Josué de Castro

In The Geography of Hunger, first published in Portuguese in the early 1950s, de Castro argued that hunger is not a natural or inevitable condition but a social and political product of poverty, land concentration, and unequal economic organization. He rejected the Malthusian view that overpopulation causes hunger, insisting instead that the global food system could feed everyone if resources were distributed equitably. The book brought together his perspectives as a physician, geographer, and Brazilian public official to show how hunger was geographically structured by colonialism and capitalist exploitation.

Yes, de Castro served as chairman of the FAO Council, the executive body of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where he advocated for policies that treated hunger as a structural problem of distribution rather than one of food supply. His work at the FAO reflected the same anti-Malthusian arguments he articulated in his books, pushing for agrarian reform and international food security policies. He used his international platform to center the perspectives of the Global South in debates about food and development.

Working as a physician in northeastern Brazil, one of the most drought-stricken and impoverished regions of the country, de Castro encountered hunger as a clinical reality rather than an abstract statistic. This firsthand experience led him to reject explanations rooted in fatalism, climate, or racial hierarchy, and to instead trace hunger to political and economic structures. His dual identity as a medical doctor and a geographer allowed him to connect the physiological effects of malnutrition with spatial patterns of land ownership, labor exploitation, and underdevelopment.

De Castro wrote several works on hunger, development, and geopolitics, including a follow-up volume sometimes translated as The Geopolitics of Hunger, which expanded his analysis to a global scale. He also produced studies focused specifically on the Brazilian Northeast and its chronic food insecurity. His body of work collectively represents one of the most sustained intellectual efforts by a Latin American thinker to reframe hunger as a solvable political problem.