Population of hungry continues to grow
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
This year the number of hungry in our world increased to 1.02 billion – nearly one in 7 people.
Folks who have followed this blog, or who know me from my previous work (director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico until 2004 – see my bio), also know that justice matters to me, the daily lives of the poor of our planet really matter to me. I have long been aware of and motivated by the gross injustices built into the global economy, as those with wealth continue to have access to wealth, and more of it, while those who do not grow poorer.
But here’s the greater insult, as I learned from Latin America – the wealth of the United States and Western Europe was largely gained over the course of 3 centuries by taking the wealth from other countries to fuel our own economic growth. I’m not making this up; it’s history, if we care to look at it honestly. And we still do this.
Source: United Nations Food Program
Today, once again, it is hunger that concerns me. It is the emerging food crisis – a product as much of injustice as it is of a crowded planet putting more and more land under cultivation to feed its growing population. And the way we are doing this is going to lead very soon to the collapse of the food system because it is built on models of agriculture that are not sustainable, that are ruining soils, the air we breathe, the genetic resiliency of crops, biodiversity, while being a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions that are polluting and warming our atmosphere.
We could feed everyone right now if the world were just. We might just make it through this population boom that should peak at mid-century then begin to slowly decline (propelled in part by some pretty scary scenarios, unless we get sane really quickly). But every day that we allow industrial agriculture to spread across the planet, bringing with it a corporate profit motivation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, enormous machines, genetically modified seeds, deforestation to clear more land, etc., we rip into the future possibility of feeding the hungry…
…which, from the standpoint of most of our religious traditions, including that one that claims a vast majority of our population, is supposed to matter; indeed, is supposed to separate out the true believers from the false prophets.
But, c’mon, Lord, when did we see you hungry?!?! It wasn’t on TV and our preachers never talked about it at church!
2009 Hunger Map - World Food Programme
A couple of recent articles offer the grim news:
Food experts worry as population and hunger grow, by Neil MacFarquhar at the NY Times
Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world’s growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist…
The track record of failing to feed the hungry haunts the effort. But other important uncertainties also give pause. The effect climate change will have on weather and crops remains an open question. The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and ’70s ended the specter of mass famines then, but the environmental cost of chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation has spurred a bitter divide over the right ingredients for a second one.
In addition, the demand for biofuels may use up crop land. And as scores of food riots in 2008 showed, oil prices and other income shocks can quickly drive millions more people into hunger, sending ripples of instability around the world.
As things stand today, the world has not a prayer of halving global hunger by 2015, the target set by the 1996 World Food Summit (the target of reducing the population of hungry to no more than 420 million sounded good compared to a billion – unless you happen to be among the 420 million. Even back then, I thought, can’t we do better than that?)
“A silent tsunami of hunger…”
Millions will starve as rich nations cut food aid funding… from The Guardian in London.
The US, by far the world’s biggest contributor to food aid, has so far pledged $800m less than in 2008…
Source: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN
Is there a moral problem here? I know, I know, all this stuff about deficits and we’re in a recession and blah, blah, blah… There is so much wealth in this country! That it is concentrated among the top 1-5% of the population, and getting more and more concentrated with every passing tax year, squeezes the rest of us and makes us feel like the country is poor. It is not. $800 million cut for the U.N.’s food program – about 1% of last year’s bank bailout.
Time to restore sanity to our tax code, to tax this concentration of wealth heavily, and to use the funds for things like helping to support a resurgence of local sustainable agriculture around the world. Even a lot of U.S. food aid only makes things worse – offering as charity the excess commodities of US farmers, bought with our tax dollars, then shipped off to countries with hungry people, increasing dependency on foreign aid and undermining food sovereignty.
This model DOES NOT WORK. To understand why, read this article from the ABC News website, U.S. Food Aid Contributing to Africa’s Hunger?
Here’s the thing, friends. What we believe here is that the things we need for life itself, like food, water, clean air, and health care, ought not to be commodities from which corporate stockholders attain wealth. They are basic human rights, and the access to things needed for life should not be in the hands of corporations, corrupt governments, or governments in a handful of rich and powerful nations. Once we have destroyed land, contaminated or overused water supplies and robbed people of their ability to feed themselves, we have also stolen from the future of the planet and the people who will live on it.
Moral issues do not get any starker than this.
