by Robin Wright

About the author: Robin Wright is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times daily newspaper.

At the end of the 20th Century, an era marked by space exploration, computer wizardry and test-tube babies, the status of the human race may more accurately be reflected in a sobering statistic: 786 million people—almost one in every six on the globe—are suffering from acute or chronic hunger. More than a billion more face various forms of serious malnutrition.

“Somalia is a drop in the bucket,” said Marc Cohen, one of the authors of “Hunger 1993,” a publication of the Bread for the World Institute.

Despite mankind’s advances, one of its biggest problems is primordial. And while the hardest-hit areas are in South and East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa...