Sherry Chandler

Democracy can end food crisis

Frances Moore Lappé, writing in The Progressive, says it is a shortage of democracy, not food that is making the world hungry:

Beneath lies the deeper cause: the scarcity not of food but of democracy. Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs. And, since a say in one’s future is the very essence of democracy, the existence of hunger belies democracy.

And what is killing democracy, while generating hunger? It is a belief system.

…

And from it flows what I call “faith-based economics” because it is detached from real-world evidence. History demonstrates that only a government accountable to citizens can keep a market competitive and open so that all citizens are able to access it.

Today’s headlines, though, repeat the myth that weather and the inexorable increase in demand, especially among the new “middle classes” in India and China, explain the crisis—along with the unforeseen consequences of enlisting cropland in ethanol production. Wrong. Our worsening democracy deficit has continued to set the world up for disaster, undermining production and access to food worldwide.

Let us count the ways.

Unaccountable international agencies, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, made loans on the condition that recipient countries reduce public support for local producers and food buyers. So African governments cut help to small farmers, and India said only the poorest of the poor could access its public “fair-price” shops that sell below-market-price grain.
Meanwhile, large agricultural interests in the North secured subsidies—almost half a billion dollars a day—making their grain so cheap its sales undercut markets for poor farmers in the South, ultimately driving many from the land.

And it gets worse. Trade agreements—most notably the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement—ended tariffs that protected local farmers. In Mexico, for example, more than a million farmers went under in the decade following the agreement.

Then, in recent years, speculators have turned futures trading—set up to protect farmers and wholesalers from extreme weather-caused price swings—into their private bonanza, pushing up the short-term price of food.

Finally, while analysts talk as if the uptick in demand for wasteful grain-fed meat is inevitable, it isn’t. Democracy deficits in India and China have generated massive inequalities, heightening demand for costly grain-fed meat. With more equitable advancement that empowered rural dwellers, demand for meat could likely be met by small farms using the long-held, ecological, and cost-effective practice of feeding waste, like corn stalks and rice husks, to livestock.

Moore offers solutions, among them:

• Get money out of—and citizens’ voices into—governance.
• Shift public support to family farmers using sustainable agroecology. A 2007 University of Michigan study concluded that moving globally to sustainable, organic farming methods could increase food output by about 57 percent. A four-year study to evaluate the impact of such practices—involving almost thirteen million farmers and more than ninety million acres in fifty-seven countries—showed on average a 79 percent production increase.
• Grow the number of family farmers. One of the world’s largest democratic social movements, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, has succeeded in transferring almost twenty million acres to almost a third of a million rural landless families, creating thousands of new farmers and enterprises and greatly reducing hunger.

Read the whole article.

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