Summary - Frances Moore Lappe's "World Hunger: Twelve Myths"
Richard Moore
Summarized and Updated by Holly Poole-Kavana
http://rehydrate.org/facts/hunger.htm
Myth One:
There is not enough food and not enough land.
Untrue. Measured globally, there is enough to feed everyone. For example there is enough grain being produced today to provide everybody in the world with enough protein and about 3000 calories a day, which is what the average American consumes.
But the world's food supply is not evenly distributed. Those who have much accumulate more, while those who have little edge toward starvation. In most countries with widespread hunger, a few large landowners control nearly all agricultural production sometimes with disastrous results. Much rich farmland remains unused, or one harvest is gathered per year when there could be two or three. Land is used for "cash crops" such as cotton or coffee instead of food. To the owners, land becomes an "investment" not a source of food for the people who live on it.
Myth Two:
There are too many people to feed.
Contrary to popular belief, overpopulation is not the cause of hunger. It's usually the other way around: hunger is one of the real causes of overpopulation. The more children a poor family has the more likely some will survive to work in the fields or in the city to add to the family's small income and, later, to care for the parents in their old age.
All this points to the disease that is at the root of both hunger and overpopulation: The powerlessness of people who must rely on food that is grown and distributed by wealthy people who have never felt hunger pangs, yet who determine how the land will be used, if at all and who will benefit from its fruits. High birth rates are symptoms of the failures of a social system - inadequate family income, inadequate nutrition and health care and old-age security.
Myth Three:
Growing more food will mean less hunger in poor countries.
But it doesn't seem to work that way. "More food" is what the last 30 years' War on Hunger has been about. Farming methods have been "modernized", ambitious irrigation plans carried out, "miracle" seeds, new pesticides, fertilizers and machinery have become available. But who has come out better off?
Farmers who already have land. money and the ability to buy on credit - not the desperately poor and hungry. In Pakistan for example a farmer must have at least 12.5 acres of land to get a loan from the Bank: but this excludes over 80 percent of Pakistan's farmers! Who else benefits? Moneylenders, landlords, bureaucrats, military officers, city-based speculators and foreign corporation - as the value or the land goes up only the rich can afford to buy the farming land. Small farmers go bankrupt or are bought out. Human energy and imagination can be organized to turn a desert into a grain field. This can be done - we have the know-how.
When land is in the hands of the people who live and work on it , they are more likely to be motivated to make the land more productive and distribution of food more equitable thus benefiting all peoples.
Myth Four:
Hunger is contest between rich countries and poor countries.
To many Americans the hungry world is seen as the enemy who in Lyndon Johnson's words, "aint what we got". But hunger will never be eliminated until we recognize the poor of Bangladesh, Colombia, Senegal as our neighbors. Rich or poor we are all part of the same global food system which is gradually coming under the control of a few huge corporations. These giant businesses grow and market food for the benefit of those people who have money which means primarily people in North American and Europe.
Poor people in the Third World market pay food prices that are determined by what people in rich countries are willing to pay. This is direct cause of hunger in many poor countries. On the other hand, people in rich countries are unaware that their own consumption is creating suction force in the world food market, diverting food from meeting the needs of the very people who have grown it.
In both rich and poor countries farmers, workers, consumers feel the impact of this system of international control, through artificial shortages of certain products, through high food prices, through poor-quality goods. Even in countries like the Unite States and Canada, small farmers find themselves unable to afford the machinery that need to keep their farms running well. Older people on small pensions even in the United States and Canada, find themselves unable to afford the food they deserve.
Myth Five:
Hunger can be solved by redistributing the food to the hungry.
Over and over we hear that North America is the world's last remaining "bread basket." The rich world's over consumption and wastefulness are endlessly compared with the misery of the poor.
True. Adapting a simpler lifestyle helps us to understand our interrelatedness with all people and less wastefulness is better stewardship. But neither "one less hamburger a week". Nor massive food aid programs, will eventually solve widespread starvation and poverty in the poorest nation. People will only cease to be poor when they control the means of providing and /or producing food for themselves.
We must face up to the real questions: who controls the land? Who cultivates it ? A few. Or all who need to? What will be grown in poorer nations - strawberries to export to the tables of the well-fed in the United States or basic grains for local consumption? How can control of the land get back into the hands of the people who need it? Who influences the distribution of food? How can people be enabled to provide food for themselves?
Myth Six:
A strong military defense provides a secure environment in which people can prosper.
But who feels secure on an empty stomach? The extraordinary investment the world makes in armaments annually (currently $900 billion) ensures that few funds are available for agricultural and economic development and shows that those who decide how a nation's money is spent are not intimately acquainted with the violence of hunger.
The security of countries both great and small, depends first of all in a population that has enough food, enough jobs, adequate energy and safe, comfortable housing. When a society cannot provide these basics, all the guns and bombs in the world cannot maintain peace.
This article is based on material by
Frances Moore Lappe' and Joseph Collins, co-authors of
"Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity", and "World Hunger: Twelve Myths"
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