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World Food Day
The Globalization of Hunger
At first, the numbers don't seem to add up. The world produces more food than ever-enough to feed twice the global population. Yet, more people than ever suffer from hunger; and their numbers are rising. Today, 854 million people, most of them women and girls, are chronically hungry, up from 800 million in 1996. Another paradox: the majority of the world's hungry people live in rural areas, where nearly all food is grown.
World Food Day on October 16 is a good time to try and understand the conundrum of world hunger. The root of the problem is the inequitable distribution of the resources needed to either grow or buy food (also known as poverty). World Food Day is an equally good time to call out one of the main culprits of the crisis: industrial agriculture, the very type enshrined in the Farm Bill that's currently before the US Senate.
The Farm Bill has far-reaching implications for farmers and food systems the world over. It is set to perpetuate a process whereby heavily subsidized US factory farms overproduce grains that are dumped in poor countries, bankrupting local farmers, who can't compete with subsidized prices. We've begun to hear a bit about the plight of these farmers, but few people know that most of them are women. In fact, women produce most of the world's food. They do so on small plots of land, working hard to feed their families and generate enough income for things like school fees and children's shoes.
US Agribusiness: Swallowing Up Lands and Livelihoods
Visit the websites of corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, who together control 65 percent of the global grain trade, and you will read that their mission is to "feed a growing world." The reality is starkly different. Big Farming is part of a larger corporate economic model that prioritizes profit-making over all else, even the basic right to food. Around the world, agribusiness bankrupts and displaces small farmers, and directs farmers to grow export crops instead of staple foods.
Not long ago, most farm inputs came from farmers themselves. Seeds were saved from the last harvest and fertilizer was recycled from animal and plant wastes. Farmers found innovative ways to control pests by harnessing local biodiversity, such as cultivating insect-repelling plants alongside food crops. While these techniques can produce enough food to feed the world and sustain its ecosystems, they don't turn a profit for agribusiness. That's why corporations developed genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, and synthetic pesticides.
These inputs are both expensive for farmers and highly damaging to the natural systems on which sustainable farming and, ultimately, all life depends. As the cost of farming has gone up, farmers' incomes have gone down due to trade rules that favor large-scale agribusiness over small farmers. For example, the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture forbids governments in the Global South from providing farmers with low-cost seeds and other farm inputs, turning farmers into a "market" for international agribusiness.
Over the past 50 years, as much of the world's farmland has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, millions of people have been forced to abandon their rural homes. In fact, this year, for the first time ever, the number of people living in cities around the world exceeded the number living in rural areas. Most of this urban population boom is due to rural migration.
Cash Crops and Climate Change
The same practices that have devastated women farmers and their communities worldwide have contributed to environmental destruction that impacts us all.
Export agriculture is a major contributor to global warming because it requires huge inputs of petroleum: it takes 100 gallons of oil to grow just one acre of US corn. It also requires a massive global transportation infrastructure, including ports, railways, fuel pipelines, and superhighways, often built at the expense of local people and ecosystems. In many places, 40 percent of truck traffic is from hauling food over long distances. Today, food that could be grown locally is shipped, trucked, or flown half way around the planet.
Trade rules have so distorted agricultural markets that almost anywhere you go, food from the other side of the world costs less than food grown locally. So people in Kenya buy Dutch butter, while those in the Big Apple buy apples from Chile. In the US, the average bite of food travels 1,300 miles from farm to fork. The system is so wasteful that many countries import the very same foods that they export. For example, last year the US exported-and imported-900,000 tons of beef.
Asserting the Right to Food
The good news is that our global food systems may be on the verge of a great transition. Although agribusiness has unprecedented control over the world's farmers and food supply, the realities of climate change, resource depletion, and the human suffering caused by industrialized farming have led more people to start thinking about the links between food, the environment, and social justice. Around the world, demands for food sovereignty-peoples' right to control their own food systems-is at an all-time high. Even in the US, where much of the population thinks of farming as a quaint and remote activity, more and more people are realizing that if you eat, you're involved in agriculture.
The theme of this year's World Food Day is the right to food. Securing this basic human right for all people, including future generations, will require fundamental changes in the way we use the Earth's natural resources to grow and distribute food. As we face rising temperatures and declining supplies of cheap energy, change will come of necessity. It's up to us-working in partnership with small-scale farmers around the world-to demand a change for the better.
