By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
In an interview on Democracy Now!, Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, raises the question: Why, when the planet is producing more than enough food to feed everyone, do millions still face chronic hunger and starvation?
On December 10, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the World Food Programme (WFP), the world’s premier humanitarian organization combating global hunger and food insecurity. David Beasley, the WFP’s executive director, accepting the prize at its headquarters in Rome, said that he saw the Nobel Committee’s decision to grant the prize to the WFP as entailing “a call to action”—action to ensure that hunger is finally vanquished from the face of the earth. However, he warned, we are currently heading in the wrong direction. A combination of factors—multiple wars, climate change, the use of hunger as a political and military weapon, and the coronavirus pandemic—is pushing 270 million people ever closer to starvation. Thirty million of these, he said, are completely dependent on the WFP for their food.
He pointed out that the present may be “the most ironic moment in modern history,” a time when we find a grim chasm between the potential promise of the world’s wealth and the appalling fate that weighs upon a sizable portion of humanity. The world economy today has a value of $400 trillion, yet 200 million people hover on the brink of starvation, facing horrific illness and death. It would take only $5 billion to save the 30 million lives that utterly depend on the WFP, yet the agency struggles to raise even this much, which is a tiny fraction of the world’s military spending.
While Beasley applauds the work of the WFP in saving lives, he does not find his job an easy one. He says: “I don’t go to bed at night thinking about the children we saved; I go to bed weeping over the children we could not save. And when we don’t have enough money nor the access we need, we have to decide which children eat and which children do not eat, which children live, which children die.”
Why Do Millions Face Chronic Hunger?
In a recent report, the progressive news program Democracy Now! features an interview with Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Early in the interview, Salvador raises the question why it is, when the planet is producing more than enough food to feed everyone, so many millions face chronic hunger and starvation. The answer, he states, partly lies in the structure of the global food system. If so many people go hungry year after year, this is not because we are short on food but because too many lack access to food. The global food system, as presently structured, allows those in positions of power and privilege to make major decisions that deprive others, less powerful, of the resources they need to eat and thrive.
Salvador points out that the modern food system is constructed as a business model. As such, this model is not intended to guarantee that everyone gets to eat, but to ensure that those who invest in the system receive the financial returns they expect on their investments. It is not only wealthy investors who benefit from the system but even middle-class folk in economically affluent countries. In the U.S. and other developed countries, almost any middle-class family can obtain from their local supermarket virtually any food item grown anywhere on the planet. But in other enclaves far from our range of sight, hundreds of millions suffer the consequences of the consumption we take for granted. When we consume even simple everyday products like coffee, tea, and chocolate, we seldom realize that we enjoy these things through the labor of people who lack the basic resources critical to a satisfactory standard of living. What is out of sight may be out of mind—for us—but it is the hard reality that ordinary people face all around the world.
Land Grabs and Food Blockades
One of the most abhorrent features of the global food system, mentioned by Salvador, is land grabs. In a traditional economy, farmers own small plots of land on which they grow crops for their own use and to sell at the local market. This allows them to subsist, not in luxury but with a sufficient degree of life satisfaction to preserve their self-esteem. However, in countries in Africa and Asia, oppressive poverty and official government policy often compel subsistence farmers to sell their small plots of land to state enterprises or large multinational corporations. These consolidate the plots into large estates which they use to grow specialized cash crops for the markets of the global North. As a result, local populations lack the land to grow the essential crops they need for direct consumption and for sale at local markets. Rendered landless, they must toil as wage laborers earning just enough to get by from one day to the next, usually under degrading conditions. And those who don’t get to work lose all access to food.
Salvador cites Africa as an example of sheer economic pillage conducted under the guise of legitimacy. Though often thought of as perpetually afflicted with a dearth of food, the continent actually produces more than enough to feed its entire population. However, what is occurring in many African countries is that “governments are making land lease deals with foreign companies or other nations, mainly China, so that the production of Africa is literally appropriated to meet the needs of other countries that have the capital to compete for that land and for the production of that land against the interests of native Africans.”
