FOOD FIRST
BEYOND THE MYTH OF SCARCITY
FRANCES MOORE LAPPE & JOSEPH COLLINS
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON 1977
PART 1
Front flyleaf
v The cause of hunger is NOT too many people.
v The cause of hunger is NOT scarcity of arable land.
v The cause of hunger is NOT overconsumption by greedy Americans.
v America is NOT and should NOT be the breadbasket of the world.
v Forced birth control and protracted “food wars” and Not inevitable.
v The sky is NOT falling.
PART 1: WHY THIS BOOK
Why this book?
Writing a positive book about world hunger sounds to most people like trying to make a joke about death – it just isn’t in the material! This attitude comes home to us every time we are introduced to someone and attempt to describe what we are doing. A typical response is a sigh of sympathy overlaid with a look of bewilderment: Why would any normal person choose to think all day and every day about starving people? Sometimes we sense latent feelings of guilt because we inevitably appear as individuals who are “making a sacrifice.”
We, too, feel uncomfortable. How can we explain in a few sentences that we are not dwelling only on the tragedy of hunger and deprivation? Instead, we are learning for the first time where our own self-interest lies. Rather than being a depressing subject to be avoided, the world food problem has become for us the most useful tool in making sense out of our complex world. But how can we explain that in a few sentences? We cannot – and that is why we decided to write a book.
To discover the positive message hidden in the apparent “hopelessness” of the world food problem we must first face the forces now pushing Americans into positions of guilt, fear, and ultimate despair. Given the threatening way that the global food problem is interpreted for us, is it surprising that most of us wish to shut it out most of the time? Everywhere newspaper headlines carry a clear message:
POPULATION BOMB AND FOOD SHORTAGE: WORLD LOSING FIGHT FOR VITAL BALANCE
New York Times, August 14, 1974
WORLD FOOD CRISIS: BASIC WAYS OF LIFE FACE UPHEAVAL FROM CHRONIC SHORTAGES
New York Times, November 5, 1974
- We are all in a life-and-death contest, we are told, between growing numbers of people and limited amounts of food.
- Since there are already so many hungry people in the world, many think it obvious that even now we do not have sufficient food to go around.
- We met each other on the first national Food Day in the spring of 1975. Frances had been invited as the author of Diet for a Small Planet and Joe, because of his work on Global Reach, a book on the impact of multinational corporations in underdeveloped countries, and his coauthorship of World Hunger: Causes and Remedies.
- We concluded that together we would throw all our energy into a search for answers to all the toughest questions that we ourselves had ever asked or that we had ever been asked by others about the causes of hunger.
As you read this book you will find that our title Food First takes on more than one meaning. In the first place it means that obviously food must come first. Until all the people of this earth are able to eat adequately, all other problems pale in significance. More concretely it means that no country can afford to think of its food resources as a means toward some other end – such as income from exports – until its people have fed themselves. This applies to the United States as much as it does to any other country in the world. Nor can anyone afford to look to a few countries as suppliers of food for the world. Every country can and must mobilize its own food resources to meet its own needs. Only then can trade serve to expand choices rather than to deprive people of their rightful resources.
We had to learn that:
v There is no such thing today as absolute scarcity. Every country in the world has the capacity to feed itself.
v The malnourished abroad are not hungry because of the individual greed of the average American.
v The hungry are not our enemies.
Hunger, in fact, is not the problem at all. Hunger is the symptom of a disease, and we are its victims in much the same way as are the nomads in Mali or peasants in India.
Moreover, we came to see that no society setting out to put Food First can tolerate the concentration of wealth and power that characterizes most nations today. The heaviest constraint on food production and distribution turns out to be the inequality generated by our type of economic system – the system now being exported to the underdeveloped countries as the supposed answer to their food problems. We are not saying merely that the solution to hunger lies in better distribution – getting the food to the hungry instead of to the well-fed. We are saying something else: that food distribution only reflects the more fundamental issue of who controls and who participates in the production process. Thus to accept the challenge of Food First is to accept the challenge of confronting the basic assumptions of our present economic system.
- We learned that Americans do not have to solve the world food problem. Hungry people do and can and will feed themselves, if they are allowed to do so.
This qualifying phrase – “if they are allowed to do so”- is the heart of our answer to the question we previously could not adequately answer. Instead of “How can we feed the world?” we now ask an entirely different question: What are we doing – and what is being done in our name and with our money – to prevent people from feeding themselves?” And “How should we work to remove those obstacles?”
The task of Americans now becomes clear. More important than food aid or designing some rural development project for the Third World is building a movement in this country that makes the connection between the way government, corporate, and landed elites continue to undermine food security both here and abroad. In underdeveloped countries, the forces cutting people out of the production process, and therefore out of consumption, are the same forces that have turned our food system into one of the most tightly controlled sectors of our economy. Fewer and fewer farms control a larger and larger portion of our food. We get more and more needless processing and less nutrition for higher prices. Thus, as we fight to democratize our food economy in this country, we are fighting directly against the very forces that contribute to hunger in other countries.
We have found that it is the land monopolizers, both the traditional landed elites and corporate agribusiness, that have proved themselves to be the most inefficient, unreliable, and destructive users of food resources. The only guarantee of long-term productivity and food security is for people to take control of food resources here and in other countries.
- This is what Food First means to us. The first step, however, in implementing Food First is demystifying the problem of hunger.
- We learned that the solution to world hunger is no mystery. The only block to the solution to world hunger is the sense of powerlessness people are made to feel: that the enormity of the problem is outside their control, that it should be entrusted to others.
PART II: THE SCARCITY SCARE