The Hunger Paradox: A Powerful Call for a More Just Food Future

The world produces enough food to feed ten billion people, yet some 733 million people go hungry. Dadhiram Basumatary argues that this is not a supply crisis. It is a justice crisis. If that sentence makes you uncomfortable, he says, this book was written for you.

The Hunger Paradox is a data-driven investigation into what Basumatary calls the greatest moral contradiction of our era: a planet with agricultural surplus, where hundreds of millions still go without enough to eat.

Not drought. Not overpopulation.

Basumatary spent years with smallholder farmers in Nigeria, tribal communities in Odisha and urban food deserts in Dhaka to answer one question: why, in an age of abundance, does hunger still exist? His answer is not drought, overpopulation or poor yields. It is a global food system shaped by trade agreements, land grabs, commodity speculation and bureaucratic indifference, a system that keeps food profitable while keeping justice out of reach.

What you’ll discover inside

The book asks why one third of all food produced globally is wasted every year, enough to feed every hungry person on earth twice over, and who profits from leaving that waste unsolved. It examines how Brazil cut food insecurity by more than half in a single decade, and why the world has not followed its example.

Basumatary also looks at India’s broken biometric scanner, which legally denied millions their food entitlement, and what it reveals about institutional hunger. He explains why women grow 60 to 80 percent of the food in sub-Saharan Africa yet own less than 20 percent of farmland, and how land injustice hides behind chronic malnutrition. He traces how climate change hits hardest the people who contributed least to it, and returns to Amartya Sen’s Nobel Prize–winning research on the link between political freedom and famine.

Meet the author

Dadhiram Basumatary is a writer and researcher deeply committed to food justice, human rights and sustainable development. His work examines the people and systems behind global hunger and asks readers to see it not as a shortage of food but as a failure of justice.

Why this book matters

The Hunger Paradox is essential reading for anyone working in international development, food policy, human rights, climate justice or global economics. It is also for any curious reader who suspects the world’s most solvable problem stays unsolved for reasons we rarely hear. It is more than a book. It is a wake-up call.