-813) and other similar measures, such as the Poor Law and the Speenhamland Law (Polanyi, 2021, p. 139-170), the fencing off and expropriation of land determined the emergence of what Polanyi conceptualized as new poverty, in the context of the new society that emerged: capitalism.From the seventeenth century onward, pauperism and its main expression, hunger, became the object of theorization of the most diverse thinkers of the time (liberals, socialists, naturalists, and conservatives). Smith, Townsend, Owen, Ricardo, Proudhon, and Burke, among others (Polanyi,, sometimes treated poverty from the perspective of assistance to the poor or addressed it by discussing its causes. Although showing divergent points of view, these thinkers defended that the poor should work, considering that hunger would be eliminated with the use of cheap labor, convinced that "an appropriate organization of the labor of the unemployed must produce a surplus" (Polanyi, 2021, p. 179), which occurred in the twentieth century.Thinkers such as Smith, Ricardo, and Burke (Polanyi, 2021, p. 181-201), extensively discussed the relationship between labor, the free market, and the meaning of poverty in the context of liberal and

The Inter-Relationship between Climate Change, Inequality, Poverty and Food Security in Africa: A Bibliometric Review and Content Analysis Approach

“…The puzzling fact is that there remains a dearth of research on the linkages between inequality, food security, and climate change. Without consideration of climate change impacts, the authors of [48,49] showed that inequality and population growth lead to increased levels of hunger. As such, policies that are aimed at reducing inequality and improving food security and nutritional outcomes are a social and economic imperative.…”

Re-Engineering Financial Resources through Development Finance in Africa: A Review of the Literature

“…In fact, most studies erroneously conclude that the private sector (especially financial institutions) has a monopoly on engineering financial innovativeness. This thinking is not only shallow, but births this study's financial re-engineering (F-Re) conceptualization axiom [8][9][10][11][12][13]. Thus, to re-engineer is to rejig the foundational principles underlying a developmental process.…”