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Most readers probably know how it feels when you miss lunch, when you fast on some religious Holiday, or when you live for a few days on vegetable shakes as part of a new wonder diet. But how does it feel when you haven\u2019t eaten for days on end and you have no clue where to get the next morsel of food? Most people today have never experienced this excruciating torment. Our ancestors, alas, knew it only too well. When they cried to God, \u2018Deliver us from famine!\u2019, this is what they had in mind. During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly robust safety net separating humankind from the biological poverty line. Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes. There are no longer natural famines in the world there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death it is because some politician wants them to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n