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* To understand what has happened in Nicaragua since the fall of Somoza, see our Institute’s book, What Difference Could a Revolution Make? Food and Farming in the New Nicaragua, by Joseph Collins, 1982.

Part II Diet for a Small Planet

1.

One Less Hamburger?

I REMEMBER RIDICULING Hubert Humphrey’s comment that if we all just ate one less hamburger a week, the hunger crisis would be conquered. Yet even while I scoffed at that notion in 1974, my own writing was often taken to be saying the same thing. In the 1975 edition I asked my readers to pretend they were seated in a restaurant, eating an eight-ounce steak—and to appreciate that the grain used to produce the steak could have filled the empty bowls of 40 people in the room.

The first two editions implied that our grain-fed-meat diet denied grain to the hungry abroad who lacked the resources to feed themselves. But as I did research for Food First, my view began to shift. I came to learn that virtually every country has the capacity to grow enough food for its people. No country is a hopeless basket case. Moreover, only a minuscule fraction of our food exports ever reach the hungry.

Much of our research for Food First focused on the food-producing potential of some of the world’s most densely populated countries, such as Bangladesh, and some of the most agriculturally resource-poor countries, such as the nations south of the Sahara Desert, known as the Sahel.

In Bangladesh, we learned, enough food is already produced to prevent malnutrition; if it had been fairly distributed, grain alone would have provided over 2,200 calories per person per day in 1979.1 And the stunning agriculture potential of Bangladesh, where rice yields are only half as large as in China, has hardly been tapped. I was struck by the conclusion of a 1976 report to Congress: “The country is rich enough in fertile land, water, manpower and natural gas for fertilizer, not only to be self-sufficient in food but a food exporter, even with its rapidly increasing population size.”2

We focused on the Sahel because severe famine threatened the region in the years just before we began Food First. We saw so many TV images of hungry people dying on desolate, parched earth that we were certain that if ever there were a case of nature-caused famine, this had to be it.

But to our dismay, we learned that with the possible exception of Mauritania (a country rich in minerals), every country in the Sahel actually produced enough grain to feed its total population even during the worst years of the drought of the early 1970s.3 Moreover, in a number of the Sahelian countries production of export crops such as cotton, peanuts, and vegetables actually increased.4

In researching what became Diet for a Small Planet, I was struck by the tremendous abundance in the U.S. food system, and I assumed that many other countries would be forever dependent on our grain exports because they did not have the soil and climate suitable for basic food production. But I learned that while the United States is blessed with exceptional agricultural resources, third world countries are not doomed to be perpetually dependent on U.S. exports.

I learned that what so many Americans are made to see as inevitable third world dependence on grain imports is the result of five forces:

1. A small minority controls more and more of the farmland. In most third world countries, roughly 80 percent of the agricultural land is, on average, controlled by a tiny 3 percent of those who own land.5 This minority underuses and misuses the land.

2. Agricultural development of basic foods is neglected, while production for export climbs. Elites now in control in most third world countries prefer urban industrialization to basic rural development that could benefit the majority. Of 71 underdeveloped countries studied in the mid-1970s, three-quarters allocated less than 10 percent of their central government expenditures to agriculture.6 Moreover, as the majority of people are increasingly