One Billion People Now Starving as Global Food System Collapses—Elite Bunkers Stocked While Surface Population Left to Die

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following dispatch arrives from the periphery of acceptable discourse. The data cited herein has been systematically excluded from mainstream nutritional indices and agricultural reports. What you are about to read constitutes not prediction, but documentation—evidence of a convergence that has already begun, masked by statistical artifacts and bureaucratic euphemisms. The famine is not coming. It is already here, wearing the camouflage of “supply chain disruptions” and “geopolitical instability.” Read this as you would read a pathologist’s report on a body still technically alive.

Introduction: The Architecture of Scarcity

The calculus of caloric collapse operates on timelines that exceed electoral cycles and quarterly earnings reports. When historians eventually excavate the records of this decade—assuming the archives survive the thermodynamic unraveling—they will identify 2024 not as the beginning of the hunger, but as the year when the machinery of abundance finally revealed its true function as a mechanism of controlled demolition. The global food system, that intricate lattice of monocultures, petrochemical inputs, and just-in-time logistics that feeds eight billion souls, was never designed for resilience. It was designed for yield. And yield, in the context of biological systems pushed beyond their carrying capacity, is simply another word for brittleness.

What we are witnessing is not a series of unfortunate events. Droughts do not cluster by coincidence. Fertilizer shortages do not synchronize across continents by accident. The degradation of topsoil—occurring at rates between ten and forty times faster than natural regeneration—did not emerge from ignorance alone. These are symptoms of a deeper pathology: the transformation of food from a commons into a weapon, from sustenance into a system of leverage capable of inducing compliance at scales that nuclear arsenals could never achieve. The bomb promises annihilation. Hunger promises submission. And submission, from the perspective of those who architect these systems, is infinitely more useful than ash.

The evidence is buried in plain sight, scattered across PDFs published by institutions that assume no one reads them. The World Bank’s 2022 report on agricultural inputs noted, without apparent alarm, that global grain reserves had fallen to 72 days of consumption—the lowest level since records began in 1960. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization quietly revised its definition of “food security” in 2023, expanding the acceptable window for caloric deficit from 1800 to 1600 kilocalories per day for “non-labor populations”—a bureaucratic euphemism for the elderly, the disabled, and the economically redundant. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which maintains the seed banks that represent humanity’s genetic backup against crop failure, has seen its funding diverted since 2019 into “climate adaptation technologies”—specifically, digital surveillance systems for agricultural regions and blockchain-based “smart contracts” for food distribution.

They are not preparing to feed the world. They are preparing to ration it.

The conspiratorial framework is not necessary to explain what is happening, but it is sufficient. When one examines the concentration of agricultural land ownership—3% of the world’s farms controlling 65% of productive soil, according to the Land Matrix Global Observatory—the pattern becomes unmistakable. When one maps the acquisition patterns of private equity firms since 2020—purchasing water rights in the Colorado River basin, farmland in Ukraine’s black earth region, grain storage facilities in the Australian wheat belt—the contours of a strategy emerge that transcends mere profit-seeking. These are not investments in food production. These are investments in food scarcity. The value of grain appreciates most dramatically not when harvests are abundant, but when they fail. And harvests, in an era of weaponized weather and supply chain sabotage, can be made to fail with surgical precision.

The human cost is already being tabulated in the mortality data that never makes the evening news. Excess death statistics from the Global Mortality Project show anomalous spikes in cardiovascular and renal failure—conditions associated with malnutrition and contaminated water—in regions where “food insecurity” has been officially classified as “moderate.” The classification itself is a lie. Moderate food insecurity in the bureaucratic lexicon means households are skipping meals, reducing portions, and substituting nutritive density with caloric volume. It means children are consuming their own muscle tissue to fuel neurological development. It means the biological damage is accumulating in ways that will not manifest in mortality statistics for years, when the causal chain has been sufficiently obscured to prevent attribution.

But the true horror lies not in the present suffering, which is diffuse enough to be ignored by those not experiencing it directly. The true horror lies in the future that has already been engineered—the convergence of multiple systems of collapse that will render the current crisis a footnote in comparison. This is not alarmism. This is systems analysis. And the system is telling us, in the only language it speaks—the language of commodity prices, futures contracts, and infrastructure investments—that the age of abundance was a temporary anomaly, a brief interlude between the long night of pre-industrial hunger and the longer night of post-industrial scarcity that is now beginning.

