Stuffed and Starved

 Misshapen Figures

Conflicting facts about hunger and obesity are becoming very intense.

•  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.

 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. This idea would work if people had choices and they could have done things differently. However, these problems can no longer be explained by personal choice. For example, in Mexico, teenagers from average-income families living near the US border are more obese than others. That geography matters so much overturns the idea that personal choice defines hunger or obesity. Hunger and obesity stem from a different problem, inequities in the food system. The very same forces that intensify farmer hunger are also the ones that instigate obesity to consumers.

Caged Consumer Choice

Consumers are free to choose what they eat. Not entirely true. Large food corporations limit our diet options. Consumer selection is crafted not by season, nutrition, or taste but by what large food corporations offer in the market. Take the breakfast cereal for example.

• Twenty-seven out of twenty-eight breakfast cereals available to British children have sugar content exceeding the government’s recommendations.
• Nine of the twenty-eight cereals are 40% sugar.
• Almost 10% of children in the UK are obese

 The unavailability of healthy food explains why children in the UK are becoming unhealthy. Food corporations constrain our choices guided by the profit motive. It is more profitable for them to sell unhealthy, processed food – those that respond well to pesticides and preservatives and those that have high sugar and fat content. Consumers, unaware that their choices are caged, buy low-quality food in the supermarket and store them in their bodies as fat.

Starved MacDonald Rents His Farm

Constrained by the playing field, farmers have little choice. In fact, the very crops they plant are determined by the kind of land they own, climate, access to the market, credit, and the ingredients in the food production.

As farmers are confined by decreasing alternatives, powerful groups like the government and huge corporations gain more and more options. These options include: the safe level of pesticides and additives; where to outsource food; the payment farmers receive; and processing, transportation, and assembly techniques used in bringing the meal together.

Farmers have little room for error for the market punishes misjudgements. Poor 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. As absurd as these arrangements may seem, farmers subject themselves to them because, again, they have little choice.

Buy Cheap, Sell Dear

In the chain of food production, large food corporations have the leverage to control food prices in the market. While farmers gain slim profits from selling their produce with prices that are sometimes even lower the cost, food corporations generate huge earnings by selling these products with prices that are a hundredfold. This can be observed in the Ugandan coffee production.

• A global coffee surplus drove prices down and Ugandan farmers were forced to sell their coffee from 69 cents/kilo to 14 cents/kilo.
• Processing and fright costs included, coffee is bought by large corporations at $1.64/kilo, with only slim profits for middlemen and Ugandan exporters.
• These corporations then sell the same coffee to the market at $26.40/kilo, nearly 200 times the cost of a kilo in Uganda.

Huge corporations with high levels of brand loyalty and market dominance are more than capable of raising the price that its growers receive. However, this is against their principal rule of buying cheap and selling dear. Besides, they do not need to bother because even if they squeeze an industry in one country dry, other countries can readily fill the demand and ship their own bags of low-priced goods to them.

Power Play

In the food distribution chain, power is concentrated in very few hands. Only a few companies have the advantages of size, capital and economies of scale. Because of this, they gain market power both over producers and consumers.

With monopolizing power, large food corporations can afford to lobby governments for economic conditions suitable to them by creating lopsided trade agreements. On the other hand, governments are being driven by concerns about poverty, by fear of what hungry poor people might do to the rich. This results to a food system that is a compromise between corporations pushing for higher profit in food and governments easing social unrest.

Reshaping the Food System

The food system is a battlefield and it has cost many lives – in rallies during protests and at home through suicide. Through the years, farmers have organized and tried to reshape the distorted food system. Farmers in the US, India, and Mexico have aired their grievances to the gates of the World Trade Organization and to the offices of huge food corporations. Meanwhile, landless farmers in Brazil have occupied disused farmland. Movements have differed depending on their conditions, constraints, oppositions, and arms. Yet, they unite around the goal of reconstructing a food system that is dominated by inequities by restoring equality.

Consumers are also bound by the market power of corporations and many have tried to gain freedom. Groups around the world have been trying to broaden the food system to give back the choices of the people who grow, and the people who eat. No one has all the answers, but each person can 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.