http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/09-8
Published on Wednesday, October 9, 2013 by OtherWords
More Food Doesn't Guarantee Less Hunger
Increasing the world's food supply won't end hunger unless we address
inequality and injustice.
by Jill Richardson
Every October, world leaders and corporate executives gather in Iowa
to present the World Food Prize. Intended to celebrate those who make
the largest contributions to increasing the world's food supply, the
recipients are announced each year by the U.S. Secretary of State.
On the same day that award is bestowed each year, so is another one.
It's less well-known but, in my view, far more important.
This alternative accolade is called the Food Sovereignty Prize. Like
the World Food Prize, it deals with food and hunger, but in a very
different way.
The corporations that fund the World Food Prize may not entirely
drive its agenda, but they certainly influence it. By focusing on the
sheer volume of food in the world, they aim to reduce global hunger
to a simple matter of science. Then they sell us on the idea that we
need their products to increase the amount of food farmers harvest
from each acre.
But producing more food doesn't always mean feeding more hungry
mouths. The Food Sovereignty Prize recognizes that ending hunger is
not a simple matter of growing more food. It involves social science
as well as physical science.
When a farmer produces an extra ten bushels of crops from each acre
of land, perhaps more people will eat - or maybe not. Americans don't
have to travel around the world to see this, we must only ask our
grandparents. During the Great Depression, farmers grew a great
surplus of food, and food prices crashed. Both farmers and consumers
suffered, as farmers went into bankruptcy while the urban poor
starved.
Today, we grow more food than we need - and then throw 40 percent of
it away. Meanwhile, many Americans can afford to eat enough calories
but only by buying cheap junk food that will ultimately make them
sick. And that's just in America, a wealthy nation. What about poor
countries?
Smallholder farmers from around the world came together in 2007 and
dreamed of "a world where all peoples, nations and states are able to
determine their own food producing systems and policies that provide
every one of us with good quality, adequate, affordable, healthy, and
culturally appropriate food." They called this idea "food
sovereignty."
In the U.S., food sovereignty means that a North Carolina family
won't wake up one day to find out their property value has tanked
because a factory hog farm set up shop next door and the air smells
like manure day in and day out. Or a small farmer in Maine who raises
a few chickens for meat won't be told that she can't slaughter and
sell them unless she first spends $30,000 on a government-approved
facility for this purpose.
In the rest of the world, it means that peasant farmers who have
farmed their family's land for generations but lack formal land
titles won't have their land sold out from under them to a foreign
corporation by their own government. And it means that indigenous
farmers in the Andes will not suddenly find that they can't grow
their traditional potato varieties because the climate changed.
This year's Food Sovereignty Prize goes to several Haitian groups who
have together helped their nation's peasant farmers conserve
traditional seeds, improve farming practices, recover from the
country's massive 2010 earthquake, and alleviate poverty.
Why are world leaders rubbing elbows with corporate executives at the
World Food Prize ceremony instead of the Haitian peasants who won the
Food Sovereignty Prize? Perhaps because advocates of food sovereignty
understand that achieving their goal will upset the social order in
which the 1 percent holds all the cards and the rest of us hope to be
trickled down upon.
And yet, if we aim to make any real progress toward ending poverty
and hunger, we must start by challenging the inequality in our world
today.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License
Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a
member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board.
She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is
Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
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