Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [30]
Most satisfying is the range of people who are using our work—peasant organizers in the Philippines and Bangladesh, teachers here at home (from classes in political science, economics, and ethics to classes in nutrition), members of church study groups of all denominations, food coop people, and journalists. In one recent week our work was used as the basis for a front-page Wall Street Journal article critical of food aid in Bangladesh, we were quoted in Newsweek, and one of our new books was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. Yet we feel certain we have just scratched the surface.
Over the four years since Food First was originally published, we have seen a dramatic change in the analysis of hunger by groups that we have been trying to reach. The simplistic overpopulation theories of hunger, for instance, are no longer accepted uncritically. The questions and attitudes of the audiences who hear me speak are also very different. We believe that our work is contributing to that change.
While many discard the overpopulation explanation of hunger, often they still fall back on the idea that greater production alone is the solution; they ignore the most critical issue of control—power. So we have tried to make our message ever clearer: unless we address the issue of power—who is making the decisions—we can never get at the roots of needless hunger.
The official diagnosis is that the poor are poor because they lack certain things—irrigation, credit, improved seeds, good roads, etc. But we ask, why are they lacking these things? In studying country after country, it becomes clear that what the poor really lack is power—the power to secure what they need. Government aid agencies focus on the lack of materials; we focus on the lack of power.
Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Commission on World Hunger, for example, identified “poverty” instead of overpopulation as the cause of hunger. We disagree. Poverty is a symptom, not a cause. Poverty is a symptom of people’s powerlessness.
Nor is this mere semantic nitpicking. From these very different analyses flow very different “solutions”—and very different roles for us as outsiders.
If, as the official diagnosis would have it, the problem is poverty, then the solution is more government foreign aid to provide the goods to increase production. Billions of dollars of foreign aid is justified this way. But the bulk of this aid goes to governments which the United States sees as its military and political allies, including some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For fiscal year 1981, just ten countries received over one-third of all U.S. aid.2 Among them were India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines, with governments internationally notorious for their neglect of the needs of the poor and their repression of those wanting change. In countries where economic control is concentrated in the hands of a few, foreign aid strengthens the local and foreign elites whose stranglehold over land and other productive resources generates poverty and hunger in the first place. Instead of helping, our aid frequently hurts the dispossessed majority.
In a Bangladesh village, tube wells designed to benefit the poorest farmers become the property of the village’s richest landlord; in Haiti, food-for-work projects intended to help the landless poor end up as a boon to the village elite; and in Indonesia, rural electrification which was supposed to create jobs in rural industries actually eliminates the jobs of thousands of poor rural women.
We’ve had to conclude that U.S. foreign assistance fails to help the poor because it is based on two fundamental fallacies: first, that aid can reach the powerless even though channeled through the powerful; second, that U.S. government aid can be separated from the narrow military and economic strategies of U.S. policymakers. In the 1975 edition of Diet for a Small Planet I scolded the U.S. government for being so stingy, and