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If we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, why don't we? by aquariusamy |
postings
China Keitetsi: I think the rich countries have forgotten Africa. And the human beings are becoming more of me, me, me, and we forget that the other person is hungry. I think if you're hungry, then you'll know that the other person is hungry. But if you are full it's difficult to know that the other person is hungry. For me, it was amazing, for example, when I was in America, so much waste of food. So much food, yet in Africa people are dying of hunger. Yet in Africa, there are women sitting and looking at their children die. Yet in many countries in Europe or in all those rich countries, nearly the food which could even feed many countries in the poor countries are thrown away. They become waste. I think it's not a question of we have not enough food, but we can also take the chance or opportunity and try to teach the other African people, the poor country, how to plant and how to produce food. Then we having to feed them because it's not really helping if you have to feed me and feed me all the time. I think you should teach me how to fish so I can depend on myself and not depend always on you feeding me. And it's very sad. It's very sad to see how much food is wasted and how much is produced, only a few countries. Yet millions of children and women are starving to death. |
Constantin von Barloewen: The food industry today is essentially also an agribusiness and we know how much the agricultural exports from the so called peripheral states, I'm thinking of Brazil, of India, of Africa, too, how much agribusiness nowadays depends on the import quota of the European Union and of America, how firmly the industrial states insist on only reducing agricultural aids if they see a possibility to export industrial goods. We do have enough possibilities to distribute foodstuff, this is a question of the principles of distribution, which are unfair, and not a question of the mere quantity of foodstuff available in the world. We need to think again, as a matter of principle, so that the states of the so called first world show more responsibility and cooperation towards agribusiness, I'm thinking of India. In India, 47% of the population still suffer from malnutrition and this in a state with an economic volume of 3.2 trillions of dollars. At the same time, India is the biggest importer of weapon technology from the western world. As we can see, it is a question of preference, not of the quantity of foodstuff, a question of political preference to distribute foodstuff in a better way and not just to invest in technology and weapon industry. Food could be distributed, there is a problem of distribution between the states of the first world and the so called peripheral states, which is absolutely inequal and so far has been solved irresponsibly. We can only ask that the World Trade Organization, WTO, and the APEC states and the states of Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America solve this problem of distribution in a different way. So far they have failed. As I said, this is not a question of the combined quantity of foodstuff in the world, but exclusively a question of the preferences of distribution. |
Cornel West: We certainly produce enough food to feed every precious human being on this globe. But, we have an economic system which puts a premium on profits, efficiency tag to the augmenting of those profits rather than a satisfaction of the needs of everyday people. Corporate globalization puts a premium on not just profits but on greed, generates lifestyles that reinforce the obscene inegalitarian distribution of food and other very precious goods and services that human beings need in order to survive with dignity. So, with so many ways it’s a matter of power. It’s a matter of institutional and structural power that makes it difficult for billions of precious fellow human beings on this globe not to have access to something as basic as food or water. So, the question of why it is we have enough food to feed everybody but don’t is a political question, it’s a moral question and has everything to do with the economic organization of capital and capitalism and we are here to radically call that inegalitarian distribution of power into question. by Cornel West |
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by Dedi Baron | 0 votes | 
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Dedi Baron: Answertext will be available soon. by Dedi Baron |
Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas: God gave each and every one of us the rights to have enough food in this world, but the problem is only few controls the world resources. 75% of the world resources are being controlled by few people, and this greediness is the hindrance to produce food for everybody to give decent life for everybody. And, therefore, I think this question should be asked and directed towards those people who are controlling the 75% of the world resources in such a way that they should look into sharing this resource that they have to everybody and that I think is what God planned for us to create the world in such a way that everybody will benefit. And, I think that’s the beauty of having each and everybody in this world to have access for food. So, if the question is, can we produce? Yes, we can produce food. |
Dritëro Kasapi: Hello, Amy. I think part of why is greed. I think it is part of why we don’t give food to the whole world because we can produce it in the western hemisphere. This way we can produce enough food to distribute it, but I think it’s greed. But the other part is that even if we do it I don’t think it doesn’t solve the problem. I think if we eventually go back to the point where we have to ask ourselves, “Is it better to give someone a fish or enable someone to catch a fish?” I think that’s the responsibility and duty and obligation of the rich hemisphere of the world is to create ways for the poor part of the world to be self-sustained and produce its own food. In that way, I think we have a long-term solution to poverty, and I don’t think distributing food to the whole world is a long-term solution. I think it is a short-term solution; we should do it to avoid catastrophes, to avoid situations like Biafra, like Somalia, like Ethiopia, like Sudan where people die of hunger and thirst. We should be able to do that very fast, faster than we do it now but also we should work very, very strongly into creating circumstances for these countries in this part of the world to create their own food because the resources are there, the capacity within the country is there. It’s just actually, I feel for us in the rich world is just to do the right thing is to give what we have basically taken away. That's it, I think. |
