“Is Hunger Really About Not Producing Enough Food?”

Glenn Peters has pointed out the sentiments expressed in an Alertnet article about food production and farming in developing countries… arguments put forward that are relevant for Australian communities.

The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and delegates at the High-Level Conference on World Food Security in Rome this month discussed insufficient investment in agriculture.

QUESTION: Will a massive agro-production investment actually help the world’s poorest farmers and their families?

“Since the surge in agricultural productivity in the 1960s and 1970s, investment in farming technology has declined…

In Africa during the 1980s there was a failed strategy to combat hunger called ‘production first.’ Lesotho and wrote about it in a book called ‘Power and Need in Africa’.

All the investment in crop improvement, mechanisation, irrigation benefited wealthy farmers and some middle-sized farmers – as well as an army of highly paid foreign consultants, contractors, and makers of machinery. Production did increase, but so did hunger among those unable to benefit because they had no land or too little land or were too far away from district headquarters to benefit from farm extension.

Others couldn’t access credit. Ninety percent of farm extension time in those days was going to the top ten percent of farmers ranked by wealth.

So in 2008 and the decade to follow…is lack of investment in agricultural productivity the root cause of hunger?

The answer is clearly no…

• In the past few years fertiliser subsidy in Malawi has increased production of the staple, maize, but poor governance means that the parliament is often deadlocked and farmers remain under the threat not only from more variable and uncertain weather but from untimely disbursement of fertiliser funds.
• The current price spike has many causes. These include a catastrophically low rice harvest due to drought in Australia – a major exporter – and increased grain demand as a growing worldwide middle class eats more meat. The diversion of land and food to biofuel production are also implicated, along with speculation and high oil prices.

Investment in agro-production will not solve all these problems.

If the delegates in Rome are serious about battling hunger and not just further enriching chemical companies and agro-engineering corporations, they will seek to support small farmers around the world with a call for land justice. They will provide money for investment in health care and soil conservation…

Meanwhile, yes, of course, food aid needs to be provided so that the children of small farmers in stress don’t have to drop out of school.

But we shouldn’t confuse the price crisis with the hunger crisis. In 1976 Susan George published a book called How the Other Half Dies. She documented how the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation has become a lobbyist and tout for big agricultural machine companies and firms producing agro chemicals.

In the 1980s, the author of Diet for a Small Planet exposed a series of myths about hunger, including the idea that production is the answer. She campaigned for democracy as a cure for hunger with the NGOs she formed.

Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen went further in exploding the myth that hunger is about lack of production in his 1981 book Poverty and Famines.

Let’s not forget so soon.

Let’s use this opportunity for a sea change in the way that small farmers are supported – building on their local knowledge and skill, providing them with access to health care, education for their children, clean drinking water, credit and removing the huge U.S., European, and Japanese subsidies to their own farmers that block market entry by small farmers in Africa and elsewhere.”

Points well made – sadly. Thanks Glenn.