15. Josue de Castro: World Federation to End World Hunger

Learn how this Brazilian activist struggled to turn the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) into a global body that would end world hunger. And how, like his colleague John Boyd Orr, he realised that only a supra-national world government could achieve that.

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
This lecture looks at the life and thought of anotherimportant world federalist thinker, Josue de Castro, from Brazil.
De Castro was a doctor, scholar,  activist and parliamentarian,who dedicated his life to addressing the problem of hunger.
In the early 1950s he was the Chair of the Council of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation,  the FAO,

(00:34):
but came to believe that only a radical re-organising of the international system
into a more just and democratic global ordercould ever truly solve the problem of hunger in the world.
De Castro was born in 1908 in the town of Recife, the main town of Pernambuco,
which is one of the 26 states that comprise today’s federation of Brazil.

(00:58):
That area in the North-East of Brazil was one of the poorest areas in the country
and many of its inhabitants were descendants of African slavesthat had been trafficked during the colonial Atlantic slave trade.
De Castro himself was born to a middle-class familyof mixed European and indigenous Indian descent,
and while relatively wealthy in the local context, he grew upvery sensitive to the issues of race and of poverty, and ultimately of hunger.

(01:26):
His father was a small cattle farmer,  selling milk to the local markets,and his mother was a teacher in the local school.
They separated when Josue was just four years old and he was mainly brought up by his mother.
He used to play in the street with the poor,barefoot neighbourhood boys, and through them he learnt
about the chronic, ever-persistent hungerthat was present all around him.

(01:48):
He was a sensitive boy and suffering caused by hungermade a big impression on him.
He later wrote, “It was not at the Sorbonne or at any other savant university that I learned of the phenomenon of hunger.
It appeared spontaneously to me…. in the miserable neighbourhoodsof Recife … This was my Sorbonne: the mud of the Recife mangroves”.

(02:10):
De Castro was a good student and after high school he went to Rioto study Medicine at the University of Brazil,
where he graduated in 1929 as a physician.In 1932, when he was only 24, he returned to Recife
to take up a position as a Professor of Physiology at the City’s Medical School.
Soon, however, he became interested in more interdisciplinary approachesto addressing the problems of poverty and hunger.

(02:36):
And in the following years he went on to becomea Professor of Anthropology at the Federal District University
and then a professor of Human Geography at the University of Brazil,where he created the Nutrition Institute and served as its first Director.
During the 1930s and early 40s his academic workfocused on the issues of hunger and poverty in northeast Brazil.

(02:57):
He spent time talking to people living in poor communitiesand sought to understand
both the profound impacts of hunger and the social and political factors that enabled and created it.
Going against the deterministic approaches that were dominant at the time,
such as Malthus’s idea that hunger was simply a result of over-population,

(03:18):
he developed a much more nuanced and contextualised analysis of the causes of hunger in northeast Brazil,
and showed how hunger was a direct resultof political decisions and social policies.
Alongside his academic studies, which quickly made himone of Brazil’s leading experts on food and food policy,
de Castro sought also to engage in practical, political activismto reduce the appalling hunger that he saw all around him.

(03:46):
In 1933 he chaired a Municipal Committee in Recife, which carried outthe first major survey of poor people to be conducted in Brazil.
In 1935 he became involved in the Campaign for a Minimum Wage, and later he co-founded and directed
major associations that studiedand campaigned for food security.

(04:06):
in these years he was also invited by the governmentsof several other countries to study their own problems of food and nutrition,
including Argentina, the United States,the Dominican Republic, Mexico and France.
In 1946 he published his first major book, 'The Geography of Hunger'.
This was a ground-breaking work which brought togetherhis research about the political aspect of hunger in Brazil.

(04:32):
He argued that the terrible povertyand the lack of access to clean drinking water and adequate food
that affected most of the Brazilian population, was not inevitable,
but the result of a particular economic model that perpetuated shocking poverty and inequality.
His book had a huge impact in Brazil and triggered a nation-wide debateon the problem of hunger and poverty as a social and political issue.

(04:57):
Based on his diagnosis of the hunger problem,  the first collectivefood services were created, the School Meals Program was established,
and programs through which employers paid subsidies for workers’ meals were created.
The book also led to the growth of his international reputationas a world-leading expert on hunger, food and nutrition

(05:18):
and to the beginning of his involvement with the newly establishedUnited Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the FAO.
In 1947 he became a member of the FAO’sStanding Advisory Committee on Nutrition,
and began to take partin high-level international discussionsabout world food policy and how to eliminate hunger.

