Hunger is not only a shortage of food

World Food Day brings familiar images of empty bowls, failed harvests and emergency distributions. They show real suffering. They can also hide the systems that decide who can afford to eat.

The latest UN food security report estimates that 645 million people faced hunger in 2025. About 2.7 billion people could not afford a healthy diet. Those figures tell us that hunger is not only about whether food exists. It is about income, prices, land, power, transport, debt and whose work is valued.

A country can produce food and still leave farmers hungry. A market can be full and still exclude people who lack cash. An export crop can earn foreign currency while local diets become more expensive. Food can cross an ocean more easily than a small producer can reach a nearby buyer.

This is especially visible in the lives of rural women. They farm, process food, manage households and hold communities together, yet often face weaker access to land, finance, technology, markets and public decisions. Celebrating their contribution without confronting those barriers is sentiment, not policy.

Emergency food assistance is essential when lives are at risk. It should not become a substitute for asking why the emergency keeps returning. If the same communities require repeated rescue while the structure around them remains unchanged, the response is managing hunger rather than ending it.

Benny Dembitzer has argued for decades that development must begin with what people can sustain, control and adapt. That means listening before designing, strengthening local food systems and treating farmers as economic actors rather than programme beneficiaries.

The practical questions are not glamorous. Can producers store a harvest instead of selling immediately at the lowest price?

Can they reach markets without losing most of the value to transport and intermediaries?

Can women own land and access finance? Can local institutions continue after the project team leaves?

World Food Day should not be a yearly performance of concern. It should be an audit.

Which policies made healthy food more affordable?

Which investments increased local control? Which projects survived after the grant?

Which claims were supported by evidence from the people expected to benefit?

Hunger is not inevitable. But ending it requires more than moving food towards poverty.

It requires changing the conditions that keep food, income and power apart.

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