Eliane Potiguara: We really have a lot of food in the world. Nevertheless, making profits has been the most important factor in the globalizing, capitalist society. When food is produced, they don’t think about feeding the starving, they think about making more and more and more profits. The human being has never been the target, the oppressed one has never been questioned. Profit and what we can do with profit is the most important. Then, until the governments don’t decide whom they should help, and with whom they should solidarize, we will never have politics of feeding poor people in the world and mainly for our indigenous people. We have a lot of food, but many times this food can’t reach, for instance, a community. We have lots of seeds, but we don’t have how to keep them safe from insects, for example, so that these seeds can preserve their room temperature. Then, there are no mechanisms of deployment and feeding production, because there’s no interest in people and consumers themselves to produce their own food. And the poor population of the world must submit itself to the industrial food, to the food imposed by the government. That’s why we can’t create our own food nor get a healthy one. And we observe that all this food which is put in the world is not healthy. This food is full of agrotoxin, full of poison, full of hormones, full of disinfectants, which is not healthy for us. Us, indigenous people. We want healthy food. |
Eliot Weinberger: Well, it’s an absolute scandal that you and I come from a country where we pay farmers not to farm, where we routinely destroy crops, destroy harvests when in fact – when you have so many people in the world who are hungry. Obviously, in an ideal word, we would start reconsidering our priorities and start exporting butter instead of guns in the traditional formula, the billions of dollars that we give in military aid should obviously be aid to feed the hungry. And I think it’s a – it’s one of those cases where once you start asking the question, it has the effect of having people begin to think about these answers. |
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you, Amy from Chicago for your question about why we are not feeding everyone if we're producing enough food to do so. It is true that the United Nations periodically tells us that we are growing enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet an adequate diet. The reason that we don’t do so of course, is that land is owned mostly, privately and on that private land corporations can grow food, employ people to grow food and sometimes the very people who grow the food aren’t permitted to eat it. So, it traces to an economic system that doesn’t work to feed everyone. I am an Evolution Biologist and I, in terms of evolving living systems and one of the most highly evolved one on our planet is our own bodies made of a hundred trillion cells in working cooperation. Now, if you try to do global economics in your body, the way we are doing them in the world, it might look something like this. We will call that northern industrial organs those north of the diaphragm, the heart lung system and give them the power of ownership over the rest of the body so that they can exploit the raw material blood cells that are actually formed in bones all over the body and bring those raw materials up to the heart lung system, process the blood, add oxygen, purify it and then the heart distribution center might say, the body price for blood is so much today. Who will buy? And so the heart would ship the blood only to the organs that could afford it. Now, you can see right away that our bodies wouldn’t [clusterate] on into that system and the poor bones who had produced the raw material blood cells that had been mined by the northern industrial organs might not be able to afford the finished blood. So, by looking at highly evolved natural living systems, we can see what’s wrong with our own world economy. And of course, there is a relationship between bodies, individuals, families, communities, nations, and the world every level is a living system and every level must function like a healthy living system if it’s going to be healthy itself. We have a World Trade Organization trying to run the world sometimes at the expense of local economies, that can’t work. It would be like trying to run your body at the expense of its cells. So, if we study living systems, we can see the answer to the problem. We need more equitable economics in our world. |
Ervin Laszlo: Not only do we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, we produce more. There is an excess that’s being destroyed and there is an excess that is being wasted. The problem is not production, the problem is distribution and the problem is access. On the people whose money have access to food and people with much money waste a great deal of it. Poor people don’t have access and they go hungry. by Ervin Laszlo |
Esther Mwaura-Muiru: And who wants to feed everybody in the world? I think that’s a sure way of saying that I lose my business. If I am producing a 1000 bags of [inaudible] and you are telling me that I feed the people who are poor and make sure that they are able to have their food, then it means that I lose my power and that’s a problem. And, as much as I produce a drug that keep it to myself so that people can come to me with [hunger for months]. They come to me to beg, so that I can show how powerful I am. And, I must deny them, the capital, the ability to produce, so that then I still maintain the power. So, the idea is if we share the capacity to produce then we will not have people coming to us and will not be able to dictate what you want. And so, there is enough what you want to produce. There is enough by communities. There is enough by the rich ones, but the distribution of that is not done and it's deliberate, it's political. It’s so that many people can start to remain suppressed and they can remain intimidated by hunger, they can be remained intimidated by having not, so that when you don’t have you have no power and that’s the problem. If you feed everybody, we lose market. I think that is the big answer. If you feed everybody with what we produce, we lose market. But if we hoard it, then we are able to dictate the price and therefore we can offer it at our own rights, our own price. |
Fernando Solanas: Today, the function of food production in the world is not to feed the whole planet. Food production follows the logic of the world's capitalistic system. Food production is understood as a commodity, as trade, and does not act to secure the essential right of humanity which is the right to feed. Because of this, the two staple foods – today: alimentation, tomorrow: water – which are necessary to secure the continuation of life are nowadays the basis of a gigantic worldwide business. Today, the planet is not designed to solve the problems of the entire humankind. In our era, globalisation understands society as consisting of two parts. There are the ones who have the right to eat, who have all the social privileges guaranteed by the charter of the United Nations. And behind these we have the gigantic legion of the marginalized, of those who have the right to nothing. The best example of this is Africa. Africa is condemned. Africa is infected. Africa is practically condemned to genocide and condemned to disappear, which is what we are seeing right now. The millions that are spent on arms, the gigantic war industry. If what is spent on the gigantic war industry, especially that of North America, was invested to fight the huge scourges of humankind, today we would have a world without hunger. |