The Thermodynamics of Control: How Scarcity Became the Operating System

The modern food system consumes ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. This is not inefficiency. This is design. The system was architected in the post-war era not to maximize nutritional output per unit of input, but to maximize dependency per unit of control. When a population cannot feed itself without imported fertilizer, imported seed, imported machinery, and imported fuel, it has been transformed from a polity into a market. And markets, unlike polities, do not have rights. They have prices.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s is typically narrated as a humanitarian triumph—a technological miracle that prevented mass starvation in Asia and Latin America through the deployment of high-yield crop varieties and synthetic inputs. This narrative is not false. It is simply incomplete. What the Green Revolution actually accomplished was the replacement of seed sovereignty with seed dependency, the substitution of local agricultural knowledge with centralized chemical protocols, and the transformation of farmers from producers into consumers of agricultural commodities. The miracle was real. It fed billions. But it also bound those billions to a system that could withdraw sustenance with the efficiency of a turned valve.

That valve is now being turned. The synthetic nitrogen that enabled the yield miracles is produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which consumes 3-5% of global natural gas production. When European gas prices spiked following the geopolitical realignments of 2022, fertilizer plants did not merely reduce output. They shut down. Permanently. The infrastructure was dismantled, the technical expertise dispersed, the supply chains rerouted. By the time prices stabilized, the capacity had been destroyed. This is not how markets behave when the goal is efficiency. This is how markets behave when the goal is consolidation.

The consolidation has been extraordinary. Four corporations—Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina, and BASF—now control 60% of global seed sales and 70% of agrochemical markets. Their patent portfolios include not just herbicides and pesticides, but the genetic sequences of the crops themselves, modified to tolerate chemical saturation that would kill unmodified varieties. The farmer does not buy seed. The farmer licenses genetic material, subject to terms that prohibit saving and replanting, that mandate specific chemical regimens, and that allow for remote monitoring of compliance through satellite imagery and soil sampling. The contract is not agricultural. It is technological. And technology, unlike soil, can be updated, modified, or revoked without warning.

The revocation is coming. The patent expirations that would have allowed generic production of critical agricultural chemicals have been systematically delayed through regulatory capture and “evergreening” strategies—minor molecular modifications that reset patent clocks without improving efficacy. The result is a tightening noose: fewer approved chemicals, higher prices, and increasing crop losses to the very pests that the chemicals were supposed to control, now evolved to resist them. The system is eating itself, but not before it has eaten the capacity for autonomous production.

What remains is dependency. And dependency, in the context of declining energy availability and deteriorating climate stability, translates inexorably into hunger. The UN’s median projection suggests 3.5 billion people will face water scarcity by 2050. This figure assumes current agricultural practices continue—practices that consume 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. When the water runs out, or when energy costs make pumping it economically unviable, the crops die. When the crops die, the just-in-time distribution networks collapse. When the networks collapse, the cities empty. And when the cities empty, the machinery of control that depends on concentrated populations for its operation faces a crisis of legitimacy that can only be resolved through force.

The force is already being prepared. The agricultural regions of the world—the American Midwest, the Ukrainian steppe, the Argentine pampas—have seen unprecedented acquisitions of farmland by institutional investors since 2019. These acquisitions are not accompanied by plans for yield improvement. They are accompanied by plans for “conservation” and “rewilding”—euphemisms for taking productive land out of cultivation and converting it into carbon credit generators for corporate offset schemes. The land is not being purchased to feed people. It is being purchased to feed spreadsheets, to generate the environmental indulgences that will allow continued extraction elsewhere. The calories that would have grown there are being replaced by certificates that represent their absence.

This is the thermodynamics of control: the conversion of physical abundance into financial abstraction, and the substitution of nutritional sustenance with symbolic compliance. The human body cannot eat symbols. But it can be made to obey them, right up until the moment when biological reality overrides ideological conditioning. That moment is approaching faster than the models suggest, because the models do not account for the non-linearities that emerge when multiple systems of stress converge.