Friends, the U.N. is convening a World Summit on Food Security Nov. 16-18. This would be a great time to contact the White House, Sec. of State Clinton*, and your members of Congress to tell them that the hunger of our sisters and brothers around the world, fueled in part by unsustainable agricultural practices, matters to you.
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* Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
November 5th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/us-food-aid-contributing-africas-hunger/story?id=8939151
I went to the abc news article you gave a link to and read the comments which mostly seemed to reflect the – ethnocentric? racist? – biases and ignorance of the writers. No one, for example, made the probable link between Global Warming / Climate Change and the emerging conflicts in the drought zone of Africa. One European public radio program I recently listened to included commentary by nomadic pastoralists in Kenya who simply have NO TRADITIONAL EXPERIENCE with the severity of the drought they are living through: one suspects that GW may be the culprit since 1- IPCC reports predict such aridification and 2- GW is the major cedible source of variance actually large enough to do this much damage.
Yet the commentators on the article took an offended – “biting the hand that feeds” – or racist (?) tone – “why can’t they help themselves?”. They did not seem capable of connecting the dots in an interconnected world and getting the Big Picture.
Depressing: in democracies theory holds that “the People” are muture and wise enough to be held accountable for the governance of the Common Wealth. This doesn’t seem the case today! The media of mass “communication” seem to be used primarily to “dumb the masses down” the better to dupe them. The inner “élan” – impulse, leitmotif – of industrialization has transformed yeomen farmers into neurotic hyper-comsumers obsessed with proving they are better than those on the bottom of the heap. The programmed over-consumption and waste scrap the environment for future generations..
Erich Fromm: Escape from Freedom, deals with the psychosocial origins of industrialization (and Fascism, the two are fused at the hip).
http://www.123people.co.uk/ext/frm?ti=person%20finder&search_term=erich%20fromm&search_country=GB&st=person%20finder&target_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.infed.org%2Fthinkers%2Ffromm.htm§ion=weblink&wrt_id=216
I also note that current restrictions (on sourcing of aid, for example) render “aid” cost-inefficient: taxpayers end up subsiding up agro-industrial megacorporations.
Agricultural dumping from highly subsidized agricultural systems (N. America, Europe) into 3rd world countries destroys indigenous agricultural systems and, as impoverished 3rd world farmers are forced off the land to live in urban ghettos, the genetic diversity of cultivars is reduced exactly when we need to boost genetic diversity to deal with Climate Change. Talk about sawing off the branch you are standing on !!
Reading this article I find myself, once again, forced to think the politically incorrect thought: maybe “aid” from the developed world, whether bilateral – between nation states – or UN issue, is a poisoned apple. In the LONG run – several generations, say – the recipients of “aid” might actually be better off without it – Oh, heresy of heresies! Western aid – intentionally or not (I lean toward the unintentional) – might actually do slightly or moderatedly more damage when all the pluses and minuses, benefits and costs, are tallied up. It might be one of those situations in which a good – even noble – idea is executed in such a botched up fashion that the end results are actually counter-productive and end up worsening the very evils that one wanted to correct in the first place!
These are hard words to type (boy! are they..), I am almost ashamed – good “One Worlder” that I am – to post them.
However, as I learn to accept the reality of the emerging Post Peak Oil Economy (“The New Economy”) and its consequences (deglobalization, long term economic SHRINKAGE), I find there are surprising – unexpected – POTENTIAL benefits at every turn: deglobalization will, in all probablility, wean the 3rd world from the false patterns of “prosperity” imposed by the West. The West itself will no longer be able to inflict its “aid” and its “progress” on the rest of the planet. The 3rd world will be forced to think on its own feet, discover its own survival strategies..
November 9th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
It would be wonderful if we could use the resources of the internet to draw people together and build solidarity across ethnic and religious lines, to make people understand that we are all in the same boat which is sinking.
Over the past few days, in comemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I came to understand that tribalism, ethnocentricity and racism may be less hardwired than some would have us believe. In Korea, separated for about a half century, young people in the south have become somewhat unconcerned about re-unification. Many worry more about how much it will cost! This suggests to me that processes of social identification, cohesion and solidarity are more flexible than many imagined. We are maybe, therefore, capable of some degree of social identification on the planetary scale (even today people give volutarily to aid others living overseas). Such planetary, species-wide, identification is essential if we hope to solve GLOBAL challenges like global warming.
In Germany, too, divisions remain after the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall which, once again, suggests that social identification along tribal – ethnic lines may only be semi-hardwired.
