A recent Radio Netherlands Worldwide article connects food speculation and land-grabs as significant drivers of world hunger. Dr. Dirk Bezemer, Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, says, “The role of the West [in solving the food crisis] will diminish in the long term, but in the meantime Western countries can help by curbing food speculation” and ending land-grabbing.
Bezemer sees food and land sovereignty as the solution to hunger in African countries, but, for this to become a reality, [African] governments must devote their full resources to developing domestic agriculture, which has been neglected since the 1980s.
Read the full article here.