Yifat Susskind is communications director of MADRE, an international women's human rights organization.
13 Comments so far
Show AllMillions starving in a world of plenty...this is the crime we must end immediately.
What we need is an eco-social-market economy that takes the best ideas of freedom and justice, and yet also ensures environmental sustainability.
There are blueprints being established to implement a more equitable re-distribution of food and world resources:
www.global-negotiations.org
I certainly agree with the article BUT until we address the issues of (a) grotesque OVERpopulation (not mentioned in this article), and (b) the problems that the male gender bring to all societies, nothing will change. The food is out there, and the men in the warlord societies where starvation is rampant use it for power.
Let's stop being namby pambies and call it like it is.
Juliann writes of the "grotesque OVERpopulation" in the world, and I agree, but the author attests, "The world produces more food than ever-enough to feed twice the global population," so apparently the problem isn't the size of the overall global population but getting food to people and, as well, overpopulation in parts of the world where food production is limited.
Her second point seems more salient to me--male gender influence. When I look around, wherever there's war and misery, there are men close behind it, not women (with the occasional exception of a Condoleeza Rice or Margaret Thatcher).
At this point it's almost a homeopathic remedy for a sickness that requires radical surgery, but I'm encouraged by the 100-mile diets that people in the West are experimenting with. Barbara Kingsolver has written a book about her family's year of eating locally, forget the title. If more of us begin to move in this direction, perhaps indirectly more farmland will be saved and local kitchen gardens cultivated, making at least some of us less dependent on megacorporate farming with all its attendant faults, as well as freeing us from paying the many costs of dependancy on foreign oil and gas to bring us our food from far away.
Also, were we in the U. S. to choose political leaders with good will and the welfare of others in their hearts instead of fear-mongers and war-profiteers, perhaps we could break bread with our less fortunate brother-and-sister nations instead of invading them. It would sure cost a lot less, and go far toward ensuring peace for our children and grandchildren.
70% of major food crops in the US (e.g., corn, soy, oats) are fed to livestock animals being cruelly and inefficiently raised for food for those who already consume too much.
A bigger problem than overpopulation of people is overpopulation of farm animals (and to a lesser extent pets, especially dogs). Using subsidized US corn for ethanol isn't helping matters either. In fact, it's increasing starvation in Mexico and Central America.
Overconsumption (of meat and other animal products, resources, forests, water) and overpopulation (of people and animals).
Eco-Eating: Eating as if the Earth Matters (it does!)
www.brook.com/veg
As far as those multinational food conglomerates are concerned, they have no future. When there is land reform it will be necessary for farming families to populate the agricultural land so that they can tend it as well as farm it. The way that the agro-industries produce food is as fast as they can for the most profit and that results in poor quality. Once those crooks are removed from the system and farm families take over production we will have better production and quality and will not have to worry so much about the horrible diseases which are associated with "barn farming".
In all categories women are judged to be superior in intelligence to their male counterparts so it is imperitive that the UN have a Council of Women to guide all aspects of societal life. Then such sad events as a World Food Day will become obsolete.
Significant progress has been made in the last 30 years. The challenge for the next 30 is to do it all and do it better, but with much less energy. (Whining and saying "We're all going to die" is not going to help)
Surprisingly, and in spite of overpopulation, US Agribusiness, multinational food conglomerates, food production inefficiencies and global warming:
Over the last 30 to 40 years
1) Life expectancies have increased world wide
2) Incomes have increased world wide
3) Child mortality has decreased world wide
(with the exception of sub-saharan Africa)
These changes and trends are obvious by inspection of UN data using the gapminder at:
http://tools.google.com/gapminder/
This charting tool for displaying UN World health statistics can
show a wide variety of trends. Almost any way you look at it you can see significant improvement in the world's health.
In a world with so much hunger with millions dying annually from insufficient food, how can we justify animal-based diets that involve the feeding of 70% of the grain grown in the US aand over 40% of the grain grown worlwide to animals? In a world with so much thirst, how can we justify animal-centered diets that can use up to 14 times as much water per person that vegan diets? In a world rapidly heading toward disaster from global warming, how can we justify 'livestock' agrivulture which emits more greenhouse gases (in CO2 equivalents) that all the world's transport, according to the UN FAO's 2006 report, "Livestock's Long Shadow."
For further information, please see my over 130 articles at JewishVeg.com/schwartz.
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Organic farming can save the planet...if we can keep agribusiness from muddying it's definition.