It would be wonderful, too, if we had the wisdom to use the wealth stolen, generated and accumulated over centuries of planetary plunder by the West to launch a new cycle of development. As both industrialized and third world countries transit into the “New Economy” of expensive energy the accumulated reserves of the old industrial and the newly industrializing nations should be used to lay the foundations of a peaceful transition to the New Economy.
However – critical point! – these reserves are finite and won’t last long if they are frittered away in
- absurd foreign military adventures (due in part to past failed development in the third world),
- degrading violent mass “entertainment”,
- bail outs of failing segments of the “Old Economy”,
- ostentatious and wasteful consumption fueled by socially programmed status competition,
- subsidies to fundamental Old Economy industrial sectors (private auto, coal fired electricity, agro-business agriculture.. Collective, social investments in NEW Economy infrastructure is required instead.)
I think the point made most admirably in the original SEH article – although not made explicity – is that the real crisis is one of MORALS or ETHICS, not economics, technology or science. People chose technologies and economic systems. Much of science, by nature, serves the dominant economic system in place. All these are humanity’s creations. We are responsible for what we do with them..
Unfortunately, the dominant neocon ideology attempts to reify “market forces” into “Laws of Nature” analagous to those physics studies. One cannot fight market forces since these are Laws of Nature. But who labeled then Nature’s laws? God? Nature? Western economists? Such arguments are obviously self-serving for the corporate elites and should be denounced as such.
Karl Poanyi’s “The Great Transformation” is probably required reading for those wishing to get a handle on the shell game Free Marketeers are playing on the public with this “Law of Nature” bosh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation
The fundamental disconnect with physical reality in economical “thinking” is really quite incredible when you take the time to step back a moment and think through what they are REALLY SAYING! For reference, please go to the argument in comment 3, re: real wealth is ecological in nature:
http://www.ecologicalhope.org/featured/need-for-an-economicfinancial-revolution/#comments
Compare this ecologically founded reasoning with the madness which of conventional economic thinking. As the following quote from a major economic work published in 1840 clearly shows such irrationality is not new (my translation):
“Natural riches {resources} are inexhaustible for otherwise they would not be free. {what a beautiful piece of twisted logic! Go back and read it again to make sure you caught it: 1- WHO decided the natural resources were free in the first place, nature..? 2- the logical connection between inexhaustibility and price is not evident!} Since they cannot be multiplied nor exhausted, natural riches are not part of the subject matter of economic science”
from Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours complet d’économie politique (Complete Cours in Political Economics), 1840
The above quote gives good reason to those sceptics in the hard sciences who deny that economics has much to do with “real” science, its methods and thinking !! For example, the most basic law of (classical) physics is denied: conservation of matter: matter cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed. Natural resources, being material, cannot be “inexhaustible” (“inépuisable”) since the earth is limited in volume and matter occupies space. Moreover their exploitation only transforms them, which reduces their quantity. Such thinking is not merely “unscientific”, it is – when applied on a global scale – collective suicide. The question of price is, of course, a red herring: European plunderers decided that the value of natural resources was zero!
One of the really nasty offshoots (corollary) of the above “reasoning” is that, not being part of “economic science”, the damages, costs and risks of exploiting “free” natural resources do not into the ledgers of corporations and governments. Thus the costs of the damage done to the environment and to human health by industrial activities is simply passed on to the poor sucker living down wind / stream of the polluting plant. This constitutes a “hidden subsidy” or “externalized cost” of operation: otherwise the pollutor would have to pay up front for pollution abatement equipment. (It’s called socialism for the rich..)
But there’s more: economic thinking has not fundamentally changed since 1840. Nobel Prize winning (!) economist Robert Solow, for example, has written:
“It is very easy to find substitutes for natural resources. In principle there is no problem here. The world can, in effect, do without natural resources. Their exhaustion is no more than a surmountable difficulty, not a disaster”.
The above quote was taken from Serge Latouche: Décoloniser l’imaginaire (Parangon, 2003, page 28). My translation from French back to English is given, hence wording will differ from the original text.
Here’s another reason for scepticism regarding economics’ presumed “scientific” status! This is, in fact, a totally unsubstantiated claim with, at best, only partial validity for some materials.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1987/solow-autobio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Solow
Who the heck are those guys in Scandinavia giving out Nobel prizes too ??!!
Solow won the Nobel in 1987, so it is evident that Western economic thinking is still as disconnected from physical (ecological, biological, human) reality as it was back in 1840 (first quote).