FOOD FIRST
BEYOND THE MYTH OF SCARCITY
FRANCES MOORE LAPPE & JOSEPH COLLINS
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON 1977
PART 1I
PART II: THE SCARCITY SCARE
Chapter 1: Standing Room Only? Too Many People?
Question: We now have less than one acre of cultivated land per person in the world and that will be cut in half within a generation even if population growth begins to level off. Aren’t there already too many people in relation to our food and agricultural land base?
Our response: one way to demonstrate that land and food scarcity is not the cause of hunger is to show that there is no scarcity of either. The second is to explain what really does cause hunger. In this book we will do both. But we will begin where this question begins: Are we running out of land and food?
- The world is producing each day 2 pounds of grain, or more than 3000 calories, for every man, woman, and child on earth. 3000 calories is about what the average American consumes.
- This estimate does not include the many other staples such as beans, potatoes, cassava, range-fed meat, much less fruits and vegetables.
- On a global scale the idea that there is not enough food to go round just does not hold up.
To many the size of a plot of land is obviously the most important determinant of how many people it can feed. We have had to learn, however, that much more important than size are four other factors:
v First, the level of human investments made to improve productivity. Soil fertility is not a gift of nature, determined once and for all, but dependent upon man’s usage of the land. The croplands of Japan were once inferior to those of northern India; today Japan’s foodgrain yield per acre is five times that of India. Depending on the human investments made, an acre might be capable of feeding 5 people or 1 – or none at all.
v Second, how many people an acre can feed depends on whether the land is used to feed people directly or to feed livestock. Livestock consumes over one third of all the world’s grain annually. One person can represent a burden on agricultural resources many times greater than another. A person is a much greater user of cultivated farmland if he or she eats a diet of animal foods produced by shrinking annually 1800 pounds of grain into 250 pounds of meat, as the average American does.
v Third, how many people a given measure of land can feed depends on whether it grows luxury crops for export or food for the local people. Africa is a net exporter of barley, beans, peanuts, fresh vegetables, and cattle (not to mention luxury crop exports such as coffee and cocoa), yet it has a higher incidence of protein-calorie malnutrition among young children than any other continent. In Mali, peanut exports to France increased notably during the years of drought while production of food for domestic consumption declined by 1974 to one quarter of what it had been in 1967.
v Fourth, agricultural land will, of course, feed no one at all unless it is cultivated. In Africa and Latin America much good land is left unplanted by large landowners. A study of Colombia in 1960 showed that while farmers owning up to about 13 acres farmed two thirds of their land, the largest farmers, controlling 70% of the agricultural surface, actually cultivated only 6% of their land. Only 14% of Ecuador’s tillable land is cultivated. Corporations often keep large tracts out of production or use them for open-pit mining and operations, such a tin dredging in Malaya, that destroy the topsoil, making land unfit for farming unless expensive reclamation is undertaken.
This widespread wastage of agricultural land, especially by largeholders, lends credence to the estimate, confirmed by several studies, that only about 44% of the world’s potentially arable land is actually cultivated.
The relationship of hunger to land turns out to be less a question of quantity than of use. We discover that the amount of land has less to do with hunger than who controls it.