The Life of Food
July 2009
Banner photo: Oxheart tomatoes [© Creativ Studio Heinemann]
Seeing Hunger Through New Eyes
Corn from a combine fills a grain truck [© Jonathan Kim/Getty Images]
People the world over are experiencing profound psychological disorientation in the face of the current economic and ecological situation; the stories long used to make sense of the world, and to envision the future, have failed. But when a tree falls, we can for the first time see its roots. Today, the toppled "tree" is our increasingly globalized economic system. What is the deepest root now exposed?
While only a decade ago development experts expressed dismay that hunger was spreading by several million people a year, in just the last two years hunger has grown by over 100 million--bringing its toll to nearly 1 billion.
There's only one thing powerful enough to make human beings create a world violating our common sense and sensibilities. It is the power of ideas. We humans create the world according to largely unconscious mental maps. They determine what we see and cannot see, and therefore what we believe to be possible.
Reconsidering Scarcity
My first clues as to the inadequacy of the dominant mental map came in 1968, as I began the research that led to Diet for a Small Planet. Experts warned that we had hit Earth's limits. But I soon realized that we were--and still are--actively generating scarcity from plenty. The world produces more than enough food to make us all chubby, even on what's left over after feeding more than a third of the world's grain to livestock, and after turning a third of the world fish catch into feed, and feeding corn to cars via ethanol.
The world produces 15 percent more calories per person than in 1970. Yet the frame of scarcity still defines the debate. It drives us single-mindedly to focus on production, while blinding us to the obvious: that dependence on costly (and eco-destructive) inputs and ever-larger farming operations (justified as "efficient," despite contrary evidence) ends up undercutting people's access to what is produced. So we continue to create more food and yet, at the same time, more hunger.
The other face of this premise is the belief that human beings are simply selfish, materialist and competitive. From here it follows that we best turn over our fate as much as possible to experts and officials--and even better, to an automatic, infallible force shielded from human tampering: "The magic of the market."
Market exchange has served human society for millennia, certainly, but in the last 50 years we've hit upon a peculiar variant: a market driven largely by one rule, by highest return to existing wealth--corporate chiefs and shareholders.
Today's complex, pervasive problems entail changes in behavior involving us all. They cannot be solved simply from the top down; they rely on the active engagement of citizens who know their voices count. Thus, feelings of powerlessness, paralyzing citizens, are arguably the greatest threat to our planet's future.
If so, the central question on which our future hinges is this: How do we transform powerlessness? In its deepest sense, empowerment depends on aligning ourselves with what we now know about our nature. What conditions have proven to bring out the worst in most of us? At least three: extreme concentration of power, in-group/out-group scapegoating and anonymity. And, frighteningly, the dominant world order--wealth in ever-fewer hands controlling ever-longer and more anonymous supply chains--generates precisely these three conditions.
Equally obvious, however, are hardwired pro-social capacities: empathy, cooperation, fairness and efficacy. MRI studies reveal, for example, that when we cooperate, areas of our brains are stimulated that are the same as when we eat chocolate!
Acknowledging the truth of our mixed capacities enables us to consciously design rules and norms that encourage the ongoing creation and dispersion of power, mutual accountability, and thus basic fairness. To seize this horrific crisis and turn our planet toward life requires not a leap of faith but a giant jump onto firmer ground. It means rejecting faith-based economics, which tells us that if we only produce more, we can alleviate suffering, and moving rapidly toward evidence-based economics, with our laser focus on realigning human relationships and our relationships with our ecological home.
This transition is already under way, though largely invisible. Healing our beleaguered planet depends on consciously celebrating the human need for agency and, on that basis, generating relationships of mutuality in which power is cocreated.
To move in this direction--given that as creatures of the mind, we humans are creatures of story--we can, through empowering stories, spread the emergent, new, evidence-based way of seeing.
India, the High-Tech Miracle?
Through the dominant lens, India is the rising economic star, but while those of us in the North hear only of this country's high-tech information boom, as of 2004 this sector employed fewer than 1 million Indians, or one-tenth of 1 percent. Nine out of ten Indians still work in the informal sector, where three-quarters make less than 20 cents a day.
Also absent in the media-fed view of tech-booming India is the employment with dignity that poor urban dwellers and villagers themselves are creating, relying not on centrally controlled capital but on relationships of mutuality. In just three decades, for example, 12.3 million rural Indians, mostly women, many landless, have created a network of 100,000 village-level dairy co-ops--generating many times the number of jobs the high-tech information industry boasts. Although these cooperatives provide over a fifth of the country's total milk supply, few beyond India have heard of them.
Or, consider another Indian breakthrough, one emerging in a context of tragedy. From 1997 through 2006, 166,000 Indian farmers committed suicide, in part responding to overwhelming indebtedness. Many had experienced catastrophic losses when Monsanto genetically modified cotton seed, for example, failed to yield promised returns.
