We Eat They Starve

They go without

By Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, from the book A Nation of Farmers

 

It's hard to grasp the degree to which the Western lifestyle is implicated. We don’t realize that when we buy imported shrimp or coffee we are often literally taking food from poor people. We don’t realize that our economic system is doing such harm.

What is the most common cause of hunger in the world? Is it drought? Flood? Locusts? Crop diseases? Nope. Most hunger in the world has absolutely nothing to do with food shortages.

Most people who go to bed hungry, both in rich and in poor countries, do so in places where markets are filled with food that they cannot have.

Despite this fact, much of the discourse about reforming our food system has focused on the necessity of raising yields.

Though it is true that we might need more food in coming years, it is also true that the world produces more food calories than are needed to sustain its entire population.

The problem is unequal access to food, land, and wealth, and any discussion must begin not from fantasies of massive yield increases, but from the truth that the hunger of the poor is in part a choice of the rich.

Inequity and politics, not food shortages, were at the root of almost all famines in the 20th century. Brazil, for example, exported $20 billion worth of food in 2002, while millions of its people went hungry.

During Ethiopian famines in the 1980s, the country also exported food. Many of even the poorest nations can feed themselves—or could in a society with fairer allocation of resources.

It can be hard to grasp the degree to which the Western lifestyle is implicated. We don’t realize that when we buy imported shrimp or coffee we are often literally taking food from poor people.

We don’t realize that our economic system is doing such harm. In fact, the system conspires to make it nearly impossible to figure out whether what we’re doing is destructive or regenerative.

We have been assured that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” that it is necessary for us to make rich people richer, because that will, in turn, enrich the poor.

The consequences have been disastrous—for the planet and for the people whose food systems have been disrupted, who never had a chance to be lifted by any tide.

Journalist Jeremy Seabrook, in his book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty, describes First World efforts to eliminate poverty and hunger this way:
It is now taken for granted that relief of poverty is the chief objective of all politicians, international institutions, donors and charities. This dedication is revealed most clearly in a determination to preserve the poor.

Like all great historical monuments, there should be a Society for the Preservation of the Poor.

Only, since it is written into the very structures of the global economy, no special arrangements are required. There is not the remotest chance that poverty will be abolished, but every chance that the poor themselves might perish.It is hard for many of us to recognize that the society we live in helps create poverty and insecurity, but it is true. Our economy is based on endless growth.

We’re told that if the rich get richer, it makes other people less poor. Think about it for a moment—about how crazy that is. Wouldn’t it make much more sense to enrich the poor directly, to help them get land and access to resources?

Historically, rural people have been quite poor, but often, despite their poverty, could grow enough food to feed themselves.

Over recent decades, however, industrial agriculture and widespread industrialization have moved large chunks of the human population into cities, promising more wealth.

But rising food and energy prices (rising because of this move and this urban population’s new demands for energy and meat) have left people unable to feed their families.

Multinational food companies have also worked their way into the food budgets of the poor. Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel are the authors of Hungry Planet.

“Few of the families we met [in the developing world] could afford a week’s worth of a processed food item at one time,” they report in the Washington Post, “so the global food companies make their wares more affordable by offering them in single-serving packets.”

Around the world, industrial agriculture has consolidated land ownership into the hands of smaller and smaller populations.

Rich nations dumped cheap subsidized grain on poor nations. Local self-sufficiency was destroyed. Now, as the price of food has risen dramatically, those created dependencies on cheap grain, which doesn’t exist anymore, mean that millions are in danger of starvation.

Real alleviation of poverty and hunger means reallocating the resources of our world into the hands of people who need them most. This is not only ethically the right thing to do, it is necessary.

There is no hope that newly industrializing nations will help us fight climate change if it means a great inequity between their people and those of the United States.

Russia, India, and China have all said so explicitly. The only alternative to the death of millions in a game of global chicken is for everyone to accept that the world cannot afford rich people—in any nation.