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A second key feature of the current world food economy is that it is highly asymmetrical along several dimensions. Some of the world’s poorest countries have become increasingly reliant on food imports to meet their needs over the past forty years. At the same time, the rich industrialized countries have experienced agricultural surpluses, and tend to export a higher percentage of their agricultural production as a result. Much of this excess production has been the product of industrialized country agricultural and trade policies, which have encouraged greater production and export of agricultural products. The prioritization of agricultural production has been perceived as a national security issue in industrialized countries, even as it had a negative impact on the ability of the world’s poorest countries to feed themselves. The irony of the situation was clear from the comments of former US President George W. Bush in a 2001 speech to the National Future Farmers Organization:

Can you imagine a country that was unable to grow enough food to feed the people? It would be a nation that would be subject to international pressure. It would be a nation at risk. And so when we’re talking about American agriculture, we’re really talking about a national security issue.¹⁴

This asymmetry in food production between countries is exacerbated by growing asymmetries within and across societies with respect to food access. As noted above, over 820 million people are chronically undernourished, a number that has remained persistently high for decades. Although the proportion of people facing chronic undernourishment has declined overall since the 1990s, progress has been highly uneven. In sub-Saharan Africa, progress on cutting the proportion of people experiencing hunger has been very slow, while absolute numbers of hungry people have risen in recent decades, leaving the continent far from meeting global hunger reduction targets. In Latin America and Asia, both the proportion of people experiencing hunger and the absolute numbers have fallen, bringing them closer to meeting global targets for hunger reduction. Meanwhile, nearly two billion people on the planet are overnourished. Levels of obesity, for example, have doubled since 1980 to reach 670 million in 2017. Micronutrient deficiencies are also widespread, affecting some 1.5 billion people, and can accompany both over and undernutrition.¹⁵

Layered over and related to this asymmetry is volatility in the global food system. The increased reliance on international trade, the concentrated market power of relatively few TNCs, and the growing financialization of food have together contributed to a world food economy that is more prone to abrupt changes with uneven outcomes. Rapid and sharp food price changes, as was seen in the 2007–2013 period, are likely to remain a permanent feature of the current global food system if no regulatory changes are made. The consequences of this instability are enormous, and are exacerbated by the inequalities in access to food in the present world food economy.