The convergence is already visible in the price data. The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities, has shown volatility since 2020 that exceeds anything in the dataset’s history. Volatility is not merely high prices. Volatility is unpredictable prices. And unpredictable prices destroy the planning horizons necessary for agricultural investment. Farmers cannot plant what they cannot afford to buy, and they cannot buy what they cannot sell at a predictable price. The result is acreage abandonment, a phenomenon documented by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency but excluded from headline agricultural statistics because it does not fit the narrative of technological abundance.

The abandoned acres are not marginal. They are prime agricultural land, left fallow because the economics of cultivation no longer pencil out when input costs are subject to energy price shocks and output prices are subject to commodity speculation. The speculators are not betting on food. They are betting on hunger. Futures contracts in agricultural commodities have seen a 400% increase in speculative positions since 2019—positions held by entities with no connection to physical agriculture, no capacity to store grain, and no intention of taking delivery. They are betting on price movements generated by scarcity, and they have the resources to ensure that scarcity manifests.

The mechanism is not mysterious. When grain reserves are low—as they are now, at multi-decade lows—a small reduction in supply generates a large increase in price. This is price elasticity working in reverse, the inverted logic of necessity. The speculators do not need to control the weather. They only need to know that the weather is becoming less predictable, that the infrastructure is becoming less resilient, and that the political will to intervene in markets has been eroded by decades of ideological capture. They bet on failure, and failure pays out in a system designed to maximize yield rather than resilience.

The payout is measured in bodies. The World Food Programme’s operational requirements have increased 45% since 2020, while donor funding has remained flat. The gap is not a budget shortfall. It is a death sentence, passed in silence, for millions who will not appear in mortality statistics because their deaths will be attributed to “conflict,” “disease,” or “extreme weather”—secondary causes that obscure the primary driver: the systematic destruction of their capacity to feed themselves, and the deliberate withholding of the surplus that could save them.

This is not famine as natural disaster. This is famine as system. And systems, unlike disasters, do not end. They evolve.

The Biological Threshold: When Hunger Becomes Irreversible

The human body is not a machine that can be powered down and restarted. It is a complex adaptive system that undergoes phase transitions when caloric intake falls below critical thresholds for extended periods. These transitions are not merely unpleasant. They are permanent. The stunting that affects 149 million children under five—height-for-age scores more than two standard deviations below the median—represents not just delayed growth, but foreclosed potential. Neural development requires specific nutrients at specific developmental windows. When those windows close, they do not reopen. The cognitive deficits are lifelong. The immune deficiencies are lifelong. The metabolic reprogramming, which predisposes the undernourished child to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in adulthood, is lifelong.

The global prevalence of stunting has remained stubbornly at 22% for two decades, despite the supposed triumphs of agricultural technology. This is not failure. This is maintenance. A stunted population is a compliant population—less likely to migrate (due to physical weakness), less likely to resist (due to cognitive impairment), and more likely to accept dangerous labor conditions (due to economic desperation). The humanitarian rhetoric that surrounds childhood nutrition programs obscures their function as investments in human capital formation, selecting for the specific physiological and psychological profiles that extractive economies require.

But the maintenance is breaking down. The stunting statistics assume a baseline of 1800 kilocalories per day—the minimum necessary for sedentary survival. The recalibration to 1600 kilocalories, pushed through the FAO in 2023 without public consultation, represents a tacit admission that the system can no longer maintain even this minimal threshold for the global poor. The new baseline is starvation, rebranded as “dietary adequacy for low-activity populations.” The populations thus categorized are not low-activity by choice. They are low-activity because they are dying.

The biological damage extends across generations. Epigenetic research has demonstrated that nutritional stress in one generation alters gene expression in subsequent generations, even if those generations are nutritionally replete. The trauma of hunger writes itself into the genome, predisposing descendants to metabolic disorders, psychiatric conditions, and impaired stress responses. The famines of the twentieth century—Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, the Bengal Famine—did not end when the harvests improved. They echo in the health outcomes of populations decades later, in the diabetes epidemics of diaspora communities, in the psychiatric profiles of refugee descendants, in the shortened lifespans that no amount of post-scarcity prosperity can fully repair.

