Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [55]
The answer to this question is much easier than the answer to the first. The sad truth is that those who want and need the grain cannot afford to buy it, so livestock get it. And this is truer every day as the poor are pushed off their lands by the more powerful landowners and as new technology denies the landless poor the jobs they need if they are to buy food.
In researching Food First I began to understand that when the “experts” praise underdeveloped countries for “upgrading their diets,” the diet of the majority is often being downgraded. This “upgrading” of diets, reflected in statistics showing greater per capita consumption, often means that the well-off minority is eating up hundreds of pounds of grain in the form of meat while the majority is denied even a minimal grain diet.
Brazil is an extreme and tragic example. There, as I’ve said, almost half of the basic grains go to feed livestock while the majority of the rural poor suffer from malnutrition. Black beans, long the source of cheap protein for the poor, are now expensive and out of the reach of many. The reason? Landowners have shifted from growing black beans to what is more profitable—growing soybeans for livestock feed for domestic and export markets.
The growing power and wealth of the elite in many third world countries means that scarce foreign exchange, often earned by agricultural exports, is used to import feed instead of basic development goods for the benefit of the poor majority. During the 1970s half of the increased livestock feeding abroad relied on imported feed, primarily from the United States.5
Exporting the Steak Religion
Most Americans assume that our farm exports go to feed the hungry world. Few appreciate that most of these exports go to other industrial countries, and, overall, two-thirds of all of our agricultural exports go to feed livestock.6 As noted earlier, U.S. farm exports have doubled in just one decade. Much of that spectacular increase is due to feed grain exports, which have leaped fourfold.
The United States has done its part to create a world of hamburger and wheat bread lovers, even in cultures that have thrived for centuries on rice, soy, and fish. From its beginnings in the 1950s, U.S. food aid was officially viewed as a tool for developing commercial markets.7 American officials understood that food aid could be a foot in the door for converting a nation’s taste and food system to dependence on the United States, first on “aid” food, then on commercial exports. The strategy has worked: among the largest importers of U.S. grain are countries, like South Korea and Taiwan, that not long ago were major recipients of food aid.
But at least most food aid went directly to feed people (mainly the better off); more and more of the current commercial shipments to such countries go into livestock production. This shift to livestock feeding in the third world was encouraged by a provision in our food aid program during the 1960s. We allowed a percentage of the local currency used to repay food aid loans to be lent at very low interest rates to U.S. corporations. Over 400 U.S. corporations benefited. Some were food firms, such as Ralston Purina, Peavey, and Cargill, which used the cheap loans to establish grain-fed-poultry operations abroad. The development of feed grain markets in the third world was also encouraged by a law that allowed the federal Commodity Credit Corporation to lend American companies money—over $120 million by 1976—to purchase agricultural commodities. The companies then sell them in the foreign markets, using the proceeds to establish operations there.
At the same time that food aid was introducing Asian tastebuds to U.S. wheat, and to poultry fed on U.S. grain, the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was pushing “aggressive