Journalist: You have just published an essay entitled Massive Destruction: Geopolitics of Hunger. You explore many causes of hunger: Capitalism, speculation, “agricultural dumping”, biofuels and others, but you don’t mention the Demographics. So, Jean Ziegler, is it not a concern to you, that there’s 7 billion of us, pretty soon 9 billion? Isn’t this not a problem in terms of feeding everyone?
Jean Ziegler: It is not a problem at all. The fact that we are 7 billion is an absolutely wonderful thing. We all know kids in our life; kids are a fantastic miracle. Hunger in the world today is a scandal; it assassinates those children. […] you know in my line of work I attend a lot of conferences, and give talks about world hunger. It often happens that someone in the back of the room stands up and says: “if Africans made less babies, they’d be less hungry”; total idiocy! Even if the population stabilizes by 2050, or drops, the collective murder remains! Unless democratic control over food distribution is addressed.
2 things: (1) Regardless of what you think of “overpopulation”, it is not a cause of hunger, current agricultural output can sufficiently feed and nourish 12 billion ppl. There isn’t a problem of production, there’s a problem of access. (2) The fucking middle classes of the fucking industrialized nations, should stop fucking treating poor ppl’s kids as numbers and theirs as angels.
