The essay is a commentary on Well's Time Machine. the three causes of starvation – politics/ war, economics, and environmental factors, are usually intertwined. With the exception of the last, they hardly ever occur in solitude. A country or polities therefore that seek to work on controlling starvation needs to take all three factors into consideration.
HG Wells' the Time Machine reminds me of the contemporary state of the world and its problems that can actually be reduced to three attributes: environmental causes, political conditions, and economic conditions.
Environmental conditions:
The Eloi seem at first sight to be a peaceful Utopian community who, although not intellectual, has used technology to control their environment and to make it work for them. Only through the duration of the book and more significantly much later, does the narrator realize that the activities of the Eloi have actually despoiled the environment. The traveler travels ahead to approximately 30 million years ahead of his own time and sees lecherous insects swarm over the country and ravage it. The further he travels, the more closely he sees the earth's rotation gradually cease, the planet become increasingly colder, and the Earth become a more forbidding, dank, and lifeless place. Eloi and similar civilizations have ruined it.
This is relevant to our own times of how we use technology to ruin the Earth. The spoilage of fresh water, forestry, confiscation of land, and pollution of resources as well as confiscation for other purposes cause a shortage of crops and unfair distribution of resources where - similar to Well's Time Machine in regards to the Eloi and the Morlocks - the privileged receive more than those hwo have little. The end-result is that a gasp exists between those who have a lot and those who have little and brutality is a consequence. This is particularly true in places where poor people are underrepresented and lack a voice to articulate their complaints. Often too, these individuals are forced to move off property compelled to relocate to unstable poor land and to overcrowded cities where their poverty only becomes aggravated and their hunger, thereof, all the more intense.
Other conditions may be long and sever periods of drought where crops cease to grow and are wasted causing starvation, loss to farmers of crops, and dehydration. This may occur in all countries and was particularly prevalent in America during the Great Depression. Wells foresaw this in his rendition of the planet Earth 30 million years ago.
2. War:
A related cause of inequality is conflict. We see this with the Eloi and the Morlocks where the Eloi depress and subdue the Morlocks (in true bourgeois fashion) and the result is conflict. The Morlocks feed on the Eloi, and the Time traveler theorizes that theirs is the life of the jungle with each preying in the other. All -- he concludes -- have lost the intelligence, wisdom, enlightenment, and rationality of Man at his peak becoming instead animals that prey on one another.
We are no different as evidenced from the enduring friction that plagues the Earth where humans battle one another simply (oftentimes) because they feel attacked by the other and view the other as aliens. Advantaged nations depress disadvantaged nations who, in Marxist fashion, bounce up and retaliate in return. Powerful and greedy corporations do the same sucking vulnerable individuals in their engines of so-called progress. The Eloi seemed at first blush to be advanced. The Time Traveler realized he was mistaken; they were intrinsically primitive despite their technological suaveness. How different are we from them?
Oppression -- as in the "Time Traveler'generates war. And war produces poverty and destruction of Earth.
Conflict not only destructs resources causing shortage, but also causes individuals to lose their income and earning. War also slows or stops food production, marketing, dissemination of food and business in general obstructing and impeding the normal routine of life causing disturbance in countless aspects of routine living and preventing people from working towards producing and buying food.
War also may make even the enterprise of buying food a dangerous as well as a costly endeavor, the former by making it dangerous to go out in public places buying the food, the latter by causing price of food to escalate therefore making it unaffordable for swathes of people. Food supplies are also often confiscated by solders, crop cycles are interrupted, sometimes livestock and crop burned by the enemy (or country themselves, as in the Napoleonic War) an s part of their strategy, and seeded and livestock may be consumed in desperation.
Even if fighting never occurs, expenditure of the army may necessitate that food prices be raised or that resources be heavily curtailed. This situation occurred on the home front during World War II where food resources were highly limited.
3. Economic conditions
The third basis of global misery is deprivation. The Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes, who feed on the Eloi do so out of desperation and need. With insufficient monetary resources, people are unable to acquire the rudiments of nutrition consequently causing starvation and war. That such is the case is most commonly seen in disadvantaged, or developing (otherwise known as three worlds) countries such as Africa and South Asia where the largest number of continuously under-nourished individuals live. In these and similar continents, growing poverty, debt, economic decline, poor terms of trade, fast population growth, unfavorable weather, war, and government collapse all contribute to maintaining and reinforcing this circumstance of poverty and starvation and hence political factors too are inextricably integrated with economic concerns contributing to endurance and resilience of the continents food problems.
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