The ethics of starvation

Abstract or Introduction

Though delivering the world’s poorest citizens from starvation is an attainable goal, producing enough food to provide a standard of living comparable to the West’s is not. Efforts to preserve the world’s most fragile ecosystems are doomed when the people in them are living in extreme poverty, and the false hope of selling a poor nation’s natural resources to the industrialized world will only bring sufficient prosperity to stave off starvation until the mineral wealth has been depleted. It should be kept in mind that the world has not seen an uninterrupted advancement in technological progress, of which food is the building block — the “Dark Age” enveloped Europe when the advanced plant genetics and animal husbandry techniques of the Western Roman Empire were lost along with its collapse in the 5th century AD. The Romans, it should be added, were not particularly concerned with feeding non-Romans in foreign lands, and were brought down by peoples who were their technological inferiors.