TEHRAN Experts believe the world has the resources and the know-how to feed its rapidly growing population over the next century yet it is almost certain that half a billion people will go hungry and many millions will starve to death.
War, politics and economics, more than climate change, natural disasters or plagues, will be the main culprits in this uneven distribution of the world's food.
Global population is growing fast and is expected to top eight billion by 2030, stabilizing at about nine billion toward 2050.
Despite the demographic pressure, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is optimistic. It has already observed a major decrease in numbers of undernourished people in developing countries, from 960 million (or 37 percent of the global population) to 790 million (18 percent) in 1996.
Another eight million are undernourished in industrialized countries and 26 million in the countries in transition, but with cereal production growing faster globally than the world population, the numbers going hungry should keep falling.
According to the FAO's figures, the world can produce enough food for each person to have a quota of 2,720 kilocalories per capita per day, although in sub-Saharan Africa, the average is only 90 calories above the agreed critical threshold of 2,100.
Judging purely by these figures, the goal set at the 1996 World Food Summit to halve the numbers of malnourished to 400 million by 2015 would appear easily within reach.
However, as the French relief organization Action Against Hunger (ACF) warns, conflicts over land or resources such as diamonds, oil and water are likely to continue preventing the even spread of food supplies.
The prospect is of famine or controlled hunger being used as a weapon to sap populations of the strength to protest or fight.
It is also often the case that political factors ensure that vital international aid never reaches those who most need it.
"Famine is no longer a result of natural disaster. The map of great famines exactly matches that of wars," the agency says.
"In Vanni, a region in the north of Sri Lanka, the government has banned the use of fertilizer on the grounds that it could be used by the Tamil Tiger rebels to make bombs.
"That makes it hard to produce food and people have become totally dependent on United Nations food supplies which are effectively drip fed into the region under tight government supervision, keeping the population on the brink of starvation," ACF's Technical Manager Chris Daniell told AFP.
Elsewhere food is used as a political carrot, withheld in the case of Iraq until their President Saddam Hussein complies with Western demands. After 10 years of sanctions, the UN estimates 1.4 million Iraqis have died including 500,000 children.
Even without wars, the last bastions of communism have suffered from political isolation, with unknown numbers of Chinese peasants going hungry and Cubans and North Koreans on rations of 500 calories a day.
When politics and war are not directly to blame, the simple economic facts of life ensure that the rich eat well while the poorest eat tree bark.
"Poverty's the main issue. Until there is a better balance, poor people are always going to have trouble finding food," says Daniell, adding that NGOs can try their best to patch up the north-south divide but the political will to negotiate debt relief for poor countries will be the real key to redressing the balance.
Jelle Bruinsma of the FAO's global perspectives studies unit agrees that economic development to redress the present gross inequality between nations will have to come hand in hand with better world governance.
For food to reach every mouth, the FAO expert told AFP, there will have to be an end to warfare, stable macroeconomic growth providing jobs, education, health services for all, and a chance for everyone to take part in the development of their country.
Even if these conditions are met, there is growing concern that the environment will continue to deteriorate as a result of pollution, erosion and deforestation, making land, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, increasingly unproductive.
Water is another unknown factor affecting the world's capacity to feed itself, with the strain on limited fresh water reserves expected to increase by 40 percent over the next 20 years, and age-old tension between dry countries like Israel and its Arab neighbors, or between Syria and Turkey likely to be exacerbated.
Although the industrialized world is likely to be affected by environmental degradation, technical advances such as genetically modified foods and increasingly efficient farming methods make the outlook for industrial food production hopeful.
The challenge is to change political attitudes to the world's "starving sections" who, as ACF consultant Sylvie Brunel says in her book "Hunger in the World", have always been written off by the world's leaders as unavoidable losses in the evolutionary process.
And as Bruinsma says, "given its occurrence in times of surpluses and given its debilitating effect on humans, this scourge (hunger) is not just embarrassing, it is unethical and therefore deserves to be dealt with as an absolute priority."