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If we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, why don't we? by aquariusamy |
postings
Simon Retallack: It’s true that we produce, as a community across the globe, enough food to feed everyone. We don’t feed everyone, however, because the sort of food that is produced is not often what -- in many instances -- isn’t directed at people. A lot of food is produced to feed animals, to supply the huge appetite, particularly people in the West with wealth have, for meat so a lot of grain goes to feed cattle and a lot of arable land is used to produce export crops for Western markets so coffee and all sorts of different other export crops that may come to us in developed countries to feed our lifestyle and our taste but do not end up on the plates of developing countries’ populations, particularly the poorest members of those countries. And that’s why you can have situations in which countries that face famine particularly in the east of Africa, for example, are actually producing food but they’re exporting it. And this is a terrible indictment of the current food system. And it results in -- its cause in part increasingly the world’s food system is controlled and dominated by a very small number of large agrichemical companies who have a very specific interest in maximizing their profits, and they don’t have any obligation, whatsoever, to ensure that people around the world are fed. It’s just not part of their [emit], and some people would say in the system in which we live it shouldn’t be part of their [emit]; but it is up to governments to make sure that people are fed and they need to be far tougher to organizations and in negotiations internationally, for example, at the International Trade level with the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and others to say our number one priority is to feed our people. If you want to give us loans and you give us financial support, don’t expect us to do that at the expense of feeding our people. Don’t hook us on a system that requires us to export all our food or use our best land to export all our food because that road, ultimately, will lead to famine. |
Sohrab Mahdavi: Of course, the main question is distribution. But then, it’s also greed in the sense that conservation, the concept of conservation, this concept of economizing not in the sense of making it more efficient, but in the sense of being industrious about consuming is lost. In a country like Iran, for example, there is a rich tradition of being content. It’s called in [Peno at] in Farsi, in Arabic. It means that people can and should economize be shrewd about how make use of resources, food, clothes and other necessities but since the question is about food, I think the dominant culture today invites expenditure, invites waste. It invites accumulation of goods in one place and that’s why some parts don’t get enough and others do get too much. |
Song Kosal: Because the foods production is part of business, and business is at the hands of powerful countries. by Song Kosal |
Stephanie Robinson: In part it’s because of production and distribution. I mean the idea of production and distribution are different operations and because both are undertaken really on a global level not to necessarily satisfy need but more so to make a profit. You have a situation by which maximizing profit becomes the primary or the predominate reason for the production and distribution of food. In its most crudest terms it is to say that if in fact you had excess grain, while it may satisfy and be useful to people around the world to receive that for purposes of nourishment, it may be more cost effective or more economic to actually rid yourself by burning that grain. I think that there is probably a second reason around this and that is that, at least from a western perspective, the ethic a protestant ethic which governs is that people are perceived as needing to be self sufficient. It is perceived as being a disincentive and people are disincentivized to received charity, to receive food and because that is probably a perceptive both external and therefore internalized by many people that we don’t do as much charity in the would that we probably could do. I think that the bottom line is that when we talk about issues of the economy, when we talk about issue of profiting and revenue generating situations which happen around the globe with respect to food and other resources that are probably what I would call fundamental dignity, basic rights that people should receive. We as a global world and as citizens of the globe probably fall short of making sure that our fellow world citizens actually receive the food and nourishment that they so desperately need and deserve. |
Steve Earle: I don't really know whether we produce enough food to feed the world or not. I know we don't produce enough food in some parts of the world to feed the people who live in that part of the world. I think, probably people that live in countries where there's obviously enough food, maybe, are completely and totally unaware or possibly not socialized to be concerned about whether people have enough to eat in other parts of the world and sometimes even on the other side of the town that they live in. So, it's a good question, but I don't have the answers to. I think we certainly have the capability to produce enough food, and it just gets to a point where rather than worry about economic globalization, a type of globalization where we become more aware of other people elsewhere in the world and what their needs really are and how they can help us. by Steve Earle |
Sulak Sivaraksa: We don’t produce enough food to feed everyone in the world because of the economic globalization, because very few international corporation control, and of course, now we have EMO and all that. So, everything is done, including food, is produced for money, not for humanity. That’s why a lot of people have not enough to eat, malnutritions, and some people overeat. Six percent of the world populations use more than 60 percent of the world resources. And this is the dilemma, which we do not take very seriously. Since the one who asked the question come from the USA, he or she should know that USA in fact is the cause of this predicament. I think we should understand the structure violence, that somebody, small amount of people eat too much, control too much food production, whereas, the rest of the world are starving. And, of course, the market economy also involve. People don’t produce food to eat any more. They produce food for marketing, and marketing, of course, help the rich and not the poor. These one must bear in mind. |