Who is your farmer?
Local Harvest -- by zipcode
www.localharvest.org:80/www.
Quality documentary about sustainable agriculture:
www.brokenlimbs.org
"Global hunger could be directly attributed to meat-eating." ---Chrissie Hynde
Half the world's population does not receive an adequate amount of food to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, "Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day," or one child every two seconds.
The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.
Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.
The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people--nearly double the entire human population of the planet. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can produce less than 165 pounds of beef.
In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that protein-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle." Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.
Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks, quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel away from the needy and hungry."
Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:
"Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything ever experienced before.
"Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation, experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."
"In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization--a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species--nearly 25 percent--been malnourished.
"The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings."
In the 1970s, the United Nations Secretary General said that the food consumption of the rich countries is the key cause of hunger around the world. The United Nations has recommended that the wealthy nations cut down on their meat consumption.
The Worldwatch Institute has released a remarkable report entitled Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, which lists nation after nation where food deprivation has followed the switch from a grain-based diet to a meat-based one.
Most of the nations that now import grain from the United States were once self-sufficient in grain. The main reason they aren't is the rise in meat production and consumption.
In Taiwan, for example, per capita consumption of meat and eggs increased 600 percent from 1950 to 1990. With this change, vastly increased amounts of grain have gone to livestock, raising the annual per capita grain use in the country from 375 pounds to 858 pounds. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used.
In mainland China, the situation is similar. Increased meat consumption has meant less grain available to feed people. Since 1978, meat consumption has more than doubled, to twenty-four kilograms. The share of Chinese grain fed to livestock rose from 7 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 1990.
Over half Of Latin America's beef production is exported, and the rest is too expensive for any but the wealthy to purchase. From 1960 to 1980 beef exports from El Salvador increases over sixfold. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of small farmers lost their livelihood and were pushed off their land. Today, 72 percent of all Salvadoran infants are underfed.
In Brazil, major portions of the Amazon tropical rain forests have been destroyed so that wealthy multinational corporations can produce beef for the wealthy. Corporations such as Volkswagen, Nestle, Mitsubishi, Liquigas, King Ranch, and Swift-Eckrich have bulldozed and burned literally hundreds of millions of acres, replacing the world's oldest and richest ecosystems, home to two million or more species of plant and animal life with a single crop--pasture grass for cattle.
And here, the beef produced has not gone to feed hungry Brazilians; it has been primarily exported to Western Europe, the Middle East, and North America. In 1987, the United States imported three hundred million pounds of meat from countries in Central and South America.
With the help of international lending institutions, Brazil has mounted an enormous effort to increase agricultural production, but this has been primarily meat-oriented production and for export. In the late '60s, soybeans were almost nonexistent in Brazil. Today, this crop is the nation's number one export--but almost all of it goes to feed Japanese and European livestock. In the late '60s, one third of the Brazilian population suffered from malnutrition. Today, the figure has risen to two thirds.
Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Brazil huge cattle ranches take up some of the most fertile soil in the whole country, yet 60 percent of Brazilians are malnourished. Oxfam estimates that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! The livestock are exported of course, to satisfy the developed nations' craving for cheap hamburgers.
In the early '60s, sorghum was almost unknown in Mexico. But by 1980, it covered literally twice the acreage of wheat. Sorghum isn't grown for humans. It is fed to livestock. In the late '60s, livestock consumed only 6 percent of Mexico's grain. Today, the figure is over 50 percent.
This is a trend throughout the Third World. Copying the United States' meat-oriented diet, these poor countries devote increasing percentages of their resources to meat production.
In Guatemala, 75 percent of the children under five years of age are undernourished. Yet, every year Guatemala exports 40 million pounds of meat to the United States. It borders on the criminal!
In Costa Rica, beef production quadrupled between 1960 and 1980, but almost all this beef is exported to the United States, and what does stay in the country is eaten by a tiny minority. Though more and more Costa Rican land is being turned over to meat production, the population is not eating more meat for the change. The average family in Costa Rica eats less meat than the average American housecat.
Throughout Latin America, land availability is a prominent social issue. Revolutionaries as well as reform-minded moderates have made land reform a major issue. Yet in many Latin American countries, forests are being leveled in order to create pastures for cattle grazing land.
In a region where land availability is a central social issue, existing land is being gobbled up by livestock agriculture. The resulting social tensions have resulted in civil wars, repression and violence.