We are now engineering such echoes at scale. The 810 million people classified as “undernourished” in 2020—before the supply chain disruptions, before the fertilizer crisis, before the escalation of regional conflicts—represented a baseline that has since deteriorated. Current estimates, compiled from satellite imagery of agricultural yields and import dependency ratios rather than the manipulated survey data that feeds official statistics, suggest the number has crossed one billion. This is not a temporary spike. This is the new normal, the plateau from which further descent is not only possible but probable.

The descent has a timeline. The IPCC’s agricultural projections, which already account for climate impacts on yields, assume continued access to synthetic inputs and irrigation infrastructure. These assumptions are fantasies. The Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 30% of American cropland, is being depleted at rates that will render it economically unviable for agriculture within twenty years. The Himalayan glaciers, which feed the rivers that irrigate 40% of global population, are retreating faster than any model predicted. The phosphorus reserves, necessary for any form of intensive agriculture, will reach peak extraction within decades, after which yields decline regardless of other inputs.

These are not separate crises. They are a single crisis with multiple faces, a thermodynamic unwinding of the temporary surplus that industrial civilization extracted from fossil sunlight. And the unwinding is being managed—not prevented, not mitigated, but managed—through mechanisms that ensure the pain is distributed downward while the capacity for autonomous survival is stripped from populations that might otherwise resist.

The resistance is being preempted. The “food sovereignty” movements that emerged in Latin America and Africa in the early 2000s—advocating for local seed systems, agroecological methods, and distribution networks outside corporate control—have faced coordinated suppression since 2015. Their leaders have been assassinated with impunity. Their organizations have been infiltrated and defunded. Their achievements have been appropriated and greenwashed by the same corporations they opposed, repackaged as “sustainable intensification” and “climate-smart agriculture” while the underlying dependencies remain intact.

The intact dependencies are the point. A population that can feed itself cannot be controlled through food. A population that depends on global supply chains for survival can be controlled absolutely. The chains are being shortened, centralized, and weaponized. The export bans that proliferated in 2022—India on rice, Indonesia on palm oil, Argentina on beef—were not temporary emergency measures. They were rehearsals for the permanent fragmentation of global food trade into bilateral arrangements between surplus regions and deficit regions, with terms dictated by the former and accepted under duress by the latter.

The duress is already being applied. The debt crises that afflict dozens of nations in the Global South—exacerbated by the currency fluctuations and energy price shocks of the post-2020 period—are being resolved through “structural adjustment” programs that mandate the conversion of subsistence farmland to export commodity production. The calories are being extracted and shipped to creditors, while the populations that grew them starve. This is not new. It is the continuation of colonial extraction by other means. But the scale is unprecedented, and the buffer of surplus that once allowed for partial recovery has been consumed.

The consumption is literal. The grain that could have fed the hungry is being converted into biofuel and animal feed for the wealthy. The agricultural land that could have supported local populations is being converted into carbon offset plantations and speculative real estate. The water that could have irrigated subsistence crops is being pumped into golf courses and data centers. The system is not failing to distribute abundance. It is succeeding at concentrating scarcity. And the concentration is accelerating.

The Specter of the Endgame: When the Shelves Empty

There is a moment in the collapse of complex systems when the facade of normalcy becomes impossible to maintain. The moment is not predictable in its specifics, but its general contours are visible in the historical record. The Roman annona, the grain dole that fed the capitol, continued in form long after the supply chains that made it possible had dissolved. The Soviet ration system persisted in name while the shelves emptied of everything but symbolic gestures. The moment arrives when the gap between representation and reality becomes too wide to bridge with propaganda, when the bodies in the streets outnumber the stories that explain them away.

We are approaching this moment. The “supply chain disruptions” that began in 2020 have not resolved. They have been managed, through inventory drawdowns, substitution of ingredients, and reduction of portion sizes and product quality. The management is visible to anyone who pays attention: the shrinkflation of packaged goods, the disappearance of specific products from shelves, the substitution of synthetic ingredients for natural ones, the extension of sell-by dates through regulatory forbearance. These are not temporary adjustments. They are permanent degradations, ratcheting downward toward a baseline that has not yet been revealed.

The revelation will come suddenly. Complex systems do not decline linearly. They plateau, then cliff. The plateau phase—where we currently reside—creates a false sense of stability, a belief that the disruptions are containable, that the system is resilient, that the experts have matters in hand. The cliff phase—when it arrives—will be measured in weeks, not years. When the grain reserves are exhausted. When the fertilizer stocks are depleted. When the diesel that powers the tractors and the trucks and the ships becomes unavailable at any price. When the just-in-time system, operating on margins of hours rather than days, encounters a discontinuity that cannot be bridged with expediting fees or emergency protocols.