(05:38):
His experiences at the FAO led him to turn his attention to the situation of world hunger,
and in 1951, at the age of 43, he published his next book, 'The Geopolitics of Hunger'.
This book was a wide-ranging scholarly tour-de-force, looking at the causes and consequences of hunger across the world as a whole,

(05:59):
and suggesting radical new paths towards a world with no hunger.
The book was soon translated intosome 25 languages and became widely read around the world,
setting de Castro as an international expert on the issues of food and nutrition.
The first section of the book set out a detailed description of what hunger is.
He looked at not just total hunger,which is a lack of sufficient food in general,

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but also specific types of ‘silent hungers’, where there aredeficiencies in specific nutrients or vitamins in the food that people do have.
In each case he explained how the particular hungerinfluenced human physiology
and had profound impacts on human functioning, physically, cognitively and socially.
He described how hunger led not only to starvation and death,

(06:47):
but on the way also caused physical stunting,learning difficulties and many other miseries which afflicted the hungry.
At this time, around two thirds of the world’s population,mainly the black and brown people living in the colonies,
were suffering from long-term, chronic hunger, and de Castro indignantly argued that there was a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about this huge world problem.

(07:12):
The second section looked at the causes of world hunger.
It consisted of several detailed case studies from different parts of the world, including India, China, Africa, Europe and the South of the USA,
in which he traced historically the underlyingsocial, political, ecological and economic forces,
that led in each situation to collective hunger and starvation.

(07:36):
These detailed studies often yielded surprising resultsthat went against the conventional wisdom of the time.
For example, he convincingly showed that the African dietused to be far more varied than it had become in the 1940s,
and he provided detailed data about African tribes who had shown no signsof malnutrition when they had lived according to their traditional way of life,

(07:59):
but, and I quote, “as soon as they go work in the factoriesand take up a diet under European influence,
typical deficiency diseases …begin to destroy large numbers of them”.
In another example, he showed that the risingof vitamin B deficiency in Amazonia during the rubber boom,
was due to the shift in eating habits from traditional fare to canned European food.

(08:23):
Putting these and many other detailed case studies together,he argued that the high rates of hunger in Africa, Asia and Latin America
were not due to general backwardnessor over-population, as was commonly thought,
but were rather the direct resultsof European colonialism and imperialism.
European colonialism had destroyed many well-integrated and flourishing societies and re-organised the global arrangement of productive agriculture

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in a way that suited European interests.
It had created large landholdings single crop cultivation,
diverted land use from food production for local consumptionto the production of cash crops for export,
and led to massive exhaustion of the soiland ecological destruction in the search for quick profits.
The result was that food was systemically sucked outof the colonies and sent to the colonising powers.

(09:19):
While the colonisers enjoyed a rich and diverse food intake for a low price,
the majority of the world’s population in the colonies suffered hunger, starvation and misery.
In making this argument, he was seekingto refute the idea promoted by Western scholars, such as Malthus,
that hunger was simply the result of over-population.

(09:41):
Instead he put forward a very detailed and convincing analysisthat showed that in fact it was the other way around,
that over-population was the result of hunger. Yes!He brought statistical evidence to show that
in a wide range of countries there was an inverse correlationbetween the consumption of proteins and birth rates,

(10:03):
ie, the less protein in the diet, then the higher the birth rate.
And he also drew  on evidence from laboratory experiments with animals that showed the same thing.
He even pointed to a possible biological mechanism to explain that pattern,
arguing that protein deficiency leads to a reductionin the liver’s ability to inactivate estrogens in the body,

(10:25):
and that the subsequent rise in estrogensincreased women’s fertility, leading to more babies.
But most importantly, this was not just an academic argument.
How scientists understood the cause of world hungerwould shape the types of solutions that they offered for it.
The Malthusian notion that world hunger was caused by over-population

(10:48):
implied that the blame for world hungerrests on the poor people themselves,
and that therefore the solution is to reduce fertility and child-birthin the colonies or the so-called ‘developing’ countries.
But if, as de Castro argued, world hunger was actually a social and political creation,
caused by the unjust pattern of organisation of world food productionand distribution,  then the solution would be to change that pattern.

