Word: hungering
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...HUNGER, most Americans seem to believe, is one of those insoluble problems, a result of rapid population growth in a world with limited resources. Newspapers have stopped running those heart-wrenching pictures of malnourished babies in the Third World; we seem to have reached a tacit agreement that if the Green Revolution could not feed the world, nothing can. People will go on starving--in Bangladesh, in the Sahel, on the outskirts of every large Third World city--and the best we can hope to do is buy time until things get really serious, and save ourselves when they...
...authors of Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity take a more optimistic view of the problems of world hunger. In her bestselling Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappe took the position that Americans must learn to sacrifice as individuals, to reduce their consumption levels in an effort to spread thin resources around. In Food First, however, she and her co-author Joseph Collins examine the root causes of world hunger. Their conclusions are both startling and persuasive...
Once you accept this fact, and the fact that much of the globe's arable land is underutilized, the problem of hunger takes on new dimensions. If Mali produced enough peanuts to export them during the 1974 drought in the Sahel, why were peasants there starving? If it is possible to increase productivity on Bangladesh acreage by a factor of 15, why is the country so often described as a basket case whose people are doomed...
Lappe and Collins use these questions as the basis of further exploration. Using a question-and-answer format that is generally successful, they argue that the real source of world hunger is the social framework in which it occurs. "Once the livelihood of millions of self-provisioning farmers," they write, "agriculture is becoming the profit base of influential commercial entrepeneurs--traditional landed elites, city-based agricultural speculators, and foreign corporations." Studies show that large landholders who use traditional labor-intensive techniques tend to be much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, who draw as much as possible...
ONCE THE PROBLEM OF HUNGER is presented as the result of social structure rather than of simple resource shortages, it becomes possible to find solutions. Social structures, unlike land areas, are man-made and malleable. Lappe and Collins recommend that Third World countries adopt a "food first" policy, that the people of the Third World concentrate on producing food for the hungry within their borders rather than on exporting luxuries to western markets. Such a policy might not supply televisions and Paris-designed clothes to the wealthy, but it would feed people whose children now suffer permanent brain damage through...