Dambisa Moyo - Winner Takes All

An excerpt from Dambisa Moyo's informative book, Winner Takes All:

'The estimated one billion people on earth who go without food every day are almost perfectly offset by the one billion people medically deemed to be obese, a disease attributable, at least in part, to overeating.
This shocking symmetry suggests that beyond the issue of waste, food is severely misallocated. But although reducing waste and more equitably allocating food are possibilities that quickly suggest themselves, they are also very expensive and, ultimately, should be unnecessary because many currently malnourished regions, like Africa, have plenty of tillable land sitting fallow. This unproductive land in the middle of a continent racked by hunger is, in turn, largely a result of a system of incentives and disincentives for food production.
We have already seen how each year many countries, including some of the world's leading industrialised economies, pursue aggressive subsidy and tariff programmes that effectively lock out the agricultural produce emanating from the rest of the world. The US Farm Bill and the European Common Agricultural Policy each pump hundreds of billions of dollars toward artificially bolstering their farmers and their domestic agricultural sectors. By covering much of the cost of production at home, these subsidies price other countries out of their food market. Not only do these government policies discourage food production elsewhere; they actually encourage overproduction of food at home. The resulting trade distortions tend to disproportionately disadvantage the world's poorest agricultural producing countries, such as those in Africa and South America.
The United States and France are two of the worst offenders. Fearful of relying on other nations for their food in the event of a global war and keen to protect their agricultural markets and win the backing of their powerful farming lobbies, these countries have pursued trade restrictions, subsidy packages, and barriers to keep out foreign produce. In the United States alone the total annual amount of farm subsidies stands at around 15 billion US dollars. The 2002 US Farm Security and Rural Investment Act has rewarded US farmers with nearly 200 billion US dollars in subsidies in the subsequent ten years, 70 billion US dollars more than previous programmes and representing as much as an 80% increase in certain subsidies.
The US subsidy programmes have the greatest effects on grain, including wheat, corn, sorghum, barley, rice, and oats, but they also include peanuts, tobacco, soybeans, cotton, sugar, and milk. Excess food production is often wasted or, in a nastily ironic twist, sent as food aid to regions where agricultural production has been decimated by the very government policies that have discouraged these poorer regions from growing crops.