-Caveat Lector-
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Thu, 30 May 2002 17:18:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: !b_a_Act: No shit! Bill Gate$ Wants to "Feed" the World's Poor
with
Chemicals!
[Not content to sue and bully international educational groups who
attempt to use outdated versions of Windoze and other Micro$hit
software without paying for licenses, Bill Gate$ now wants to put all
the farmers of the third world out of business. Better starvation
through chemistry. This is charity. Leave faith and hope at the door.]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - May 22, 2002
A Better Way to Feed the Hungry
by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe
Bill Gates thinks he's got a brilliant idea: fighting malnutrition
abroad by fortifying food.
The scheme, backed with $50 million from the Gates Foundation, in
part encourages Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris' Kraft, and other
companies to develop vitamin and iron-fortified processed foods. It
then facilitates their entry into Third World markets.
Gates seems to believe we don't have time to address the complex
social and political roots of malnutrition. But in opting for this
single-focus, top-down, technical intervention, Gates can end up
hurting the very people he wants to help.
His strategy ignores a crucial reality: Many, if not most, of the
hungriest people in the world are themselves farmers. They eke out a
living by selling what they grow, and eating it. Helping foreign food
purveyors penetrate their markets will only further rob them of
livelihood. For example, India's dairy cooperatives -- many run by
poor women -- would be hard-pressed to withstand the onslaught of
Kraft's marketing power.
The Gates approach also hurts the poor if it shifts tastes toward
processed foods -- typically adding fat, sugar, and salt while
removing needed fiber and micronutrients. This diet trend already
contributes to the spread of diseases currently burdening the
industrial world. Obesity and diet-related diseases including
diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are becoming a global crisis. In
the Third World, grossly insufficient health care budgets are now
being diverted to treat these conditions, and away from treating
deadly infectious diseases.
Aiding market penetration by global food processing companies also
ends up making consumers dependent on foreign suppliers for life's
essentials. But while corporations such as Kraft or Proctor & Gamble
might well participate in Gates' do-good scheme, ultimately their
interests diverge from those of the hungry. By law, theirs is
assuring the highest return to their shareholders -- foreigners --
not the improved well-being of local people, and certainly not hungry
local people too poor to make their needs felt in the market.
Even the piece of the Gates scheme focused on fortifying grain
(presumably locally grown) misses critical lessons learned since the
first World Food Conference in Rome declared war on global hunger
almost three decades ago.
Then, many still believed that hunger could be solved by simple,
mass-production approaches. After decades of failed,
technologically-driven solutions, a new wisdom is emerging.
We recently traveled on five continents, witnessing a heartening
array of local initiatives addressing the complex, interwoven roots
of needless malnutrition. These are not pie-in-the-sky solutions;
they are working.
In 1993 Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared food a
right of citizenship. This single shift of frame -- beyond charitable
hand-outs, beyond market tyranny -- unleashed dozens of innovations:
Making city plots available for local, organic farmers as long as
they keep prices within the reach of the poor; posting where to find
the cheapest prices for over 40 food staples; enhancing nutrition in
school lunches by replacing processed foods with local organic food.
The city also tries to innoculate newly arrived dwellers against
global corporate food advertising (probably including that of the
very companies in the Gates fold) by educating them to the value of
sticking with the healthy whole foods diets they grew up on in the
countryside.
Across the globe in Kenya, women of the Green Belt Movement, an
anti-desertification campaign that has planted 20 million trees, are
now reclaiming diverse, traditional food crops. They are creating
organic kitchen gardens growing precisely the fruits and vegetables
that provide the nutrients Gates' fortification scheme seeks to
supply.
A promising international "fair trade" movement now also addresses
the powerlessness that leaves people malnourished in the first place.
Third World producers can market fair trade products, such as coffee
certified by Oakland-based Transfair USA, helping to ensure the
livelihood of some of the world's poorest people.
Tens of thousands of such innovative efforts, many citizen driven,
continue to emerge on every continent. They are succeeding because
they address the real causes of malnutrition -- concentrated economic
and political power that blocks people from pursuing their interests
and from building vibrant, sustainable local economies, accountable
to local needs.
Just imagine what might happen if Bill Gates chose not to fortify
corporate foods but to use his $50 million to fortify efforts like
these, encouraging their cross-fertilization and replication. With
nutrient deficiencies stunting the lives of at least two billion
people we can't afford ill-considered strategies that will hurt
rather than help.
[Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe are authors of "Hope's Edge: The
Next Diet for a Small Planet" http://www.dietforasmallplanet.com ]
(c)1999-2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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