Too Many People? 5/5

In troubled times, all of us seek ways to make sense of the world. The way people think about hunger is the greatest obstacle to ending it. A centuries-old debate has recently heated up: just how close are we to the earth's limits? Worries about global food shortages are nothing more than apocalyptic scenarios. The conventional wisdom is that world hunger exists primarily because of natural disasters, population pressure, and shortfalls in food production. These problems are compounded, it is believed, by ecological crises and global warming, which together result in further food scarcity. Ergo, hunger exists simply because there isn’t enough food to go around.

Not everyone has adequate access to the food they need, and this has lead to large-scale hunger and malnutrition in the world. In 2009, more than one billion people worldwide were considered to be undernourished; this means that one in every six persons suffers from hunger every day. Around a quarter of all children under 5 years of age suffer from acute or chronic symptoms of malnutrition; during seasonal food shortages and in times of famine and social unrest, this number increases. According to some estimates, malnutrition is an important factor among the children who die from preventable diseases and infections, such as measles, diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia. The vast majority of the undernourished people live in Asia and the Pacific. This region, which is home to 70% of the total population of the developing world, accounts for almost two-thirds of the undernourished people. A quarter of the undernourished are in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is also the region with the highest proportion of its population undernourished.

There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life. Yet people go hungry even when there's plenty of food around. Often it's a question of access - they can’t afford food. Chronic hunger has a range of causes, but global food scarcity is not one of them. Only when we free ourselves from the myth of scarcity can we begin to look for hunger's real causes.

According to the World Food Programme, we produce enough to feed the global population of 7 billion people. And the world produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago, and the rate of food production has increased faster than the rate of population growth for the past two decades. Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third. Even after diverting roughly half of the world’s grain and most soy protein to animal feed and non-food uses, the world still produces enough to provide every human being with nearly 2,900 calories a day. Clearly, our global calorie supply is ample. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: 2 1/2 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.

There is plenty of food in the world. Production of cereals (wheat, rice, millet etc) in 1985 reached 1799.2 million tons, enough to offer everyone in the world well over the recommended minimum of 2.500 calories per adult per day. And that is before you’ve even begun to count the calories in vegetables, nuts, pulses, root crops and grass-fed (as opposed to grain-fed) meat.

There’s little relationship between hunger and the availability of land. Holland has 1.117 people per square mile and Bolivia (just 12, yet the Dutch are one of the best-fed people in the world and the Bolivian poor among the world’s most undernourished. We think of India as overpopulated yet it has 568 people per square mile, less than Britain’s 583. And Africa may have the world’s greatest food problem - but it isn’t for the lack of land. At the moment only a quarter of Africa’s potential arable land is being cultivated. Thanks to continuing increases in crop yields, the world's farmers are harvesting hundreds of millions of tons more grain each year on tens of millions of acres less land than they did in the 1970s and '80s. For instance, according to USDA figures, the world was producing 1.9 million metric tons of grain from 579.1 hectares of land (a hectare is 2.47 acres) in 1976. In 2004, we got 3.1 million metric tons of grain from only 517.9 hectares of land. This is quite a jump.

The United States Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) provides financial assistance by "renting" the land from the farmers so that things like grass and trees can be planted there instead of crops.

According to a 2009 report published by the FAO, about 400 million hectares of African savannah are quite suitable for farming--but only 10 percent of that land is currently cultivated. Called the Guinea Savannah Zone, this stretch of arable land winds through 25 African countries. And, even though Africa has a dire history of war and unstable government, things have recently begun to look up for many of these nations, which means this land is more likely to be cultivated in the future. According to the FAO, "Africa is better placed today to achieve rapid development in agriculture than either northeast Thailand or the Cerrado when their agricultural transformation took off in 1980 . . . There are a number of reasons for this: rapid economic, population and urban growth providing diverse and ample domestic markets; favourable domestic policy environments, improved business climates in many countries; increased foreign and domestic investment in agriculture; and the use of new technologies."

the real reasons for Africa's food problems are no mystery. Africa's food potential has been distorted and thwarted.

* The colonial land grab that continued into the modern era displaced peoples and the production of foodstuffs from good lands toward marginal ones, giving rise to a pattern where good land is mostly dedicated to the production of cash crops for export or is even unused by its owners. Furthermore, colonisers and, subsequently, national and international agencies, have discredited peasant producers' often sophisticated knowledge of ecologically appropriate farming systems. Promoting "modern," often imported, and ecologically destructive technologies, they have cut Africa's food producers out of economic decisions most affecting their very survival.

* Public resources, including research and agricultural credit, have been channelled to export crops to the virtual exclusion of peasant-produced food crops such as millet, sorghum, and root crops. In the 1 980s increased pressure to export to pay interest on foreign debt further reinforced this imbalance.

* Women are principal food producers in many parts of Africa, yet both colonial policy and, all too often, ill-conceived foreign aid and investment projects have placed decisions over land use and credit in the domain of men. In many cases that has meant preferential treatment for cash crops over food crops, skewing land use and investment patterns toward cash crops.

* Aid policies unaccountable to African peasant producers and pastoralists have generally bypassed their needs in favour of expensive, large-scale projects. Africa has historically received less aid for agriculture than any other continent, and only a fraction of it has reached rain-fed agriculture, on which the bulk of grain production depends. Most of the aid has backed irrigated, export-oriented, elite-controlled production.

