SUMMARY

Despite the positive path taken over the past fifty years, in this 21st century the provision of food to all of the world's population remains an unresolved issue. Moreover, the recent price crisis has so destabilised food markets that in just a few months humanity has managed to take significant steps backwards as regards its undernourished population, with obvious inherent risks of social and political destabilisation.

The causes of this new situation are many, complex and interrelated. Among them should be considered, on the one hand, structural factors that have shaped a new world scenario and placed a strain on food supply and demand. On the other hand, there also exist factors of a more contextual nature, but which possess a huge potential to destabilise.

This new scenario is characterised by activity along three identifiable lines. The first of these consists in the accelerated growth in demand for raw materials and basic foodstuffs resulting from the increasing population levels and rapid development taking place in the so-called emerging countries (China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South-East Asia). The second is materialised in tensions deriving from the energy factor in the face of multiplied demand for fossil fuels and a supply that can already foresee its own gradual demise, which will translate into a tendency towards higher prices. In this context, the production of biofuels assimilates food production with the production of energy, exacerbating the price trends of both. The third line situates climate change as a long-term factor, but one which is now having a pronounced effect on the accentuation of tensions.

The part played by biofuels in this crisis has been broadly debated from extreme and often highly controversial positions. The significance of their role is not so much their greater or lesser causal value in the percentage increase in prices, but rather that of having been the very detonator of this price explosion. Biofuels, supported by a generous policy of subsidies and with demand defended from long-term programmes established by legislation in the most powerful countries in the world, have knocked on and opened the door to speculative movements of a financial nature in the first instance, but subsequently with acute consequences in real markets and food supply.

The impact of recent events may however have distracted our attention from the core problem that lies behind the subject of malnutrition, which is none other than that of economic development. At the present time the world has the capacity to feed its growing population, though to do so significant action must be taken, above all in productive infrastructure and especially that which optimises the use of water as a raw material in agriculture. Technology has been called upon to play a decisive role in confronting the challenge of economic development and the supply of food. In this sense, both the biotechnological revolution and the results of advances in the information and communication technologies bring further added potentialities.

However, the frailties of the food markets and the risks associated with technological advances require the international community to implement measures of market regulation and control and guarantee of the use of these technologies.

The 21st century will not only be that of the culmination of processes initiated in the past, it will also be the generator of new methods that will prove vital in meeting decisive challenges in such fields as energy, food supply and climate change. The future of humanity depends on our capability to act collectively in this quest to find sustainable solutions.