Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

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.

by Fernando Solanas

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

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

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

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.

by Galsan Tschinag

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

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.

by Giora Feidman

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

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.

by Gladman Chibememe

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

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.

by Govindaswamy Hariramamurthi

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Hans-Peter Dürr: food, but its distribution to the people doesn’t work. But it’s not originally a question of distribution. The problem is that we take away the opportunity from the people to take care of their food themselves. They don’t want it to be presented to them, they have strength and enough experience to produce all they need themselves. But these premises don’t exist anymore. That’s why the distribution plays such an important role afterwards. It is being distributed among the people who have enough money to buy it. Thus there are still hungry people, because they don’t have access to money, which is in case important, to obtain food. We should work out the possibility, which enables everyone in the world to take care of his own food. A participation in the food provision is very important for a human being and gives significance to his life.

by Hans-Peter Dürr

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Harry Wu: I think this question is quite simple because the historical fact is step by step to changes. The realities are different.

by Harry Wu

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Helena Norberg-Hodge: At the moment, food production is being taken out of the hands of farmers worldwide. And the production that is going on in the hands of transnational corporations is one that is production for profit. It means that around the world, countries are allowing their local populations to go hungry while they export food. The Food Corporation of India, there are mountains of food ready for export, sometimes rotting while people go hungry. So, it is vital that we understand the difference between farmers growing our food and transnational corporations producing our food like in a factory. The pressures on farmers worldwide are increasing day by day, because of economic globalization. And this means that governments through the process of globalization are being pressured to subsidize production for export rather than production for home needs. We urgently need to reverse this trend. We need to realize that right now something like half of the global population is still on the land and in countries like China and India, most of the countries of Africa, in South America, and what we call the third world, a very large proportion of the population is still farming. Protecting their rights, allowing them to diversify production to produce a range of products for local needs, for regional needs is one of the most important issues today. We in order to understand how we can make this change; we need to look at two elements in particular. We need to look at the process of trade de-regulation and understand that we need to reverse that. We need now to control the movement of multination corporations. We need to control their rights in order to restore the rights of the citizens around the world for, among other things, producing food for their own needs to ensure that people don’t go hungry. One of the biggest myths around is the idea that we need to buy food products…

by Helena Norberg-Hodge

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Homero Aridjis:

by Homero Aridjis

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Irina Yasina: First of all it’s not true. We don’t produce food enough to feed the whole humanity. Secondly, it’s one thing to produce and other thing to dispense. The point is that it’s impossible to feed people who don’t make anything and who don't produce anything. We would have then the unstable structure of the whole world. That's why only such an exchange is possible: somebody produces food, someone else produces machines, and somebody produces technologies or ideas. Therefore we should understand that if the world chooses some hungering people and simply starts to give them something to eat; we will just create corruption, larceny, and the same poverty because we should give people the fishing rod. Do you remember the old story, the old fairy story about what is better: to give someone a fish or to give him the fishing rod and to teach how to catch fish. I think that we human community should teach people who have serious lack of food and other necessary products how to produce it by themselves, because simply to feed means again and again corruption, stealing and poverty, poverty, poverty. Thank you.

by Irina Yasina

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Jerry Mander: Answertext will be available soon.

by Jerry Mander

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Jesper Green: Well, it is a fact that we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, or that we could do it, but the situation is like that those who produce the food, they are, have some terms that they, they want money for their corn and they want money for the feed, so we don’t feed those who can’t pay. It’s sad, but it’s, that’s why we don’t feed them. That’s why we can’t ship the food to them. And if we just, if we just feed those who, of course, it’s a dilemma. If we want to, we could feed everyone in the world but they should learn or we should help them learn, we have to serve them, we have to educate them so that they could produce their own food, but in the meantime we should feed them, but, so there’s the education issue. That’s why we don’t feed them, and there’s the issue that we have, or the food producers or manufacturers, want money for their food.

by Jesper Green

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Jodie Evans: So actually this year is, they say, is one of the first years where we won't produce enough food for everyone in the world to not go hungry. This idea has been true and we're kind of coming at a place where that's not true anymore, which is even more frightening than the fact that we don't feed everyone that's hungry. And that's because it's not about feeding people. Food is about food distribution and the accumulation of wealth. If we wanted to feed everyone that was hungry, that's quite possible to do, but that's not the driving force. We haven't made a value that we hold people to or hold people responsible to the basic needs of humanity. We're not responsible to that. That isn't what is a driving force or what we've decided to make a driving force. So until we can actually do that we won't feed everyone that's hungry. But the power structure -- I have an interesting story from when I was in Baghdad, right after we invaded, the head of intelligence for the U.S. said ,,you know, we've taken a page from Saddam Hussein's book, keep a dog hungry and he'll follow you anywhere''. And so the strategy of keeping people hungry is that you have them as slaves. And so by not creating the situations where everyone can eat, by actually creating the, what we've created in development is making people hungry, because we've taken away from them their capacity to feed themselves. We then create the situation of power. And so to create the possibility of everyone eating is to try to understand the power relationship and how we can use it against itself. So that it can understand that actually feeding people gets it to where it wants to go and that's where it wants to go is the total extermination of our planet which is what will happen in that process.

