The world produces enough for every one of its people to be well and healthily fed. So how come that 800 million people, more than one in every eight on the planet, do not get enough food to lead normal, healthy and active lives? How come that every year 11 million children under five die from hunger or diseases related to it? And can protecting the environment help?

On average people in the richest countries consume 30-40 per cent more calories than they need, while those in the poorest nations get 10 per cent less. But the averages conceal big differences. The well-off in developing countries eat at rich-nation standards, while much of the population tries to subsist off three quarters of their requirements.

In the end it comes down to poverty not production. Poor people simply can't afford to buy the food they need - and, while they cannot do so, it will not be grown for them.

So to end hunger we have to end poverty, often called the greatest environmental evil of all. It can be done. The world's nations have adopted Millennium Development Goals that would halve destitution by 2015. We need to make sure they meet them - and then go on to eliminate the other half.

At the same time we need to address the environmental damage that is destroying the very basis of the world's food production and economic well-being - and driving the poor into even greater destitution. Billions of tonnes of the world's precious topsoils are blown or washed away each year as the land is overused. Water supplies are drying up, and being polluted, around the world. And wild species, whose genes are needed
to safeguard and increase harvests, are being driven to extinction.

Meanwhile there are heated debates about the relative merits of genetically modified foods and organic agriculture, of using pesticides and other agricultural chemicals or avoiding them, of eating meat or being vegetarian.

In the end it will be our generation that will see the food crisis played out. In our lifetimes the world will either fulfil its capacity to feed everyone properly, or will descend into ever deepening hunger and conflict.

ART BY DEIA SCHLOSBERG/PCI