(11:16):
De Castro brought convincing data to show that the foodproduced in the world was more than enough to feed everyone.
The problem, however, was not  a shortage of foodbut the extremely unequal distribution of that food.
And this led to the third and final section of the book,
where he began to develop proposalsfor solutions to the world’s hunger problem.

(11:38):
While he looked to new technologies to improve levels of food production,
his central argument was that the most important thingwas to change the structure of the world system.
Most basically, this would require, in his words, “a radical transformation in the social structure of the world”
and “full and harmonious integration, ….at the same time economic, technical, social, and human,

(12:03):
permitting the enhancement of resources and possibilities.”
He argued that the ‘geography of hunger’ could be transformed into a ‘geography of abundance’
if colonialism would end and there would be “the transition from a colonial economy to a co-operative world economy based on mutual interests”.
In contrast to international development theory,which was emerging at the time

(12:28):
and which called for all sorts of state-led projects of industrialisationunder the benign oversight of the Western powers,
de Castro instead argued that the contemporary poverty, hunger and inequality
was a direct result of under-developmentof the colonies  that was caused by the West.
Instead of ‘development’,  he called for“the collective emancipation of humanity”

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such that all the areas of the world would be integrated intoone global system, based on cooperation, mutuality and reciprocity.
In this way, global food reserves could be spread more evenly over the planet, with food surpluses from rich areas being transferred to poorer areas,
such that everyone would have a healthy and balanced dietand no-one would suffer the misery of hunger.

(13:17):
He thus argued against  “agricultural nationalism”and the competition between states for power, wealth and food,
and instead he called for a more humane economy, one that servedto benefit all of humanity, rather than amass never-ending wealth for the few.
And finally, he believed that hunger was one of the main causes of war,

(13:38):
and thus he also saw that evening outthe world’s food consumption and eliminating hunger
was crucial to reach world peace,which was a major concern at the time in the aftermath of World War Two.
But while many peace activists in the Westfocused on disarmament as the way to world peace,
de Castro called for a deeper look at the root causes of war,

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and argued that creating a more equal world where no-one was hungry
would remove many of the key drivers for war,and thus be a far more effective way to bring about peace.
As he wrote, “We will never achieve peace in a world divided intoabundance and deprivation, luxury and poverty, waste and hunger.

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We must put an end to this social inequality.”
This book, on top of his years of academic study and activism,
solidified de Castro’s reputation as a world-leading experton food and nutrition and led to his election, in 1952,
as the Chair of the Councilof the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. the FAO.

(14:46):
De Castro’s involvement with the FAOhad already started five years earlier in 1947,
when he became a member of the FAO’s Standing Advisory Committee on Nutrition,
and indeed much from that experiencehad fed directly into the analysis of his book.
It is worth taking a step back here,and having a look at what happened in these earlier years, in the FAO.

(15:09):
At that time, the FAO had been under the leadershipof its first Director-General, John Boyd Orr,
a Scottish physiologist and international food policy expert
who had been working since the 1930s on hunger and nutrition in the UK and worldwide through the League of Nations.
In the 1920s and 30s, in the aftermath of World War One,food supply had been a very serious issue,

(15:34):
and there had been a growing sense that the food system needed to be managed globally.
Arthur Salter, who had been Head of the Economic Departmentof the League of Nations at the time,
had even proposed the creation of an International Food Board,
which would prevent price fluctuations on world marketsthrough the purchase and sale of food commodities

(15:55):
and would balance regional deficits in distribution via prompt aid shipments.
Boyd Orr had been much influenced by these ideas,
and when he took up the leadershipof the new FAO in the years after the Second World War,
when again hunger and starvation were becoming massive global problems, affecting not only the colonies but also Europe,

(16:16):
he drew on these ideas and developed them further
as he sought to make the FAO into an organisationthat would abolish hunger, for everyone, everywhere.
In 1946 he developed a proposal to establish a World Food Board,
which would have the power to stabilize the prices of agricultural commodities on world markets,

(16:36):
to establish a world food reserve adequate for any emergencythat might arise through crop failure in any part of the world,
and to fund the distribution of agricultural surplusfrom producers to those countries urgently in need.
According to Boyd Orr, the World Food Board would dampen social unrest, stabilize world prices,

(16:56):
double the food supply, and eliminate world hunger.
The activities of the proposed World Food Board would meanthat food deficient countries would receive low-priced food,
relatively high and stable prices for agricultural goods that they export,
and the necessary credit to expand food production for both internal and external consumption.