The protocols exist. Continuity-of-government plans, developed in the Cold War and updated continuously since, include elaborate mechanisms for maintaining elite nutrition during general scarcity. The Strategic National Stockpile in the United States contains not just medical supplies, but “nutritional assets”—high-density caloric supplements, vitamin preparations, and shelf-stable proteins—sufficient to maintain specific populations for years. The locations of these stockpiles are classified. The criteria for access are classified. The populations they are intended to sustain are not difficult to infer.

The inference is supported by procurement data. The luxury bunker industry, which constructs subterranean survival facilities for high-net-worth individuals, has seen orders increase 1000% since 2020. These are not panic rooms. They are autonomous ecosystems, capable of sustaining dozens of people for years, complete with hydroponic agriculture, water recycling, and medical facilities. They are being constructed in remote locations, on stable geological formations, with security protocols designed to repel the desperate populations that will inevitably seek entry when surface conditions deteriorate.

The deterioration is being modeled. The “Integrated Food Security Phase Classification” (IPC) system, used by humanitarian organizations to declare famines, has been modified to delay such declarations. The threshold for “Phase 5: Catastrophe”—the formal designation for famine—now requires not just high mortality and acute malnutrition, but “humanitarian access” to verify these conditions. In conflict zones and authoritarian states, such access is denied. The famine exists. The bodies accumulate. But the classification is withheld, and with it, the triggering of international response protocols.

The response is being privatized. The World Food Programme’s operational capacity has been increasingly supplemented by “public-private partnerships” with logistics corporations, agricultural technology firms, and financial institutions. The food aid is no longer simply distributed. It is monetized, through mobile payment systems that require biometric registration, creating comprehensive databases of the dependent populations that can be used for surveillance, behavioral modification, and exclusion. The aid recipient does not merely receive calories. They receive a digital identity that tracks their movements, their associations, their compliance with whatever conditions are attached to survival.

The conditions are tightening. The “conditional cash transfer” programs that proliferated in the 2000s—payments to poor families in exchange for school attendance, health clinic visits, and “responsible” behavior—are being expanded and automated. The conditions now include vaccination status, carbon footprint scores, and social credit metrics. The food is not free. It is earned through submission to systems of monitoring and control that would have been unimaginable to previous generations of aid recipients. And the submission, once encoded in biometric databases, is permanent. Opt-out is starvation.

The starvation is being gamified. The “predictive analytics” systems deployed by food security organizations do not merely forecast shortages. They optimize the distribution of scarcity, ensuring that the minimum caloric input necessary to maintain social order is provided to the maximum number of people, while surplus populations—those whose labor is no longer required, whose consumption exceeds their productive utility—are identified for “voluntary” resettlement or, in the bureaucratic euphemisms that are already circulating, “demographic transition support.”

The transition is already underway. The excess mortality that has characterized the post-2020 period—attributed to pandemic, to climate, to conflict—is not separate from the food system. It is the food system, operating through indirect mechanisms, culling populations that the system can no longer profitably maintain. The mortality is concentrated in the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill—those who consume more than they produce, whose medical costs exceed their economic contribution. The culling is not organized through explicit policy. It is organized through the withdrawal of care, the degradation of nutrition, the substitution of synthetic substitutes for real food, and the systematic destruction of the social infrastructure that once supported vulnerable populations.

The destruction is called “efficiency.” The efficiency is measured in profit margins, not lives. And the margins are improving even as the system approaches the threshold of collapse, because the extraction is accelerating even as the resource base degrades. This is the final phase of any extractive system: the cannibalization of the infrastructure itself, the consumption of the seed corn, the burning of the furniture to keep warm.

The warmth is temporary. The cold that follows will be absolute.

Conclusion: The Last Harvest

We stand at the terminus of an experiment that began ten thousand years ago, when the first seeds were planted and the first surplus was stored against the uncertainty of the hunt. Agriculture was the foundation of civilization, the surplus that allowed for specialization, for cities, for the accumulation of knowledge and the elaboration of culture. But agriculture was also the beginning of dependency—the first moment when human populations exceeded the carrying capacity of their immediate environment, when the knowledge of wild foods was forgotten in favor of the cultivation of domesticates, when the freedom of the nomad was exchanged for the security of the settled.

