November/December
2000
Food
and Finance: Human Needs versus Corporate Greed:
The Satya Interview
with Anuradha Mittal
|
|
|
Anuradha Mittal is
the co-director of Food First, also known as the Institute for
Food and Development Policy. She launched “The Time has Come!”,
a national campaign to challenge increasing poverty, hunger and economic
insecurity in the U.S. Anuradha is the co-editor of America Needs Human
Rights (Food First, 1999), and her articles have appeared in newspapers
across the country. She spoke to Angela Starks about the myths and the
facts surrounding hunger’s causes and cures.
What would you say is the most important political food issue?
At Food First, we are especially concerned about the myths around
the whole issue of hunger and how these myths prevent us from ending
it. We do not have a clear reason presented to us by the policy makers
and the media as to what causes hunger. The usual reason given is that
there is not enough food to go around. But look at a country like the
U.S., which is the largest surplus producer. According to the U.S.
Department
of Agriculture, 36 million Americans do not have enough food, or they
do not have adequate food security. Then there’s India which has
a serious hunger problem, even though it is one of the largest exporters
of food. Another myth is the ‘over population’ excuse. The
fact is, for every overpopulated country like Bangladesh, which has
hunger, you have countries like Brazil or Nigeria, which are not densely
populated and yet they have hunger.
One of the main causes of increasing hunger and poverty is not the
shortage of food production but the shortage of purchasing power. It’s
the absence of living wage jobs, the absence of genuine land reform
(people
do not have control over resources, including land, to be able to grow
their own food) and the increasing concentration of corporate power
over our food system which are responsible.
Are there important differences between the causes of hunger in so-called
developing countries and the U.S.?
In this age of economic globalization, universal factors are responsible.
In the U.S., for example, not everyone receives a living wage. Also
the system does not support the small family farmers. Family farmers
are no longer counted as a profession; they have virtually disappeared,
and yet agribusinesses are getting stronger and stronger. The need for
the redistribution of resources applies globally.
Food First talks about food as a human right. Why is it necessary
to campaign for the right to food as a human right when it should be
a given?
That is a very important question. Food as a human right should
be a given, but the reality is that even in a country like the U.S.,
while we are so gung-ho about trade agreements and the like, we have
not ratified the International Covenant for Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR), which would guarantee the right to food. In 1996 at
the World Food Summit in Rome, the head of the U.S. delegation basically
explained that we cannot support the right to food—just as the
U.S. government does not support the right to housing—because it
would mean that welfare reform is in violation of international laws.
Because the ICESCR is a treaty, it would become law if ratified, which
means it would be a government’s job to respect, protect, facilitate
and fulfill economic rights. So when we find that the governments are
not fulfilling obligations, that they represent large corporations
instead
of their own people, we need to have campaigns that talk about food
and housing as rights. Just as the torture of one family or individual
is unacceptable, the hunger of one family or individual in this modern
day and age, when we have enough food around the world, should not
be
tolerated. It would be a crime against humanity.
In what other ways do economics factor into the hunger issue?
Governments need to have appropriate policies for land reform and
living wages and to ensure that trade agreements will not work against
working families but in favor of them. With any social economic policy
that a government embarks on it can ask itself, “is it going to
honor and facilitate people to feed themselves?” That should be
its litmus test. It does not mean setting up groups of people who just
knock on people’s doors with free meals—that should only be
a last resort. Donations are not the solution; challenging the political
structures—that’s what we have to do.
It actually makes better economic sense to have policies that protect
the right to food, because when you have people who are starving they
are not able to perform adequately, including children who are not
paying
attention in schools. Living wages are very feasible; they are not
just an inspiration to strive towards but a reality that we can make
happen.
Unfortunately, the U.S. has repeatedly seen the end to hunger as a ‘goal’ which
is very different from viewing food as a human right.
So rather than throwing money at the problem, we need to change the
infrastructure?
Yes. Right now, for every dollar spent on food, only 15 cents goes
to the farmer. The rest goes to corporations like Cargill that control
not just the food production, they are also the buyers, packers and
shippers. So we create a situation that puts our farmers out of business.
Agriculture used to be about small family farms, when a community knew
where their food came from, when children grew up singing “old
MacDonald had a farm.” That whole situation has changed, to “old
MacDonald has a factory.” How many children know that tomatoes
don’t grow in a can that you buy at a supermarket? Look at the
distance that food travels today, whether it’s blemish-free grapes
from Chile, or beans from Ethiopia. Industrial agriculture has managed
to effect, in a very detached and impersonal way, how we connect to
our food. The cash economy and exports have become the new form of
agriculture,
instead of a local effort around which communities, religions and festivities
are based. It is this commodification of agriculture that has resulted
in the devastation of the environment, ecology and social and economic
life.
What role do multinational corp-orations play in hunger?
The world’s food and grain supply system as well as the seeds
are now controlled by a handful of corporations—it is dependent
on their whims and fancies. The agricultural clauses of the World Trade
Organization are drafted by the Vice President of Cargill, which in
itself presents a very threatening situation. To have something like
food—that is so integral to political and economic sovereignty—being
taken over by agribusinesses is very scary. A lot of people might think
that with the end of the Cold War, we do not have to worry about embargoes
and the rest because we are one big happy family. I would like to remind
readers of cases like Cuba, which illustrate the importance that every
country be food self-sufficient. Cuba could have been starved with
the
collapse of the socialist block and the trade embargo, but it has managed
to feed its own people by practicing sustainable ecological agriculture.
Are countries exporting a lot of what they grow on their prime land?
About 78 percent of countries with child malnourishment are food
exporting countries. When you look at the famine of Ethiopia in the ