Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [3]
In one sense, what motivated me to write Diet for a Small Planet was simple outrage. We feed almost half the world’s grain to livestock, returning only a fraction in meat—while millions starve. It confounds all logic. Yet the pattern has intensified. Vast resources move at an accelerating rate toward the production of exports from lands on which people go hungry. Since the 1970s, the rates of growth in food production have been lower in the basic grains and tubers eaten by poor, hungry people than in fruits, vegetables, oil seeds, and feedgrains for meat, eaten largely by the planet’s already well-fed minority.
My mission was to awaken people to this simple fact: Hunger is human made. I sought to liberate people from the myth that nature’s to blame for the massive deprivation hundreds of millions of people now experience. In writing Food First and establishing the Institute for Food and Development Policy in the mid-seventies, however, my mission became more ambitious.
I sought, with my colleagues, to explain how human-made institutions create needless suffering. In books like Aid as Obstacle, World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Betraying the National Interest, and Taking Population Seriously we described the growing concentration of decision making—from the village level, to the national level, to the level of international commerce and finance. Fewer and fewer people make decisions that have life-and-death consequences for the rest of us. The problem is not scarcity of land or food, I became fond of saying: it is a scarcity of democracy.
But, for this phrase to make any sense, I had to probe to the heart and soul of democracy. Surely to have any meaning at all, democracy must be more than a set of formal rules and procedures. After all, many countries—the Philippines, India, and many of the Central American countries—have all the trappings of democracy. Yet their people live in misery. Democracy had to be more—is it less a set of rules, I wondered, than a very human process? A process grounded in several principles that can only be realized by people themselves? First is, perhaps, the accountability of leadership to those who have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Second, the related principle of shared power, perhaps never equally shared but at least shared to the degree that no one is left powerless, unable to protect themselves and those they love.
In so defining democracy, it became clear to me that wherever there is hunger, democracy has not been fulfilled.
But the better I got at describing the problem, the more intense my frustration. What were the solutions? I could describe the need for greater democracy, making possible, for example, the reforms necessary for the rural poor in the third world to achieve food security and reduce the size of their families. I could describe policy shifts that could do away with homelessness here. But without a practical path for getting there, all my descriptions and prescriptions left me profoundly unsatisfied. I had always enjoyed giving public talks but my enjoyment began to wane. I realized my audiences wanted more from me. And I did not feel able to give it.
I had to go deeper. In the early 1980s, I started reading widely again in political theory and social change. I traveled to countries I thought might have something important to teach. I visited Europe to study the movement for worker participation there. I went to Sweden to examine the much-debated proposal to democratize and decentralize ownership of large industry. In Yugoslavia I studied the troubled path toward worker self-management. I ventured to China to look at its dramatic restructuring of agriculture.
By the mid-eighties my sense of possibilities had been greatly expanded, but I had also come more firmly than ever to believe that no program—no matter how “correct”—could address the problems of our communities and our planet unless