A Better Way to Feed the Hungry

[Guest guest]

Published on Wednesday, May 22, 2002 in the _Seattle Post-Intelligencer_

(http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/)

 

A Better Way to Feed the Hungry

by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé

_http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views02/0522-03.htm_

(http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views02/0522-03.htm)

Bill Gates thinks he's got a brilliant idea: fighting malnutrition abroad by

fortifying food.

The scheme, backed with $50 million from the Gates Foundation, in part

encourages Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris' Kraft, and other companies to

develop

vitamin and iron-fortified processed foods. It then facilitates their entry

into Third World markets.

Gates seems to believe we don't have time to address the complex social and

political roots of malnutrition. But in opting for this single-focus,

top-down, technical intervention, Gates can end up hurting the very people he

wants

to help.

His strategy ignores a crucial reality: Many, if not most, of the hungriest

people in the world are themselves farmers. They eke out a living by selling

what they grow, and eating it. Helping foreign food purveyors penetrate their

markets will only further rob them of livelihood. For example, India's dairy

cooperatives -- many run by poor women -- would be hard-pressed to withstand

the onslaught of Kraft's marketing power.

The Gates approach also hurts the poor if it shifts tastes toward processed

foods -- typically adding fat, sugar, and salt while removing needed fiber

and micronutrients. This diet trend already contributes to the spread of

diseases currently burdening the industrial world. Obesity and diet-related

diseases including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are becoming a global

crisis.

In the Third World, grossly insufficient health care budgets are now being

diverted to treat these conditions, and away from treating deadly infectious

diseases.

Aiding market penetration by global food processing companies also ends up

making consumers dependent on foreign suppliers for life's essentials. But

while corporations such as Kraft or Proctor & Gamble might well participate in

Gates' do-good scheme, ultimately their interests diverge from those of the

hungry. By law, theirs is assuring the highest return to their shareholders --

foreigners -- not the improved well-being of local people, and certainly not

hungry local people too poor to make their needs felt in the market.

Even the piece of the Gates scheme focused on fortifying grain (presumably

locally grown) misses critical lessons learned since the first World Food

Conference in Rome declared war on global hunger almost three decades ago.

Then, many still believed that hunger could be solved by simple,

mass-production approaches. After decades of failed, technologically-driven

solutions, a

new wisdom is emerging.

We recently traveled on five continents, witnessing a heartening array of

local initiatives addressing the complex, interwoven roots of needless

malnutrition. These are not pie-in-the-sky solutions; they are working.

In 1993 Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared food a right

of citizenship. This single shift of frame -- beyond charitable hand-outs,

beyond market tyranny -- unleashed dozens of innovations: Making city plots

available for local, organic farmers as long as they keep prices within the

reach of the poor; posting where to find the cheapest prices for over 40 food

staples; enhancing nutrition in school lunches by replacing processed foods

with

local organic food. The city also tries to innoculate newly arrived dwellers

against global corporate food advertising (probably including that of the

very companies in the Gates fold) by educating them to the value of sticking

with the healthy whole foods diets they grew up on in the countryside.

Across the globe in Kenya, women of the Green Belt Movement, an

anti-desertification campaign that has planted 20 million trees, are now

reclaiming

diverse, traditional food crops. They are creating organic kitchen gardens

growing

precisely the fruits and vegetables that provide the nutrients Gates'

fortification scheme seeks to supply.

A promising international " fair trade " movement now also addresses the

powerlessness that leaves people malnourished in the first place. Third World

producers can market fair trade products, such as coffee certified by

Oakland-based Transfair USA, helping to ensure the livelihood of some of the

world's

poorest people.

Tens of thousands of such innovative efforts, many citizen driven, continue

to emerge on every continent. They are succeeding because they address the

real causes of malnutrition -- concentrated economic and political power that

blocks people from pursuing their interests and from building vibrant,

sustainable local economies, accountable to local needs.

Just imagine what might happen if Bill Gates chose not to fortify corporate

foods but to use his $50 million to fortify efforts like these, encouraging

their cross-fertilization and replication. With nutrient deficiencies stunting

the lives of at least two billion people we can't afford ill-considered

strategies that will hurt rather than help.

Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé are authors of " Hope's Edge: The Next

Diet for a Small Planet " _www.dietforasmallplanet.com._

(http://www.dietforasmallplanet.com./)

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