Another form of food deprivation mentioned in the interview is the deliberate withholding of food as a weapon of war, a weapon that can be as lethal as bombs and bullets. The prime example he cites is Yemen, where a civil war is being conducted as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The conflict in Yemen is widely considered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. To subdue their rivals into submission, both sides in the conflict have imposed food blockades that have pushed hundreds of thousands to the edge of starvation—and beyond. At times, as many as 8.4 million people have been at risk of starvation, with acute malnutrition threatening the lives of almost 400,000 children under the age of 5.
Repairing the Global Food System
Salvador does not make specific suggestions about the kinds of policy shifts needed to tackle hunger on a global scale, but his remarks suggest that a far-reaching overhaul of the international food system is necessary. Whatever official policy changes are implemented must be guided by a moral imperative. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 25, takes this moral stance, recognizing food as a fundamental human right. What we must do now, on a global scale, is take up the task of feeding the entire world population as a shared moral challenge, a challenge that must be met if we are to measure up to our humanity.
We can’t complain that we lack the funding to meet this demand. If we had the moral will, funds would not be an obstacle. After all, nations around the world—especially the major military powers—invest hundreds of billions in their military forces and weapons of war. The U.S. itself has a defense budget of almost a trillion dollars. It would take only a tiny fraction of this to guarantee that everyone eats, that no one starves, that no child lives in misery, reduced to a heap of skin and bones.
However, acts of charity are not enough. People should be able to obtain the food they need in a way that affirms their inherent dignity. This means that they obtain their food through their own resources, not through the generosity of others. They would either grow their own food on land that they themselves possess or earn enough to live on a nutritious diet. To achieve this goal, the current dominant model of industrial agriculture, often cruel and destructive and blindly driven by the profit motive, needs to be substantially supplemented, if not replaced, by the alternative model of agroecology.
Agroecology offers a holistic approach to agriculture that is based on principles of ecology as well as food and nutrition security, food sovereignty, and food justice. Instead of relying on chemical inputs, many derived from fossil fuels and detrimental to the long-term vitality of the soil, agroecology seeks to enhance agricultural systems by relying on natural resources and recycling organic waste back into the environment. This is a model that emphasizes a diet centered around vegetables and fruits rather than meat, and reduces the enormous carbon footprint generated by industrial agriculture.
In place of large commercial farms, advocates of agroecology support food production by small food producers and family farmers, drawing upon farmers’ traditional knowledge and practices as well as on innovations that farmers arrive at through trial and error. If we are to triumph in the global struggle to abolish hunger and curb escalating climate change, we have to realize that the industrial model of agriculture is a blunt weapon of choice. In the long run industrial farms, highly dependent on complex machinery and transport systems that run on fossil fuels, degrade the health of the soil, pollute water systems, emit large quantities of toxins into the environment, create dependency on external inputs, and impair biodiversity and ecosystems. Through its reliance on fossil fuels, this system is also a major contributor to rising carbon emissions.
In contrast, agroecology can increase the incomes of farmers while also providing abundant yields, competitive in many ways with those coming from commercial agriculture. This system of agriculture helps to reduce carbon emissions and improves biodiversity and crop diversity. It therefore offers us one of the most potent means for reducing global hunger.
According to the 2014 Report of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food:
There are strong environmental arguments in favor of agroecology. But agroecology also provides other social and health benefits. Diverse farming systems contribute to more diverse diets for the communities that produce their own food, thus improving nutrition. Because agroecology reduces the cost of farming by minimizing the use of expensive inputs, it improves the livelihoods of farming households, particularly the poorest households. And it supports rural development: because it is knowledge-intensive and generally more labor-intensive, it creates employment opportunities in rural areas.
On its own, of course, agroecology cannot serve as a complete remedy for the problem of global hunger. That would require an array of far-reaching measures, including the resolution of conflict (both within countries and between countries), the reduction of poverty, expanded educational opportunities for poor children, and improvements in the status of women. But agroecology along with other modes of small-scale cultivation can be included as an important part of the solution.
Apart from the resolution of conflict, which is beyond our purview, all the other factors essential to reduce global hunger figure prominently in BGR projects, as can be seen in the “Project Areas” section of our website.
