Sustainability and Hunger

There are things people need to understand about hunger, courtesy of Food First:

... Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - ­vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - ­enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. ...

So remember this: we have enough food in the world to make everyone fat. Everyone.

This is a distribution problem, a social justice problem, a profit-sharing problem, an employment security problem, a land access problem ... but there's an abundance of food in the world. The people flogging scarcity and crop yields as our biggest obstacles to feeding the world are at best misinformed, at worst, deliberately lying for personal or political gain.

In the case of politicians, those of them who are generally progressive, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been misled by hyper-slick lobbyists who make a convincing case that their corporations are doing good and really care about the public interest. The large food corporations have even bought out much of the anti-hunger lobby in the US, donating to their causes and sponsoring their DC publicity events, all for the sake of preventing anyone from looking too closely at how their management of food distribution channels actively promotes hunger.

It works really well.

Consider Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent call for support to 'sustainable agriculture'. She outlines seven principles, elaborated here, likely without realizing that the implications of the first, as commonly implemented, can readily undermine the third:

1. We will seek to increase agricultural productivity, by expanding access to quality seeds, fertilizers, irrigation tools, and the credit to purchase them and training to use them. ...

3. We are committed to maintaining natural resources, so the land can be farmed well into the future. That includes helping developing communities adapt to climate change, which has had a major effect on the world's farms. ...

The first item there is a direct call to push agriculture in the developing world towards the current model of mainstream US farming. It flat out won't work.

The whole industrialized approach to agriculture relies on being able to successfully maintain access to credit over a long period of time, being able to produce high yields over that same period of time, having steady access to an abundant surface or underground water source, and hoping that so many people aren't getting higher yields of the same crop you're growing that prices become too depressed for any of you to make a living.

In short, it's a dodgy proposition for people in desertifying areas, particularly when faced with political instability or living in regions where armed conflict may be an issue.

One bad crop year can mean not only hunger, but an insurmountable burden of debt and poor credit.

I know that Secretary Clinton has spent an unfortunate amount of time in the company of Monsanto representatives, but I hope she'll also consider what this development model means for people not living on top of the equivalent of the Ogallala aquifer. Indeed, what it's meant for the people who are living and farming over the Ogallala now - it's going to run out, and then what?

If a farmer can't access a steady source of irrigation water, do we give up on them and their neighbors? Even in water deprived Burkina Faso, farmers can set up simple lines of stone on the contours of their property? A stone line on the ground can create immediate improvement in land quality in just a year, foster the survival of protective hedges, and make better use of that land's natural water 'budget' even without irrigation.

Before markets are opened, before infrastructure is improved, and whether you're talking hybrid crops or GMOs, farmers who have poor economic and trade infrastructure access need to be supplied with seeds that can be saved and used again the following year. They need access to animals who can produce fertilizer on an ongoing basis, as opposed to having always to buy industrial soil amendments.

Farmers in all regions of the world need to be trained to use not just technology that works in the Midwestern breadbasket region of the United States, but in appropriate technology for their region, economy and climate situation. In many cases, that means the 'technology' transfer, the intellectual property and understanding, that they need is one that relies on the independent capacity of plants and animals to reproduce themselves and sustain the life-giving properties of their local environs.

As long as there isn't a sufficiency of living wage, non-farm jobs, nor the educational infrastructure to make that viable, subsistence and small-scale farming must not be undermined as it has been in India, where early adopters of Green Revolution techniques and export-oriented farming are now killing themselves in droves as they fall prey to unsustainable burdens of debt.

[Update: Jill Richardson highlights some of these same issues with Clinton's comments on LaVidaLocavore, as well as related comments by a member of her staff, noting that many 'high-yield' varieties could more accurately be called high-input varieties.]