"GLOBAL ISSUES, LEADERSHIP CHOICES":

As we prepare to shop for our Thanksgiving meals, it is worth considering that "For the first time in many years, the estimated [global] number of undernourished people has actually gone up rather than down [to about 800 million or 2.5 times the population of the United States]. ... Hunger remains a universal problem. ... In low-income countries, the share [of respondents to a Gallup Poll asking whether there have been times in the past 12 months when they didn’t have enough money to buy food] has gradually increased to around 60 percent. In middle-income countries, it’s stuck around 30 percent. Even in advanced economies, it’s quite high, somewhere near 10 percent. There are about a billion people living in advanced economies, so 10 percent means 100 million people still grapple with food insecurity in high-income countries. Even more striking, there is no evidence of any improvement over the past decade. While the world has become considerably richer, the issue of hunger has not become appreciably smaller." This article from the Brookings Institution considers issues of agricultural credit, government subsidies and tariffs, and grain productivity. www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2017/10/23/the-world-is-off-track-to-end-hunger-so-whats-the-solution