Slides of the presentation held by George Kent during the FSN Forum Conference in FAO/Rome on Friday December 2010.

1. George Kent University of Hawai’i

8. We talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished. That rather innocent view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger.

24. Malnutrition occurs in a social context. The extent to which people suffer from hunger and other forms of malnutrition depends on how they treat one another.

25. In the practice of mutual aid . . . we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle—has had the leading part.

27. “ . . . as a rule, the individual in primitive society is not threatened by starvation unless the community as a whole is in a like predicament. Under the kraal-land system of the Kaffirs, for instance, "destitution is impossible: whosoever needs assistance receives it unquestioningly.” No Kwakiutl "ever ran the least risk of going hungry.” "There is no starvation in societies living on the subsistence margin.”

28. de Waal, Frans 2009. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society . New York: Harmony.

42. If we find a way to ensure the health of every cell and every organ of the global body, based on how they are managed from within and also from the outside, we will have solved the hunger problem.