Exposing The Myths
Myth 1
People are hungry because of scarcity, both of food and land.
Scarcity cannot be considered the cause of hunger when even in the worst years of famine there is always plenty of food in the world – enough in grain alone to provide everyone in the world with 3000 to 4000 calories a day, not counting all the beans, root crops, fruits, nuts, vegetables and non grain-fed meat?
And what about land scarcity?
We looked at the most crowded countries in the world to see if we could find a correlation between population density and hunger. We could not. Bangladesh, for example has just half the people per cultivated hectare that Taiwan has. Yet Taiwan has no starvation while people in Bangladesh often experience food shortages. China has more than twice as many people for each cultivated hectare as many other countries. Yet in China people are not hungry.
Conversely, in Central America and in the Caribbean, where as much as 70% of the children are undernourished, at least half of the agricultural land (and the best land) grows crops for export – not food for the local people.
Myth 2
There are just too many people in the world. An exploding world population means there is less food for everyone.
If ‘too many people’ cause hunger, we would expect to find more hungry people in countries with more people per agricultural hectare. Yet we can find no such correlation.
Countries with comparatively large amounts of agricultural land per person have some of the most severe and chronic hunger in the world. While severe hunger is a recurring problem for many people in Bolivia, for example, they live in a country with well over one-half acre of cultivated land per person, significantly more than in France. Brazil has more cultivated land per person then the United States. Mexico, where many rural people have suffered from undernourishment, has more cultivated land per person than Cuba, where now virtually no-one is underfed.
Rapid population growth often reflects people’s need to have many children in an attempt to provide labourers to increase meagre family income, to provide old age security and to compensate for the high infant death rate, the result of inadequate nutrition and health care. Moreover, high birth rates reflect the social powerlessness of women which is intensified by poverty.
Myth 3
Hunger will be overcome by concentrating on producing more food.
Diagnosing the cause of hunger as scarcity inevitably leads to the conclusion that increased production in itself will solve the problem. Techniques to boost production have thus been the central thrust of the ‘war on hunger’ for at least 50 years. Governments, international agencies and agribusiness corporations have promoted ‘modernisation’ – large-scale irrigation, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, machinery and the seeds dependent on such inputs – all to make the land produce more. Such farming practices have been labelled the ‘green revolution’.
But when a new agricultural technology enters a system where there are power inequalities it tends to profit only those who already possess some combination of land, money, ‘credit-access’ or political influence. This selectivity alone has excluded most of the world’s rural population and all the world’s hungry.
Myth 4
To achieve food security the hungry world must rely on large land holders.
Governments and international lending agencies have sometimes passed over the small producer, believing that concentrating on large holders was the quickest road to production gains. However, a study of 83 countries reveals that just over 3% of the landholders control about 80% of the farmland. This gives some idea of how many of the world’s farmers would be excluded by such a policy.
A study of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala found the small farmer to be three to fourteen times more productive per hectare than the larger farmer. In Thailand plots of one to two hectares yield almost 60% more rice per acre than farms of 55 hectares or more. Other proof that justice for the small farmer increases production comes from the experience of countries in which the redistribution of land and other basic agricultural resources like water has resulted in rapid growth in agricultural production: Japan, Taiwan, and China stand out.
Myth 5
We are faced with a tragic trade-off. A needed increase in food production can come only at the expense of the ecological integrity of our food base. Farming must be pushed onto marginal lands at the risk of irreparable erosion. The use of pesticides will have to be increased even if the risks are great.
Haiti offers a sad picture of environmental destruction. The majority of the farmers cultivate the once-green mountain slopes in a desperate effort to grow food. Has food production in Haiti used up every hectare of farm land so that only the mountain slopes are left? No. Those seeking to farm the fragile slopes can only be seen as exiles from their birthright – some of the world’s richest agricultural land. The rich valley lands are in the control of a handful of elites (and their overseas partners) whose concern is not food but dollars to pay for an imported lifestyle. These fertile lands are thus made to produce largely low-nutrition crops (sugar, coffee, cocoa) exclusively for export.
With the urgent need to grow more food, won’t we have to accept some level of harm from deadly chemicals?
Nearly half the pesticides in the United States are used not on farmland, but on golf courses, parks and lawns. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that some American farmers once used 50 million pounds of pesticides and lost 7% of their crop before harvest. Today they use 12 times more pesticides yet the percentage of the crop lost before harvest has almost doubled. In the South, most pesticides are used for export crops, (principally cotton and to a lesser extent for fruits and vegetables) grown under plantation conditions. The quantities of pesticides injected into the world’s environment therefore have little to do with the food needs of the hungry.
Myth 6
A developing country’s best hope for development is to export crops in which it has a natural advantage and to use the earnings to import food and industrial goods.
Export-orientated agricultural operations invariably import capital-intensive technologies, such as chemical fertilisers and pesticides, to maximise, yields as well as to meet the foreign markets’ ’beauty standards’ and processing specifications. Basing an agricultural system on imported technologies helps ensure that whatever is produced will be exported to pay the import bill – a vicious circle of dependency.
Export crops were mostly chosen by former colonial powers on the basis of what would bring the greatest profit in the high-paying markets back home. The same land now growing cocoa, coffee, rubber, tea, or sugar, could grow an incredible diversity of nutritious crops – grains, high-protein legumes, vegetables, fruits and root crops.
Myth 7
Hunger is a contest between the Rich World and the Poor World.
Terms like ’hungry world’ and ’poor world’ make us think of uniformly hungry masses. They hide the reality of hierarchical societies in which hunger afflicts the lower rungs in both the North and the South.
The hungry all over the world are linked through a common threat: the tightening of control over the most basic human need – food. The process of increasing concentration of control over land and other productive resources that we have identified as the direct cause of hunger in the South is also going on in the North.
Myth 8
Peasants are so oppressed, malnourished and conditioned into a state of dependency that they are beyond the point of being able to mobilise themselves.
This view ignores a fundamental reality in every country today. Because of the selective way news is transmitted to us, we are often unaware of the courageous struggle of millions of people everywhere to gain control over food-producing resources.
Many who question what peasant farmers can do for themselves seem unaware that people in many countries have, in our lifetimes, freed themselves from hunger through their own efforts. Even during the worst years of war in the 1960s, the Vietnamese were improving their agriculture. Yields were going up, and irrigation was extended from 20% of the cultivated area in the mid-1950s to nearly 60%. The Chinese people, formerly at the mercy of droughts and floods, have built reservoirs and multiplied their irrigated land through a system based on local self-reliance and local initiative. The Chinese now cultivate one third of all irrigated land in the world, and have doubled their yields of major grains.
Myth 9
Hunger should be overcome by world trade redistributing food from areas where there is a surplus to areas where there is a shortage.
There is a problem in seeing trade as the solution to hunger. Distribution of food is a reflection of the control of the resources that produce food. Whoever controls the land determines who can grow food; what is grown; and where it goes.
Thus redistribution programmes cannot solve the problem of hunger. Instead we must face up to the real question: how can people everywhere begin to democratise the control of food resources?
Myth 10
To solve the problem of hunger we must increase food aid.
Increasing foreign aid budgets is a narrow view because direct assistance through aid is only a small fraction of the total economic impact of international investments.
Of course, food aid is essential in times of emergency. However, it needs to be part of a long-term strategy of agricultural reform – to help prevent famines from recurring. This will require serious steps to redistribute control over food-producing resources.
Source: Adapted from Lappe, F.M. and Collins J. (1998) World Hunger: Twelve Myths, 2nd edition, Grove Press, New York.
