Global hunger is a "crisis in democracy"

Sheila Pratt, The Edmonton Journal

So here's the question: With the world producing ever increasing quantities of food, why does the number of people going hungry just keep rising?

Frances Moore Lappe gave the world a wake-up call on that very question 40 years ago when she wrote her seminal book, Diet for a Small Planet.

Lappe dared to dispute the prevailing wisdom of the 1970s "green revolution" -- that producing more food, with pesticides, fertilizer and large-scale, corporate farming -- would solve the world's hunger problems. And so far, it hasn't.

An employee carries a rice bag in the GIE Delta linguer factory in Ross Bethio on January 26, 2009. The food crisis, difficult access to Asian rice production and high consumption of rice in the country lead to focus on local production in Senegal.

GEORGES GOBET

Food scarcity is not the problem, never has been. Food production has generally gone up faster than population growth, so there's enough food to go around, says Lappe. (In 2008, for instance, world grain production went up five per cent while population growth was up 1.2 per cent.)

The problem is how the world uses food, who controls the supply and the growing concentration of corporate power in global agribusiness, she argues.

"Things have gotten both worse and better since the 1970s," says Lappe in an interview from the Small Planet Institute, an independent think-tank on democracy and food issues she runs in Cambridge, Mass.

"We're still making hunger out of plenty," says Lappe, who will speak Monday in Edmonton at International Week at the University of Alberta, says.

The number of hungry rose again last year. In December, the UN reported 963 million undernourished people, about 40 million more than in 2007. That's a huge jump, due mostly to rising food prices in the last two years and partly to food crops like corn diverted to ethanol production.

In 1971, Lappe pointed out that the world's grain crop, rather than feeding people, was increasingly being fed to cattle for meat for richer countries. Since then the trend to feed protein to animals has become much worse. In addition to a third of the world's grain, most soya meal goes to cattle; one-third of the ocean's fish stock is now animal feed; and a quarter of U.S. corn goes into feed for automobiles.

And there's even more corporate concentration.

"When I started out, there were hundreds of seed companies," says Lappe. "Now five or six control half the world market, and in GM (genetically modified) crops, there's only one, Monsanto."

Recently, she noted, another worrisome trend has emerged -- multinational corporations buying up large swaths of land in poorer countries in order to control crop production.

"We are moving (in poor countries and in the U.S) to more colonial landholding patterns characterized by a few land holders and many powerless workers," she says.

"These large holdings could in fact grow a lot of food but if those doing the work have no power, they will not benefit, no matter how much is grown."

Therein lies the rub. The food crisis is really a crisis of democracy, says Lappe. As the gap between rich and poor grows with industrial farming, so do the "disparities in decision-making power that are at the root of hunger," she says.

Even in democratic societies like the U.S., people lack the power to influence food policies that are mostly designed to serve big corporations and agribusiness, not the food consumer.