Fred Matser: Well, I think basically, I think there is a lack of willingness to really do it. Let's not forget, we are trained, many of us are trained to believe in scarcity, basically the economic systems are based on that belief. I think more that in time and space, there is enough for everybody, there is, in a way, abundance and it's more a question, if we could see that it is a matter of sharing and that when we on our side have enough, I mean, I am a representative of the West, that we have to find ways to help our brothers and sisters on the planet to give them the tools and perhaps teach them the tools to do the same, to create their own food and make their agriculture more functional so that in a way, they can be self-sustainable, and basically fill in their own needs. But, as we believe so much in scarcity, we see in practice that many people are suffering and I think it's even two third of us that have not enough food or many of them are hungry. And I think it's of the utmost importance that we join forces and share all the knowledge that we have in the West and with respect, share that with the people that have not yet enough food, primary healthcare, access to water, in order to help them to come to at least a level of fulfilling their basic needs. So, again, it may also involve the question, if we have to distribute our food that is produced another side, yes. In first instance, that is a good thing to do, but the bottom line first is, yes, we have to give people first fish, but the most important thing is that we teach them and help them how to fish. by Fred Matser |
Galsan Tschinag: Because not all people are able to pay the food that is needed every day and the markets that produce the food, rather want their products to be destroyed than to be offered to those in need. Most people apparently don't know that one third of the annual food production on this planet is destroyed again. The fact that locomotives are from time to time heated with coffee instead of coal, would be an example for this. Another alarming example would be: Less than ten years ago, two million sheep were killed and destroyed in Australia in order to, as was callously explained, stabilize the price of meat. |
Giora Feidman: Well, really, it’s a very good question. There is so much food in this world. But, why, why there are so children, adults, in this moment, every day, every hour, they are starving? It’s a question of responsibility of society. It’s a question to overcome the meaning of “to be hungry.” It’s a question of business. It’s a question of move to our responsibility of all the human family, not to allow it, to exploitate, and not to [inaudible] of human being for self-interest. Already, this will bring food for every, every human being in this planet. I was told, and I am not sure about some big numbers, that this moment in the planet they use I think one trillion of dollar to build arms. Well, yes, for these people, perhaps, it’s a solution for the people that build this arms. But, if we use this trillion dollar to find a solution for sickness or to give food to people, no one human being in this entire planet will be in a situation of to be hungry. Again and again, it’s a question of conscience level. It’s a question of responsibility of every one of us, every human being. Again, not to allow to exploit and not to ignore the needs of humanity. |
Gladman Chibememe: Yeah, it's really a problem to say people can produce enough and why don't they, because sometimes people are selfish and they wouldn't like to really produce enough to feed the other person, because if they produce enough to feed the other person, it means that that person will now be dependent on them. And, some states, some people would even prefer to dump the extra food instead of giving it to the people who really are in need of the food just to try to and make sure that they perpetrate the hunger. There is a current – what it seems that the world system is in such a way that it is tilted towards a system in which some states, some people want to perpetrate poverty so that they would be able to continue being in power. A poor person is better to control than a rich person, because they turn the demand for something. What you do is just give them handouts. If you give them handouts, they keep quiet. So, in this case, I personally think that there should be paradigm shift in which all people work together cooperatively to uplift the level of all the people equally and not to create opportunities that stop or that prevent other nations from progressing or from achieving sustainable development or working towards reducing poverty. There is need to have access to technology. There is need to have access to training, appropriate training skills so that people, communities and states can be able to generate their own food and to grow their own food instead of those communities to continue suffering without food just because of a system that is being put -- placed by the international world just to keep them down so that they will take advantage of them either in the form of being providers of free labor or raw materials. So, there has to be a true paradigm shift in which all states are considered equal and they participate effectively in development. |
Govindaswamy Hariramamurthi: We produce enough food to feed everyone. But, we produce it -- once we feed that is not -- that he doesn’t want to feed. But, the market mechanism should enable the consumer has access to feed himself or herself. Often we see a lot of food gets stocked and stored and gets wasted. We often see that people who are feeling hungry they are unable to buy food. You see the world doing everything possible to help the hungry to eat. It is not just you can produce enough food that people can eat. You feed those whom you want to feed. You don’t necessarily produce enough food or less food to feed even animals. We feed animals so that we get milk. We feed chickens so that we can eat chicken. In a world that is selfish driven by selfishness, where is the question that this world produces the food to feed everyone. It is just not possible to find an easy answer, I think, I see often. |
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by Hans-Peter Dürr | 0 votes |
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Hans-Peter Dürr: |
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