Misshapen Figures
- As of 2007, 800 million people are hungry while one billion people are overweight.
- In India, millions of tons of grains rotted in silos while the food quality eaten by India’s poorest is getting worse.
- In the United States in 2005, 35.1 million people didn’t know where their meal is coming from while there are more food and cases of diabetes than ever before.
Two differing theories explaining global hunger and obesity arise.
- Personal choice. Folk wisdom and moral condemnation suggests that the poor are hungry because they are lazy and the rich are fat because they eat too abundantly. However, this idea would work if people had real choices. That is not the case.
- Inequities in the food system. Inequities in the food system arise from internalization and the power of huge food corporations both over the price and availability of food. These forces intensify farmer hunger and instigate consumer obesity.
Starved MacDonald Rents His Farm
Constrained by the playing field, farmers have little options.
- Farmers do not plant at their whim. The very crops that farmers grow are determined not by choice but by elements like the land they till, climate, and access to the market.
- Farmers’ options are dictated by powerful groups. The government and huge corporations control options including: the safe level of pesticides and additives; where to outsource food; and the payment farmers receive.
- Farmers have little room for error. Poor farmer choices lead to high debt and even bankruptcy. When this happens, farmers resort to contract farming or renting the farms that they used to own.
The Sovereignty of Food Corporations
Large international food corporations both control the fate of food producers and consumers.
- Food corporations have the leverage on food prices. While farmers gain slim profits from selling with prices that are sometimes lower than the cost, dominating food corporations generate huge earnings by imposing prices that are a hundred times the original.
- Food corporations control the distribution chain. Only a few companies have the advantages of size, capital and economies of scale. Because of this, they gain monopolizing market power. Some of them also gain government support through routes like lopsided trade agreements.
- Food corporations determine what is made available in the market. Consumer selection is crafted not by season, nutrition, or taste but by what large food corporations offer in the market. They sell food that respond to pesticides and preservatives and those that have high sugar and fat content to generate higher earnings.
- Food corporations determine what consumers eat. Consumers, unaware that almost all options in the supermarket are unhealthy, buy and eat low-quality food that will be stored by their bodies as fat.
Reshaping the Food System
- The food system is a compromise. The current food system is a compromise between food corporations pushing for higher profit and governments easing social unrest.
- The food system is a battlefield. The fight to reform the lopsided food system has cost lives – both during protests and through farmer suicide. Farmers have organized various movements depending on differing conditions, yet they unite around the objective of restoring equality in the food market.
- The food system must offer real choices. Producers and consumers are bound by the market power of food corporations. Groups around the world have been trying to broaden the food system to give back real choices. Each person can at least have real sovereignty over what he eats by fighting for a deeper kind of choice; a choice not only between Coke and Pepsi but between a wider, redefined array of food options.
Source:
Patel, Raj, Stuffed and Starved, (Portobello Books, 2007), pp. 1-19
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