The southern state of Andhra Pradesh, termed the "pesticide capital of the world," ranks second in farmer suicides. A few years ago, civil society organizations began initiatives to reduce farmer debt driving the epidemic. Credit went to rural women's self-help groups for a non-pesticide approach. The state rural development ministry then supported the movement.
Rejecting GM seeds and using natural pest-control practices did not significantly affect farmers' yields. But without expensive inputs, costs went down. With lower costs, farmers in one village using the non-pesticide approach enjoy 23 percent more net income than their chemically dependent neighbors, and farmers report their health improving as well.
Forgoing chemical treatment is also allowing more complex human and ecological relationships to emerge. Simple monoculture and dependency on distant markets are giving way to diverse cereals, fodder and fuelwood for exchange locally. With varied crops maturing at different times of the year, a farmer's income is spread out. The non-pesticide movement has spread to 3,000 villages across 18 of the 23 districts of Andhra Pradesh, reaching 340,000 farmers.
A Different African Story
If India is framed as a winner in the global economic race, Africa is cast as the loser. We hear only of the continent's degraded soils, absent infrastructure and endless wars.
What's to be done? For many aid and development agencies the solution is clear: poor African farmers have been left out, so help them buy into, literally, the dominant model in which abundance is purchased. Link small farmers to corporate vendors of new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides.
This solution starts with things, more things, within a construct destined to perpetuate and intensify existing, extreme imbalances of power, and thus to deepen dependencies.
Burkina Faso, in the Sahel region of Africa, ranks third from the bottom in the Human Development Index of 177 countries. Within Burkina Faso, soils in the northern Yatenga region had long been viewed as the most degraded. In the 1970s and 1980s, environmental degradation, drought, harvest failures and famine brought despair. Many left. But despair also triggered something new.
Farmers began to reestablish and improve on traditional planting pits called zaï--shallow holes that collect rainwater and to which farmers add manure. The compost attracts termites that dig channels and digest organic matter, making it easier for plants growing in the pits to absorb nutrients. The approach can rehabilitate "rock-hard, barren land" and quickly increase yields, according to a report for the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Civic groups began helping to spread the approach. Then a local farmer started an Association for the Promotion of Zaï, and he now holds an annual "zaï market," attracting farmers from about 100 villages who share experiences. In a nearby area, another farmer began a "zaï school," and his district association of such schools now claims about a thousand members.
In Burkina Faso in only 15 years, farmers using zaï have made tens of thousands of badly degraded acres productive. And, with the help of development organizations, contour stone bunds that reduce erosion have been built on at least 250,000 acres. With added manure, the results are stunning: cereal yields jumping sevenfold or more without chemical fertilizer.
Since the 1980s in neighboring Niger, moreover, a similar farmer-engaged process of regenerating cultivated fields is succeeding on at least 12.5 million acres, which probably makes it the largest positive environmental transformation in Africa.
A survey of 45 sustainable agriculture initiatives in 17 African countries involving 730,000 households found that agroecological practices substantially improved food production and household food security. In almost all these projects, cereal yields improved by 50 to 100 percent. Author of the survey Professor Jules Pretty emphasizes that "new configurations" of "human relations [are] prerequisites for improving nature." Behind sustainable success, he notes, is trust within organized groups generated through what he calls "social learning" in which farmers participate directly and share what they learn.
Such a process seems relevant to the breakthroughs in Niger, where, according to soil and water conservationist Chris Reij, "some of the doom and gloom stories about Africa's drylands are not based on facts, but on fiction."
Shifting the Frame
The dominant scarcity frame scares us into believing that the alternative approaches described above are not possible--that we can't have a future in which we relate to the Earth healthfully and are still able to meet survival needs. A multidisciplinary study at the University of Michigan concluded that if the whole world shifted to sustainable, organic practices, our total food supply could increase by about half. And this approach, which enables the dispersion, not concentration, of power, means that the increase in output is more likely to reach those who most need it. The key is a shift of frame from powerlessness to possibility, from bringing in more things to building new relationships of mutuality.
I believe that solutions are known, not just to the crisis of hunger but to our planet's other major challenges as well. If true, then the only thing we have really to worry about is the widespread feeling of powerlessness, preventing so many from finding the courage to work for solutions that already are evident.
If also true, then nothing is more important to our future than disciplining ourselves to search out stories of possibility--spreading them not as panaceas but as proof that we have a fighting chance of turning our planet toward life. Since human beings didn't evolve to be couch potatoes and whiners--and since acting is infinitely more satisfying than sitting back depressed--that confidence in possibility may be all most people need to jump in and to give our all in this momentous time of planetary opportunity.
Frances Moore Lappé is the author of 16 books, from Diet for a Small Planet in 1971 to Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad in 2007. With Anna Lappé, she leads the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund (www.smallplanet.org). She is also cofounder of Food First, the Institute for Food and Development Policy. In 1987, Lappé‚ received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel. This article has been adapted from a longer version in the Issues in Brief series of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.
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