Mabel stopped me in my tracks with this question about an hour ago.  Ordinarily, I would start from the other end of the equation, and note how starvation is the deliberate outcome of the processes of colonialism and capitalist expansion.  Like poverty and unemployment, starvation is a necessary function of global capitalism.

Capital needs markets and it needs compliant workers, and if those markets have to be created, and workers’ compliance secured, at the expense of thousands of lives daily, well then that’s just too bad.

So perhaps the answer to Mabel’s question is that the isolation of absolute poverty and starvation is also a function of capitalism: that the unchecked spread of such conditions is a threat to capital, even as capital depends upon their contained existence in the Global South.