The Scarcity Fallacy

"The Scarcity Fallacy" is an article written by a group of sociologists at Ohio State University. The article focuses on determining the cause of World Hunger. The authors' major argument is that scarcity of food is misconceived as the biggest cause of world hunger, while in reality the problem stems from other factors. The authors argue that the root cause of world hunger is poverty. In essence, they are saying that people go hungry because they cannot afford food, not because there is a scarcity of available food. To support this position they cite the "prevalence of hunger in the world's 77 low-income food deficit countries (LIFDCs)." They also mention that becaus of their lack of "foreign exchange in the international marketplace," these LIFDCs are not able to make much progress. The child hunger rate in Sub-Saharan Africa has dropped only 0.5 percent since 1990. However, the authors also stress that hunger does not exist only in LIFDCs but also in much of the industrialized world, including the United States. In these cases, the authors relate the prevalence of hunger to gender and ethnic inequality. Countries with these types of prejudices also have very high rates of hunger. The authors also blame various types of corruption for world hunger. They claim that corruption in food aid systems contibutes to the problem. For example, they state that food policy aid specialists "found no relationship between need and food aid in Ethiopia. Food aid was instead allocated to areas where organizations had stable operations." Overall, they argue that we should remove the blame for world hunger from food scarcity and place it on the various other factors that they mention.

I think that the authors make a lot of interesting points in this article. I think that when people think about world hunger, they often think that we need to find ways to produce more food in affected countries. As the authors point out, this in fact is not really the case. I think that the idea of producing more food needs to be tweaked to finding ways to to produce inexpensive, sustainable food in impoverished countries. I also think that we need to attack the other underlying issues that the authors mention such as inequality and corruption in government and food aid. We need a more rounded, complete approach in order to reduce and eventually wipe out world hunger.

Discussion Questions
1) What are the biggest underlying issues contributing to world hunger?
2) What approach should we take to solve world hunger?