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The overall result would be a global managementof the food supply, and thus the abolition of hunger.
Boyd Orr's proposal had received enthusiastic supportfrom the scientists and experts involved in the FAO, including de Castro,
but when it was presented to the member states at the first FAO Conferencein Copenhagen in 1946, the reception was much more mixed.

(17:41):
While several governments  in Europe, Asiaand Latin America expressed support,
the governments of the USA and Britain were strongly against.
Britain did not want to lose its cheap food imports, and the USA preferred to build its political and economic dominance in the world economy
through bilateral agreements, conditional aid and power politics.

(18:03):
Boyd Orr spent the next three years trying to rally support for his plan.
But Britain and the US consistently blocked it, until it became clear that it would not pass.
Frustrated and deeply disappointed, Boyd Orr had resigned in 1948.
By this time the FAO’s only contribution to alleviating  world hungerwas providing some technical assistance and publications of some statistics.

(18:28):
As Boyd Orr bitterly put it, "The hungry people of the world wanted bread,and they were to be given statistics".
From his position on one of the FAO’s Advisory Committees,
de Castro had seen first-hand the geo-politics of nutrition and hunger being played out.
He supported Boyd Orr’s World Food Board proposalas a rational and just way to eliminate poverty and hunger

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and re-balance a deeply unequal world.
He too was deeply  angered and frustratedwhen he saw how the rich countries would reject
a scientifically rational plan to abolish world hungerin order to maintain their own narrow self-interest.
The two men shared a very similar vision for a just and equitableglobal food policy that would eliminate hunger, and thus also war,

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In 1952 Boyd Orr wrote an enthusiastic forewordto the English edition of de Castro’s book,
saluting it as an intellectual instrument for “saving our civilisation from perishing in a third world war”.
Being younger and earlier in his career than Boyd Orr,de Castro was not yet ready to give up on the FAO.

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In 1949, after Boyd Orr had already left,
de Castro had supported another FAO initiativeto create an International Commodities Clearing House,
in order to control the purchase and distribution of food.
This would have been a mechanism to regulate the prices of labour and production globally,
by countries cooperating togetherin the common effort to abolish hunger.

(20:03):
But again, the governments and especiallythe rich governments had refused to set up such a body,
and instead created the much weaker'Committee on Commodity Problems’, still active today in the FAO,
which is strongly dominated by the interests of the US government and multinational corporations.
Both the idea of a World Food Boardand the idea of a Commodities Clearing House

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drew on ideas of Keynesian economics, which were dominant at the time.
Indeed, during the same years,  governments were discussingKeynes’ proposal for an International Trade Organisation
and an International Clearing Union, which would regulateand balance out international trade more generally, in a similar way.
But these proposals too, had been vetoed by the US,

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who wanted to fashion the post-war world orderso as to consolidate its power as the new hegemon.
And so, in 1952, when de Castro took up the role as Chair of the FAO Council,
it was already clear to him and everyone elsethat the FAO had no powers of its own,
but was almost completely dependent on the agendasof national governments, and particularly that of the US.

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Nonetheless, de Castro tried to further the interests of the world’s poor in the developing countries
and argue for food policies which would reduce if not eliminate hunger.
Less radical and all-encompassing than the proposed World Food Boardor the proposed International Commodities Clearing House,
he suggested the creation of an Emergency Food Reserve,

(21:34):
which would be able to provide food to starving people in crisis situations.
But like all the previous initiatives,this one also was blocked by Britain and the US.
And eventually de Castro too left the FAO in frustration.
Seeing the lack of decision-making power that scientists and scholars had in international politics,

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in 1955 he moved from academia into politics,
becoming a parliamentarian for the Pernambuco State of Northeast Brazil, and sitting in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.
That same year he attended two major conferencesthat would have a big influence on his future thinking and activism.
In April he attended the Bandung Conference in Indonesia.

(22:18):
As European imperialism was beginningto indeed come to an end, at least in it’s direct form,
many of the leaders of the newly independent countries fromAfrica and Asia were starting to think about how to collaborate as a bloc
and how to work together to change the global systeminto one that was more equal and just.
Their first major meeting took place at Bandung,and this conference later led to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement.

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This was the group of countries, de Castro thought,that would be able to lead the movement to transform the world system.
And it was here that he personally met several key leaders,
including Nehru from India, Nkrumah from Ghana,Sekou Touré from Guinea and many others.
Later that year, in July, he attended the 7th Congressof the World Movement for World Federal Government,

(23:08):
which would later become the World Federalist Movement, or WFM.
It was presumably his  friend and colleague, John Boyd Orr,who served as President of the organization from 1948 to 1951,
who encouraged de Castro to come to the Congress and get involved in the movement.
Boyd Orr’s bitter experience in the ineffective and unjust international system

(23:29):
led him to conclude that the only way to truly eliminate world hunger and to bring about world peace and justice,
was to create a democratic world federation.
Only such a supra-national institution, he reasoned,
would be able to make and implement global policy without being subjected to the national interests of powerful states.

(23:50):
In 1949 Boyd Orr received the Nobel Peace Prizefor his life-long activities to promote a more equitable world order,
and in his speech he said, and I quote“We are now physically, politically, and economically one world
and nations are so interdependent that the absolutenational sovereignty of nations is no longer possible

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However difficult it may be to bring it about,some form of world government with agreed international law,
and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable”.
These ideas resonated strongly withde Castro’s own experience in the international system,
as well as his own ideas about world integration and world emancipation,and took them to their logical conclusion.

(24:33):
And so de Castro began to get involvedwith the World Movement for World Federal Government,
and also with theWorld Association of Parliamentarians for World Government.
In 1957 he published 'The Black Book of Hunger',  a short manifestosetting out again his vision for how the world could free of hunger.
In this manifesto he was now more clear that the wayto bring about a just and balanced world food system

(24:57):
required a system of supra-national governance,a democratic world government that would have powers
over and above that of national governments.

Describing the UN and the FAO, he writes: “Their decisions depend on assemblies of national delegates (25:06):
undefined
who place egoistic national interest above the higher interests of humanity.To resolve a problem of such scope,
something more is needed than an inter-national organisation.
We need a supra-national organisation,  freed from those sterilising injunctions of what is called, without much basis,

(25:31):
the ‘national interest’ of each country.We would need to organise a World Government…"
That same year he also founded and became the first Directorof the World Association for the Fight against Hunger,
an organisation which would promote the  creation of supra-nationalpolitical structures to assure world food supply and world peace,

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alongside project to support the socio-economic development of areas threatened by hunger.
In 1962 he moved from national politics in Brazil’s parliamentto international politics, as Brazil’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.
Now as a government representative, rather than a scientific expert
he occupied a different position within the UN system, with different possibilities and different  limitations.

(26:18):
In his new role he spoke up for the developing countriesand allied Brazil with countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America
during policy negotiations.
However, just two years later, in 1964,  there was a military coup in Brazil
and suddenly he found himself deemed a ‘subversive’ personand all his political and civil rights revoked.

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And thus, at the age of 56, he went into exile in France.
Establishing himself in Paris, he returned to academia and to activism.
He taught Human Geography at the University of Paris in Vincennes, a hub for leftist intellectuals,
where he worked alongside other radical scholarssuch as Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard.

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Most of his energy, however, was now devoted to more activist endeavours. He founded the International Centre for Development,
an independent think-tank focussing on alternativeforms of development and geopolitics from a ‘third world’ perspective,
and became increasingly active in movementspromoting global democracy and world federation.
He corresponded with several leading world federalist thinkers,including Bertrand Russell, Leopold Senghor, and Jawaharlal Nehru

(27:26):
and became increasingly convinced that world peace and justice could not be brought about through
the contemporary ‘international’ system in which governments compete with each other for their own self-interest,
and would only be possible if all states united into one integrated ‘global’ system,
with supra-national government directlyand democratically accountable to the world’s people.

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He got more involved with several world federalist activities and movements, most notably the movement for a People’s Congress.
In 1963, on the fringes of a World Federalist Movement meeting in Brussels,
de Castro, along with other activistssuch as Jacques Savary and Jeanne Hasle,
launched the idea of a People’s Congress to draft a world constitution, as a radical step towards bringing about a democratic world federation.

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Most of this group were connected with theInternational Registry of World Citizens,
an organisation which worked to create a registerof people who declared themselves to be ‘world citizens’,
that had been started by Gary Davis in 1949and had since grown to include almost a million people.
The group were well aware that there had been several previous attempts to organise similar World People’s Conventions,

(28:43):
building on the ideas of Rosika Schwimmerand Lola Maverick Lloyd in 1937,
and including British MP Peter Usborne’s attempts in 1950,but despite the difficulties,
they felt that it was the only way to bypassthe two great barriers to the rise of a democratic world order,
which where the dysfunctional and undemocratic UN system, and the dynamics of the cold war.

