Ending world hunger
World hunger these days it seems to be just a product of one or more of three things: genocide, civil war and socialism. Could there be a solution that might end it? It touches on a diagnosis that most establishment institutions are reluctant to state as bluntly as I do.
The world food system currently generates almost 3,000 kilocalories per person per day, which is enough to feed everyone on the planet adequately. The problem is almost entirely one of distribution and politics, not production. Conflict is not only a primary driver of hunger, but warring parties are also actively weaponizing food itself, deliberately targeting food, water and energy infrastructure and blocking food aid.
In 2024, conflict was the leading cause of hunger, impacting nearly 140 million people across 20 countries, including areas facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity in Gaza, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali. Sudan has confirmed famine conditions.
Misgovernment is a huge factor. Command economies, state monopolies on grain, collectivisation, and price controls have historically created famine from abundance (think the USSR, Mao's China, Zimbabwe, Venezuela). And genocide can be organized starvation by another name.
We need to find the one institutional lever that cascades into everything else. My Aid by Enterprise (1984) pointed to property rights in land as the foundational fix. It would need secure land title to give farmers an incentive to invest in soil, irrigation, and productivity rather than subsistence farming. It would enable them to borrow against their land (Hernando de Soto's argument in The Mystery of Capital) to buy inputs and scale up.
It would also undermine the power of local warlords and kleptocrats who control territory precisely because peasants have no legal claim to it. It would replace collective or state farm inefficiency with individual incentive.
The advances of recent decades in reducing poverty, hunger and starvation have been achieved through the application of free-market principles on a world scale.
The problem of genocide and civil war is that no property rights reform survives an army burning your fields. You cannot economic-freedom your way out of the Sudanese RSF. Here the lever is security, not markets. Mediaeval barbarians with modern weapons, kidnapping and enslaving children have to be met with force. Morality does not check power; only power checks power
Property rights and open markets work well to limit misgovernment. This is where the free-market case is strongest.
The greatest contribution would be to end agricultural protectionism in wealthy nations. Western farm subsidies (the EU's CAP and US farm bills) suppress global food prices, destroy the viability of African and South Asian agriculture, and trap poor-country farmers in dependency. Abolishing it would be genuinely radical, and would do more than any aid programme. It identifies a Western policy causing the problem rather than a charity solution alleviating it.
The harder truth is that famine today is almost always a political act. Where there is peace and even minimal rule of law, people don't starve. The single measure, if one exists, is probably something closer to liberal international order than any one economic policy. As Adam Smith himself said, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” He was not wrong.
Madsen Pirie