Susan George: Well, “we” is a big word here because who is producing the food and who is going to be able to eat it? These are questions that are not determined by moral pressure; these are questions of pure economics. And, if a person does not have enough land to grow his or her own food or does not have enough money to purchase it, then that person is going to go hungry, even though physically speaking there may be enough to share out among everybody. For the market, food is a commodity, just like anything else. It’s not because its absolutely necessary to life that that status changes and most of the statistics that you will see, like the question expresses – well, what you are talking about there is we are producing enough to feed everyone if its in terms of grain, of cereals. But when you consider that a huge proportion of grain is fed to animals and we do not all have a vegetarian diet, it means that there will be food which is going into value added activities, as economists say, which is going to feed animals which can be -- and their meat can be sold at a higher price; and, therefore, you can also see in the statistics that when a country becomes a little bit richer, when there is a higher gross national product per capita, people immediately start buying more meat. So, they move up the food chain. That’s what's happening, for instance, in China right now. We also do produce enough food for everyone, but most of this production is in places where people are not going hungry; and where people are going hungry, very often their farmers have been ruined by cheap imports coming from the rich countries. This has happened massively in Mexico. So, there are many more poor Mexicans than there were and many have lost their farms and these people cannot compete. Thai rice farmers have lost their land; Filipino rice farmers have lost their land. We can’t look at production and consumption as if there were just a straight line between them. by Susan George |
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by Swami Pragyapad | 0 votes | 
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Swami Pragyapad: Answertext will be available soon. |
Sydney Possuelo: I think this question has a lot to do with our feeling of profit. We look at another person as a “homo economicus” and not with humanitarian feelings. And as long as we are in these difficult moments of our own evolution, we are still going to be extremely selfish and only want to make more profit, even if this profit can cause suffering and difficulties for other poor people in the world, for the other people. We are in a general way still extremely selfish and we have to improve ourselves a lot so that our relations with other people can be a little bit fairer, mainly concerning the basic question which is the question of food. |
Takashi Kiuchi: Well it's a matter of distribution, all right. We are not in a justice society. We must know that the fact that whether it's in the food industry or in any other industries we don't have, until now, the right distribution system. When I say, "right," I’m talking about the distribution which is justified because of the various reasons such as what we're talking about here. Distribution has a tendency to accumulate economic activities, profitabilities and other things and until now, even though we know so many things about what's going on in those poor countries, we have ignored to create a justifiable distribution system. |
Tamas St. Auby: Because the deputies of representative democracy, the governments, the owners of brands, and most of the people are sick of affluenza, oniomania, and pleonexia. |
Tania Bruguera: I think that one thing that happens is that capitalism needs to have the key, this means the system of work that can [inaudible]. Capitalism is a system with cheap human labour and therefore I think that hunger was used a lot, that hunger has been a kind of currency, a strong currency, a currency of exchange, this means it´s a way of, I think, keeping the people a bit, I say, under control, a way of keeping the persons under control and even creating a larger difference between one group or another what is very important for the power, without clearly distinguishing who is in a postion of power and who is not. And I think that unfortunatly it´s something so basic, so unbelievably basic and human is food, and this is what is used a bit, like the [inaudible] to distinguish between the different people in a society and of course poverty is a way of manipulating the people. It´s a quiete inhuman way of manipulating the people. Anyway there is a problem which is the problem of fear, the fear that people could have of sharing and the fear that the people could have of feeling in a postion [without power]. |
Tavis Smiley: If we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, then why don't we? I think the answer here is rather simple. It’s a lack of courage, a lack of conviction, and a lack of commitment about the least among us. We in fact produce enough food to feed everyone in the world and we don’t primarily because those persons who are the least among us, those who are politically, socially, economically and even culturally disenfranchised, their concerns have not risen high enough on the world’s agenda. I live in the United States of America, and even in our own country we have hunger. We throw away more food every day in the United States than we need to. And so this problem we have of not feeding everyone in the world, even though we produce enough food to do so, really starts with a lack of courage, a lack of commitment to those persons who are the least among us. And that’s why this conversation today, to raise these unvoiced questions and address these challenging issues on behalf of those persons who are the least among us is so critically important. by Tavis Smiley |
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Currently video only.
