The ‘Freedom from Hunger’ campaign has focussed the attention of the more favoured countries on the glaring inequalities that exist in the world today between nations. There is much talk of ‘one world’, and with the immense speeding up of communications, physically speaking, this concept is now real. But the world is divided into two camps as clearly as when Disraeli wrote about the ‘two nations’ in Victorian England. On the one hand, there are the ‘provided for’, those who enjoy this world’s goods and live in plenty and luxury; and on the other hand, the ‘have-nots’ who stagnate in want and are familiar only with the fear of hunger, sickness and death. Far from being filled up, the gap between these two groups is growing wider, for prosperity breeds prosperity, and want engenders want.

The amount of actual hunger and under-nourishment in the world is difficult to calculate, for under-developed countries have underdeveloped statistics. And scientists differ about what actually constitutes under-feeding in terms of calories and so on. This has led at times to exaggeration. It does not seem at all true, as is sometimes claimed, that two out of three people in the world go to bed hungry. The best evidence, produced by Dr P. V. Sukhatme of FAO in May 1961, estimates the proportion as between ten and fifteen per cent, that is to say between 300 million and 450 million of the inhabitants of the world. Malnutrition is also a scourge of the less developed countries and leads to diseases such as kwashiorkor, pellagra, beriberi, etc. The same report puts the number of those suffering from under-nutrition and malnutrition as fifty per cent of the world’s inhabitants.