The Shortage Isn't Food, It's Democracy

Progress on food security issues will only come when we
begin to ask the right question and challenge the myths
that trap us. by Frances Moore Lappe

Sojourners Magazine July 2008
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&mode=printer_friendly&issue=soj0807&article=080712


News broadcasts report a horrific "world food crisis."
But there is no food shortage. In fact, there's more
than enough food to make us all chubby--even counting
only the "leftovers," what remains after turning more
than a third of the world's grain and fish catch into
feed.

The forecast for world cereal production in 2008 stands
at a record 2,164 million metric tons, says the U.N.'s
Food and Agriculture Organization. That's an increase
of 2.6 percent over last year, the previous global
high.

Again: The shortage is not of food. It is one of
democracy. At its heart, democracy means power
distributed so that citizens' interests--our values and
our common sense--show up in policies.

Yet, can you imagine citizens anywhere setting things
up so that just one company, controlling a huge share
of the entire world's grain trade, could enjoy a 65
percent profit surge last year, while at the same time
food price hikes are pushing 100 million more people
into poverty and hunger? (The most recent quarterly
Archer Daniels Midland profit surge came largely from
the company's financial division that makes money on
price volatility via commodity futures trading.)

Or think about this: In a world where even before this
historic price climb almost a billion people couldn't
afford enough to eat, what citizen would say, "Why
don't we start shifting prime farmland into agrofuel
production and push prices still higher!?"

Neither could happen if citizens had real power. Each
violates our common sense and our hardwired human need
for fairness.

So this crisis makes me ask: Why are we playing
Monopoly when we could be living democracy? In today's
deadly global Monopoly game, the biggest money players
get ever bigger while most others get progressively
knocked out of the game. We've seen it in the housing
market and now we're seeing it in the food market. In
this game, what does growth mean? The 1990s saw
considerable economic expansion, but for every $100 in
growth only 60 cents went toward ending poverty. In
Monopoly, after many long hours the game finally ends,
and all but one player goes to bed "broke." Everybody's
had fun. But in real life, it's not fun. The outcome is
premature death for millions of our fellow humans.

FOR 40 YEARS I've been asking why it is so hard for
humans to see the needless misery we're generating.
Gradually I came to see that in large measure the
answer is the power of ideas. One very dangerous idea
perpetuating our global democracy crisis is this: We
humans are so flawed that we have to turn over our fate
to an infallible, almost mystical force: The Market.
The danger is that this idea leaves us feeling
powerless. We're blind to the obvious fact that left to
its own devices, unguided by democracy, a market
inexorably concentrates wealth and power so tightly
that it infects political decision-making. So we end up
with, in effect, "privately held" government.

The result? Hunger-generating policies that no
assemblage of real citizens would dream up.

For several decades, for example, countries in the
Global South were encouraged by international lending,
aid, and trade agencies to let go of the goal of food
independence. While in the North many extol the goal of
oil independence, comparable food independence was
somehow deemed a bad idea. Aid was often proffered on
conditions that undermined local producers. In 1986
John Block, Ronald Reagan's agriculture secretary,
called the idea of poor countries feeding themselves an
"anachronism of a bygone era."

Within a generation, countries in the Global South that
had been food exporters became massive food importers.
And today, as food prices jumped by almost half in nine
months, poor people are living--or, more accurately,
dying--from the consequences of this disastrous policy.

Peeling away the layers to grasp the roots of needless
hunger, we find them in people's lack of power--the lack
of capacity to act on our values and in our interests.
If hunger results from extreme power imbalances in
human relationships, the questions before us are:

How do we empower more and more people, starting with
ourselves?

How do we reshape relationships so everyone has the
power to live in dignity and to meet their needs?

Through this new lens, removing the influence of money
in political decision-making is not a separate
political matter; it is essential to ending hunger on
this abundant planet. In the past decade, for example,
U.S. agribusiness spent almost $1 billion lobbying our
government for policies, including massive farm
subsidies, that are in many cases undermining poor
people's capacities to feed themselves. Such subsidies,
for example, undermine smallholders, from corn growers
in Mexico to cotton growers in Mali.

Many Americans have given up on reclaiming democracy
from moneyed interests. They should not. It can be
done; it is being done. We must crack open the
best-kept secret in America: that public financing of
elections is working statewide in three states. We can
take that success national. (Visit
www.just6dollars.org.) Simultaneously, we can get
behind candidates in this election year who commit to
shifting support to family-scale sustainable farmers in
all aid and trade legislation, domestic as well as in
foreign, and who are willing to halt the deadly
agrofuel program. (One third of U.S. corn production
will go to ethanol this year.)

Through the lens of remaking power relationships, we
also see food as a right of citizenship, one now
inscribed--either for all citizens or for children--in 22
national constitutions. We know how to make this right
real. And we can build on the proven anti-hunger
policies of progressive taxation, a legal minimum wage
that is a living wage, anti-monopoly enforcement, and
protection of the rights of trade unions. In the same
vein, we can back policies that encourage producer and
consumer cooperatives, the kind that already create
more jobs worldwide than do multinational corporations.

To prevent future crises, we can embrace the goal of
food independence, as much as possible, at both the
local and national levels. For how can any people feel
free if they remain at the mercy of international
market vagaries and manipulation?

Today's food price rises are predictable outcomes of
policies flowing from decades of anti-democratic
decision-making. Each of us can explain to our friends,
neighbors, co-workers, and legislators that our crisis
is human-made. Food scarcity is a myth; the deeper
scarcity is of democracy. And we can spread the good
news, too, that we each have the power to be part of
creating real, living democracy.

Frances Moore Lappe, cofounder of the Small Planet
Institute, is the author of 16 books, including, most
recently, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, &
Courage in a World Gone Mad.



The Shortage Isn't Food, It's Democracy. by Frances
Moore Lappe. Sojourners Magazine, July 2008 (Vol. 37,
No. 7, pp. 16-18). Cover.

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