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While many people in the wider World Federalist Movementstill believed that the best route to creating a world federation
was through reforming the UN, de Castro,with his years of experience in both the UN and the FAO,
felt that this would never happen and that insteadof waiting for national governments to act,
it was imperative for citizens to take matters into their own hands.

(29:32):
In 1966 The People’s Congress launchedThe Declaration of Thirteen World Citizens,
a short manifesto calling on people to declare themselves world citizens
and to participate in the election of delegatesto a People’s Congress which would draft a world constitution.
The declaration was signed by thirteen eminent people,including Josue de Castro, John Boyd Orr, Bertrand Russell,

(29:56):
Shinzo Hamai (the former mayor of Hiroshima),Linus Pauling (Nobel Prize Lauriete in Chemistry),
Ivan Supek (Yugoslavian scientist and peace activist) and various other Nobel Prize winners.
The full text of the declaration read as follows:
" In the absence of supernational law,nations are obliged to resort to force to defend their interest.

The consequence (30:18):
war, voluntary or accidental; and war, since the splitting of the atom and the development of bacteriological weapons
becomes the absurd "final solution",  the genocide of the human race.
Without world institutions able to assure thefundamental needs common to all, man is helpless.

(30:39):
Two thirds of humanity suffer from hunger, while immense riches are wasted.
At the same time, scientific and technical progress make it possibleto organize a world community of peace and abundance
where fundamental liberties would be guaranteed to individuals, peoples and nations.
So why this contradiction? Because governments, blinded by their duty to put national interest above everything,

(31:05):
far from accepting the necessary changes,sometimes even hinder the work of the international institutions
created to defend universal peace and to serve mankind.
Only the people of the world, every one of us, can save the situation.
The first simple but effective step we ask you to takeis to register as a world citizen, as we have done.

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If enough of you answer our plea, we will take the second step together.
We will organize on a transnational basis the election of delegateswhose duty will be to defend the individual,
to voice the needs of the people of the world and,finally, to devise the laws for a peaceful and civilized world".
In the following years many people responded to this calland registered with the group as world citizens,

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and de Castro and his colleagues set about organisinga transnational, world election of delegates to the People’s Congress.
The idea was that this would take place in phases,with elections selecting two candidates every few years.
In 1969 the first elections took place.Some 10,000 people distributed across 87 countries

(32:13):
sent in their postal votes to choosethe first two delegates to the People’s Congress.
Josué de Castro was chosen as one of the first two delegates.Since then the People’s Congress has organised
several more transnational elections and the organisation has expanded and changed its initial approach,
adding also a Consultative Assembly to bring together world citizens organisations,

(32:36):
and eventually focussing mainly on promoting the idea that the People’s Congress should transform into a democratically elected World Parliament
which could then make world law and buildsupra-national world institutions.
Whilst it has not succeeded in its original aims, it has succeededin developing a large, transnational network of world citizens organisations,

(32:58):
mainly across the French-speaking parts of the world.
De Castro died in 1973, a few years after that first  election, at the age of 65.
Throughout his life he worked tirelessly to bring an end to world hunger,as a scholar, as a politician and as an activist.
Building up from detailed local studies  of particular situations of hungerto working at the international level in the UN and the FAO,

(33:24):
he came to see that hunger was a social problem, created by the political structures of the world
and the way that they shaped agricultural productionand distribution in the interests of the rich and powerful.
And thus he came to the conclusionthat the only way to eliminate chronic, long-term hunger,
was to transform the world system into a democratic world federation,

(33:46):
so that democratic supra-national bodies could implement policiesthat would ensure that everyone in the world would have enough to eat.
His ideas are still deeply relevant for our world today,
where millions of people sadly still go hungry and malnourished and where the UN and the FAO
remain dominated by the interestsof the US and other Western countries,

(34:09):
now exacerbated even further with the involvement of huge transnational food and seed corporations.
Today the West has a problem of obesity, while the developing countries continue to struggle with hunger and malnutrition.
To end this scandal we need to return to the ideas of Josue de Castro,and of his colleague John Boyd Orr,

(34:29):
and create supra-national institutions which will act  accordingto the will of the world’s people, and not just of the corporations and the elite.