by Jodie Evans

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

John Gage: We produce food locally, we produce food globally, we produce food in individual small patches of land tended by someone who has been on that land for a long time, we produce food in giant factory farms fed by inputs from the petroleum industry, from the corn industry, fed by gigantic simplified agricultural structures. We produce food in many forms. The concentration of factory production generates an agricultural product, a simplified agricultural product that is at a very low price. That means that those that can invest in that technology of mass factory food production can in an era of economic globalization undercut local production. What we desire is the ability for every one of us globally to produce food adequate for local sustenance. Technology is localized for local production, the ability to be self-sufficient, not dependent upon intricate supply chains. So, why is it, if we can produce food adequate for everyone and we don’t, it’s because the allocation of resources, the existence of the markets, the ability for the transfer of the knowledge about how to do these things and the fundamental investments in the world’s poorest countries in seed, in water, in the capabilities of agricultural production, have not been made. That’s where we receive the largest return for an investment, is a reallocation of our resources to production at the local level in Rwanda, in Kenya, in the areas where drought strikes, populations unable to resist since they have inadequate economic resources to resist, unable to resist the hammer blow of drought, cattle death, crop death. If we invest there, we can reallocate the sources of production, depend less upon massive industrial food production, benefit in all ways by increased self-reliance of those that create the foundation for all society adequate food.

by John Gage

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Jonathan Granoff: We do produce enough food to feed everyone in the world. We don't distribute the food to nourish everyone in the world. And the reason is we don't view food as a fundamental human right. We don't view food in the same way as we view, say, air. We have not commodified air. Ah, to some extent we’ve commodified water, but for the most part, at least in the developed water, people presume the human right to water, that water's free because it's the water of life, it's the wherewithal through which we live. And air is not commodified, air is ah, everyone has a right to breathe, nobody would propose that you have to buy air to breathe. But we have fully commodified the food chain. And so the distribution of food is dependent on the economic arrangements that we have. So you know we hear people talking about with better genetic engineering we could feed everybody. But in fact that's not the problem. Now I'll take an example: Brazil. In Brazil, less than 5% of the farmers produce all of the food that the people in the country eat. The rest of the agri-business produces feed stock for animals, to feed animals to turn them into meat, to eat them, abroad. But the capacity to feed everybody is met by a fairly small amount of the farming. But the distribution network works and so you don't have starvation there. The problem therefore is in my opinion not one of the capacity to grow, but again the issue of our sense of justice, and the way in which we arrange power. And a sense of what right people have. I mean, do people have a right - does everyone have a right to a minimum health? Does everyone have a right to decent shelter? The issue is that we have enough to satisfy everybody's needs, we do not have enough to satisfy everybody's greeds. And greed is the organizing principle for our economic engine and it's great that we've harnessed greed into a useful dynamic, but it's not enough. We also have to harness generosity, justice, caring, love, compassion. When we begin to harness those powerful human dynamics, we will not only have enough food, we will have enough justice and everybody will be fed.

by Jonathan Granoff

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Jonathan Meese: What is food? What is the world? What is a human being? What is food? What is repletion? We don't know anything. All these phenomena have nothing to do with each other, see [Zardoz announcement for harvest production of cereal]. All of these questions are more elementary than the links, which we don't know. The system is a spider's web. Who is the spider? Who is the victim? Who is the pupation? Nobody knows. Art is going to regulate it because art is a net in which no human being can stay. Human beings are not able to share and that's just fine. We just have to realize this than the division will take place on its own according to its own rules, just the way it should be. If we give food the possibility to distribute itself than food is going to do it according to its own logic and estimation. As long as we are involved there will be injustice. What is everything? What is food? Food is love, humility, power. Announcement for harvest production, see Zardoz, see Clockwork Orange, see the eyes of Alex DeLarge. There you will see food. Look in the eyes of Martin von Essenbeck, The Damned. Are we the damned of food? Yes or no, this is about self-accusation, self-denunciation. This is the only possibility to move on. We will only move on if we stick to one point of view forever. The eternal distance to ourselves. Than food will emerge on ourselves like it wants to be, like it wants to. This is not about our will. What I want is insignificant. Food wants. Division wants. Repletion wants. We are suppressed by our condition. This does not make us human beings.

by Jonathan Meese

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

Jonathan Stack: We do in fact produce enough food for everybody in the world. And so, the question is, that's sort of like asking why aren't we better to each other, why aren't we kinder, why aren't we better? And maybe the answer is we are becoming that and that -- it is a progression of things. We are going to move in that direction, but trying to figure out why human beings don't behave in the way that they are capable of, is something I ask everyday and ask of myself everyday. Why aren't I the person that I am capable of or why don't I share more of what I have with other people? And that question and that desire to transcend my own limitations, my own flaw is what motivates me everyday to better. So, how do we reach that point where we collectively produce enough so that everybody can live well on this planet is one of those mysteries of the material world that we are going to have to constantly grapple with. And until we figure out the actual answer, we just got to do better everyday in the ways each of us can do something.

by Jonathan Stack

Sep 9, 2006 10:10:00 AM cite

José Manuel Prieto: Behind this matter of the possibility or impossibility to feed every country and the entire population of our planet, there is a clear political background. There is a necessity of political willingness to ensure that the produced food reaches those in need and that the design of its distribution allows the needy to have access to the food, and not only access to the food but to generate production mechanisms so that they can actually feed themselves. It’s a challenge to feed [everybody], and I think it’s something that eventually will be achieved relatively soon, because there is a possibility, there are all the means , as said in the question, to feed the planet. And it’s a question of [developing] politics, what is in my opinion the main component, as shown in his investigations, by the Noble laureate in Economics, Amartya Sen, who dicovered or pointed out or determined the fact that many of the famines under which have suffered various countries, have been provoked by political and economic reasons, not because of the lack of food, but owing to the blindness of their political leaders.

by José Manuel Prieto