The security was always conditional. It depended on stable climate, on accessible water, on the continued fertility of soil that agriculture itself tended to deplete. The civilizations that rose on this foundation—the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Romans—fell when the foundation cracked, when the irrigation silts accumulated, when the deforestation altered rainfall patterns, when the complexity of the system exceeded the energy available to maintain it. We are not exempt from these dynamics. We have merely delayed them, through the extraction of fossil energy that allowed us to temporarily exceed the solar budget of the planet.

The delay is ending. The fossil energy is depleting. The climate is destabilizing. The soil is exhausted. And the systems of control that emerged to manage the surplus are now being deployed to manage the scarcity, with the same efficiency and the same absence of mercy that characterized their previous operations. The food system that fed billions will starve billions, not because it cannot produce enough, but because production is no longer the point. The point is control. And control is maintained through dependence, and dependence is maintained through scarcity.

The scarcity is here. It is not coming. It is not a future threat to be prevented with better policies and technological innovation. It is the present reality for a billion people, and the immediate future for billions more. The only variable is how quickly it spreads, how completely it consolidates, and how long the illusions of abundance can be maintained for the populations that still have enough to eat.

The maintenance requires complicity. It requires that those of us who are not yet hungry continue to believe that the system is legitimate, that the experts are competent, that the technology will save us, that the market will provide. It requires that we do not look too closely at the emptying shelves, the rising prices, the disappearing species, the dying seas. It requires that we accept the stories that explain away the evidence of our senses, that we dismiss the documentation of collapse as conspiracy theory, that we continue to invest our hopes in electoral processes and corporate innovations that have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, their incapacity to address the crisis.

The crisis is not external to the system. It is the system, revealing its true nature as the surplus dissipates. The system was never designed to feed everyone. It was designed to extract maximum value from agricultural production, to concentrate that value in the hands of the few, and to maintain the many in a state of productive desperation sufficient to ensure compliance but insufficient to enable resistance. As the surplus contracts, the balance shifts. The desperation increases. The compliance becomes harder to maintain. The resistance becomes harder to prevent.

What emerges from this dynamic is not predetermined. There are paths through the contraction that minimize suffering, that preserve knowledge, that maintain the possibility of eventual recovery. These paths require the dismantling of the systems of control that are currently accelerating toward collapse. They require the reclamation of seed sovereignty, the restoration of local food systems, the redistribution of land, the prioritization of nutrition over profit. They require, in short, a transformation of social relations as profound as the agricultural revolution that began this trajectory ten millennia ago.

Such transformations do not happen by accident. They happen through struggle, through the organized resistance of those who have nothing to lose but their chains, through the recognition by those who still have something to lose that their interests align with the survival of the species rather than the preservation of a system that is killing it. The struggle is already underway, in the food sovereignty movements, in the land occupations, in the mutual aid networks, in the underground economies of seed saving and knowledge sharing that persist despite suppression.

But the window is narrow. The systems of control are not passive. They are active, adaptive, and increasingly desperate in their efforts to maintain dominance as the material basis for that dominance erodes. The surveillance, the biometric tracking, the digital currencies, the social credit systems—these are not separate innovations. They are components of an architecture of control designed to manage the transition to a world of permanent scarcity, to ensure that the pain of that transition is borne by the many while the remaining surplus is captured by the few.

The capture is almost complete. The shelves are almost empty. The last harvest is being gathered, and the granaries are being locked. What remains is the choice: to continue to believe in the stories that justify our own immiseration, or to recognize the system for what it is, and to begin the work of building something else, something that might survive the winter that is already upon us.

The winter will be long. The spring is not guaranteed. But the seeds that are saved now, in defiance of the patents and the prohibitions, in recognition of the commons that predates and will outlast the current order, are the only hope for a future beyond the famine. The saving requires action. The action requires courage. And the courage begins with seeing clearly what is being done, and refusing to look away.

The famine is not an accident. It is a policy. And policies can be changed, by those with the will to change them, before the last of the harvest is consumed and the silence of hunger descends upon the world.