Hunger is really a social disease caused by the unjust, inefficient and wasteful control of food. Our food security is not being threatened by the prolific, hungry masses, but by elites that profit by the concentration and internationalization of control of food resources.
In country after country the pattern is repeated. Livestock industries are consuming feed to such an extent that now almost all Third World nations must import grain. Seventy-five percent of Third World imports of corn, barley, sorghum, and oats are fed to animals, not to people. In country after country, the demand for meat among the rich is squeezing out staple production for the poor.
The same trend can be found in the Middle East and North Africa--increases in grain-fed livestock require more imported feed. In the early '70s, Egypt was self-sufficient in grain. Then, livestock ate only 10 percent of the nation's grain. Today, livestock consume 36 percent of Egypt's grain. As a result, Egypt must now import eight million tons of grain every year.
In the late '60s , Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock has consumed increasing amounts of the country's grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1,000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.
According to Buckminster Fuller, there are enough resources at present to feed, clothe, house and educate every human being on the planet at American middle class standards. The Institute for Food and Development Policy has shown that there is no country in the world in which the people cannot feed themselves from their own resources.
Moreover, there is no correlation between land density and hunger. China has twice as many people per cultivated acre as India, yet less of a hunger problem. Bangladesh has just one-half the people per cultivated acre that Taiwan has, yet Taiwan has no starvation, while Bangladesh has one of the highest rates in the world. The most densely populated countries in the world today are not India and Bangladesh, but Holland and Japan.
Many of us believe that hunger exists because there's not enough food to go around. But as Frances Moore Lappe' and her anti-hunger organization Food First! have shown, the real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food.
Thanks, Yifat, for the simple, straightforward logic of your statement.
Reagan´s "Santa Fé Statement": using food as a weapon, has its deadly, warped logic. When I came to Brasil in the 60´s, 70% of the population lived on the land. Today, 80% live in urban regions. Little wonder there is undeclared civil war in the cities as people struggle to survive.
Now we have the "ethanol boom" in Brasil which will diminish even more the land needed to produce food ... so that "clean", "renewable" energy can be produced - two vast myths/lies that have very short legs to carry them!
Thousands and thousands of families in Brasil are being forcibly evicted from the land so that sugar cane can be planted to produce ethanol.
Ethanol is not a "clean" energy source. Ethanol is produced in Brasil by using slave labour or work conditions analogous to slave labour.
Ethanol is not a "renewable" energy source. Ethanol is produced in Brasil by devastating the environment and polluting water sources above and below ground.
"Full tanks (at the cost of) Empty Bellies"?
No thanks!
It's my belief that land reform will become as much an issue in the US as it now is in Latin America. For one thing, the end of oil will mean a return to hand labor for food production. Will society re-form along feudal lines, in which the majority labor as serfs for large land-holders? Or will society re-form so that the majority are freeholders in the land?
If it were not for land monopoly--much of it by agribusiness--far more Americans could now make their living by farming, and almost all could grow most of their own food and fuel. Almost all food could be locally grown; local economies would flourish.
If land were fairly evenly distributed among the population, we would find far fewer people who felt compelled to commute two hours a day to work in a cubicle.
Organic methods of food growing have been demonstrated to produce three to six times as much food per unit area as chemical/mechanized farming methods.
The "overpopulation" thing is more or less nonsense--especially in a world that is now producing twice as much food as necessary to feed the world's population.
The opponents of the overpopulation argument have long pointed out that you could stand the population of the entire world within the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida. While that was back in the 80s, it would still take no more than twice that land area to stand the present world population. (Feel free to do the math on this. It's not too much trouble really.)
Human beings have apparently used birth control methods of one kind or another for thousands of years. Cleopatra was familiar with birth control, and so were pre-Columbian Native Americans. There is even some evidence that certain traditional whole-food diets act as a restraint on human fertility. (Some important grain crops, for example, seem to have evolved so as to contain contraceptive-like elements, presumably to keep from being eaten to extinction by humans.) I wish someone would do an in-depth examination of the factors that have historically been related to "population explosions" in certain regions. I think it's arguable that they appear subsequent to widespread changes in diet.
I'm betting that excessive human reproduction would take care of itself in a reasonably just world--especially one in which women could freely share information about traditional birth-control methods.
Thank you, vasumurti, for mentioning Lappe's "Food First!" A must-read for anyone interested in understanding this problem.