Because of external as well as domestic factors African governments have often maintained cheap food policies whereby peasants are paid so poorly for their crops that they have little incentive to produce, especially for official market channels. The factors responsible for these policies have included developed country dumping of food surpluses in African markets at artificially low prices, developed country interest in cheap wages to guarantee profitable export production, "middle-class" African consumer demand for affordable meat and dairy products produced with cheap grain, and government concerns about urban political support and potential unrest. The net effect has been to both depress local food production and divert it toward informal, and therefore unrecorded, markets.

Until recently many African governments also overvalued their currencies, making imported food artificially cheap and undercutting local producers of millet, sorghum, and cassava. Although recent policy changes have devalued currencies, which might make locally produced food more attractive, accompanying free trade policies have brought increased imports of cheap food from developed countries, largely cancelling any positive effect.

* Urban tastes have increasingly shifted to imported grain, particularly wheat, which few countries in Africa can grow economically. Thirty years ago, only a small minority of urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa ate wheat. Today bread is a staple for many urbanites, and bread and other wheat products account for about a third of all the region's grain imports. U.S. food aid and advertising by multinational corporations ("He'll be smart. He'll go far. He'll eat bread.") have played their part in molding African tastes to what the developed countries have to sell.

Thus beneath the "scarcity diagnosis" of Africa's food situation lie many human-made (often Western influenced) and therefore reversible causes. Even Africa's high birth rates are not independent variables but are determined by social realities that shape people's reproductive choices.

India ranks near the top among Third World agricultural exporters. While at least 200 million Indians go hungry," in 1995 India exported $625 million worth of wheat and flour, and $1.3 billion worth of rice (5 million metric tons), the two staples of the Indian diet. In the early 1970s, Bangladesh came to symbolise the frightening consequences of people overrunning food resources. Yet Bangladesh's official yearly rice output alone-which some experts say is seriously under-reported - could provide each person with about a pound of grain per day, or 2,000 calories.' Adding to that small amounts of vegetables, fruits, and legumes could prevent hunger for everyone. Yet the poorest third of the people in Bangladesh eat at most only 1,500 calories a day, dangerously below what is needed for a healthy life. With more than 120 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin, Bangladesh may be judged overcrowded by any number of standards, but its population density is not a viable excuse for its widespread hunger. Bangladesh is blessed with exceptional agricultural endowments, yet its 1995 rice yields fell signficantly below the all-Asia average. The extraordinary potential of Bangladesh's rich alluvial soils and plentiful water has hardly been unleashed. If the country's irrigation potential were realised, experts predict its rice yields could double or even triple. Since the total calorie supply in Bangladesh falls only 6% short of needs, nutritional adequacy seems an achievable goal. Brazil exported more than $13 billion worth of food in 1994 (second among developing countries), 70 million Brazilians cannot afford enough to eat.

Too often, people who produce the world’s food are unable to feed themselves and their families. The FAO estimates that about half of the world’s hungry people are from smallholder farming communities. Though reducing hunger might seem like a job for large-scale agriculture, the UN has called for a greater focus on the potential of small-scale farmers to reduce global hunger rates. The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, has called for governments to shift subsidies and research funding from large agribusiness to small-scale rural farmers, who are already feeding the majority of the world. Industrial agriculture relies on patented seeds, manufactured fertilisers and pesticides, and large-scale machinery. The production increases of “industrial agriculture” are no myth, but this model of farming is not sustainable and has already proven unable to end hunger. With a narrow focus on production, it fails to take into account the web of relationships, both those among people and those involving the natural world, that determine who can eat.

The industrial model also ends up accelerating the concentration of control over land and other resources that lie at the root of hunger and of vast environmental damage. Tightening control of land is also true in the United States where farms are being squeezed out so that only four farms remain today for every ten in 1950. And despite the vast output of US industrial agriculture, one in six Americans is “food insecure.” Worldwide, the model’s unsustainability shows up, for example, in topsoil eroding at a rate 13 to 40 times faster than nature can replenish it; and the run-off of chemical fertilisers has created more than 400 aquatic dead zones. While industrial agriculture has not ended hunger, fortunately, there are proven pathways—such as agroecology—that help to end hunger by protecting the environment while enhancing equity, food quality, and productivity.

In many parts of the world, farming practices that minimise or forgo manufactured pesticides and fertiliser are proving effective. Called organic farming or agroecology, the approach involves much more than the absence of chemicals. Agroecology is an evolving practice of growing food within communities that is power-dispersing and power creating—enhancing the dignity, knowledge, and capacities of all involved. Agroecology thus helps to address the powerlessness at the root of hunger. It builds on both traditional knowledge accrued over millennia by peasants and indigenous people and the latest breakthroughs in modern science. Its practices free farmers from dependency on corporate suppliers and thus reinforce the dispersion of power, including for women. While some studies indicate that industrial agriculture produces higher yields than these alternative practices, many small farmers adopting ecological farming in the Global South are enjoying yield increases, some quite dramatic. In any case, this model of farming—one that views life’s multiple dimensions as connected and interacting—has multiple benefits beyond productivity. It not only avoids the negative and unsustainable environmental and health impacts of the industrial model but also contributes to addressing climate change. It both reduces emissions, relative to the industrial model, and increases carbon absorption.

Growing more food will not end hunger: people go hungry even in a world of plenty. The root causes of poverty and hunger are the uprooting of peoples from their land and livelihoods. Only raising the living standards of the poor and increasing the social and economic status of women will end hunger and lower fertility rates.