Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [43]
3. More and more basic grains go to livestock. As the gap between rich and poor widens, basic grains are fed increasingly to livestock in the third world, even in the face of deepening hunger for the majority there. Not only is more and more grain fed to animals, but much land that could be growing basic food is used to graze livestock, often for export. Two-thirds of the agriculturally productive land in Central America is devoted to livestock production, yet the poor majority cannot afford the meat, which is eaten by the well-to-do or exported.8
4. Poverty pushes up population growth rates. The poverty and powerlessness of the poor produces large families. The poor must have many children to compensate for their high infant death rate, to provide laborers to supplement meager family income, and to provide the only old age security the poor have. High birthrates also reflect the social powerlessness of women, exacerbated by poverty.9
5. Conscious “market development” strategies of the U. S. government help to make other economies dependent on our grain. (See “The Meat Mystique,” Part II, Chapter 3, to learn how market development works.)
These forces that generate needless hunger are hidden from most Americans, so when they hear that the poorest underdeveloped countries are importing twice as much grain as they did ten years ago, Americans inevitably conclude that scarcity of resources is their basic problem. Americans then urge more food exports, including food aid.
In writing Food First, however, we learned that two-thirds of U.S. agricultural exports go to the industrial countries, not the third world, and that most of what does go to the third world is fed to livestock, not to the hungry people. In writing Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry, we learned that chronic food aid to elite-based, repressive governments not only fails to reach the hungry in most cases, it actually hurts them. Food aid, we found, is largely a disguised form of economic assistance, concentrated on a handful of governments that U.S. policymakers view as allies. Because food aid is often sold to the people by recipient governments, it serves as general budgetary support, reinforcing the power of these elite-based governments. In 1980, ten countries received three-quarters of all our food aid.10 Among them were Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and South Korea. Notorious for their neglect of the poor, such governments block genuine agrarian reform that could unchain their country’s productive potential. Indonesia, for example, squanders its spectacular oil wealth—$10 billion in 1980—on luxury imports, militarism, and showy capital-intensive industrial projects which don’t even provide many jobs.
What I have just said does not diminish our responsibility to send food to relieve famine, as was needed in Kampuchea in 1980 and Africa in 1981. (Note that disaster and famine relief are only 11 percent of our government’s food aid program.) But even in the face of famine, as in Kampuchea or Somalia, we learned, the U.S. government often operates more out of political than humanitarian considerations—to the detriment of the hungry. Famine relief funds channeled through private voluntary agencies often have a better chance of helping.
In writing Food First and the books that followed, I had to learn some painful lessons. In the back of my mind I was always asking, what does all of this mean for the