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by Tegla Loroupe | 0 votes |
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Tegla Loroupe: Answertext will be available soon. |
Thenmozhi Soundararajan: I think it’s primarily a question of that there’s a lack of political will. It’s not profitable to solve the food security issues of our time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not an imperative of our generation to really deal with that. Particularly, when you look at the UN has set up a series of goals to look at development across the board internationally called the ‘Millennium Goals.’ I think food security is one of the biggest issues to really look at with that. The Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen said, “There’s no such thing as a political food problem.” I think it’s one of the things of our generation to really make this a political question for our generation. I think that, unfortunately, even with modernity and with the technological advances that we do have, we’ve seen consistently time and time again in the 20th Century governments undermining the food security of their own nations for their own greed and I’m hoping that we can actually change that. I think one of the things, though, that we should really be wary of in looking at how to solve food security problems is that we don’t apply big box solutions and technological solutions that come from the West and try and create a model that applies for all countries. I don’t think that there is one model for development. I don’t think there is one model for technological development. I think that the more locally-grown sustainable agricultural economies that we create where local farmers and local production is empowered with a greater diversity of seeds and foods and crops that are better, I think that we will be able to move into the 21st Century. But I think if we look at trying to create an industrial model around food, we’ll consistently see food failures like the what we see now where you have huge amounts of agro crops that are grown and destroyed primarily to support and subvert markets based on who can profit from that. I think what we’re also doing when we do that is we eradicate our rich history of seeds and really subvert the local farmer for the corporate international farms. I think that to really have an enlightened approach what food security means we need to really realign the way we look at international solutions being jointly led in a multi-dialogue like this. |
Tu Weiming: The serious problem of the over capacity of many major agriculture economies in the world to produce the food sufficient for all members of human community, and yet this – if not a deliberate attempt, this is lack of political will, the lack of really understanding of the overall situation. The question about food has been so politicized that it is not simply the question about availability of food, it is a question of distribution, question of infrastructure mechanism that would be able to spread to move these kind of food to the rest of the world. And yet most of the countries have adopted protective measures, especially powerful western countries, in order to preserve the level of support of their agricultural sector. In this sense in the whole world there's such a difference between the abundancy of food on the one hand and the lack of the basic food and therefore suffering from starvation. And that kind of inequality cannot be easily resolved without the participation of the most powerful nations and exercise certain kind of political will which has to be enhanced by the direct participation of the civil society as a whole. Without the participation of the civil society, it’s difficult to imagine that a government themselves overwhelmed by various kinds of local interests would be able to help the various countries that require the aid of various kinds of food. And I think one particular problem that we face is that there’s no international global mechanism through which the distribution of food can be made. However it is important to bear in mind that once the politicization of food as an integration of a governmental policy to its agriculture, the possibility of overcoming that serious issue becomes even more aggravated. That’s the reason why the use of food as a political weapon is unpardonable. by Tu Weiming |
Valentina Melnikova: The question contains a contradiction. Nobody has to feed another man if the last has physical abilities to support himself and his family. The question is that we cannot speak only about distribution. Of course there is justice, and there are principles of charity, but healthy and able to work people should not wait that someone brings them ready food. The problem is that independence has to be developed all over the world, in all locations, because biological human history shows that people are able to survive and to live and to reproduce even in hard climatic circumstances. That’s why the responsibility of mankind today is to try to use all means everywhere where there are human communities to enable people to support themselves and every society to live independent and to develop in cooperation with other nations and countries yet contributing to the economical development of humanity and to the production of food and of clean water. |
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by Vesna Pesic | 0 votes |
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Vesna Pesic: Answertext will be available soon. by Vesna Pesic |
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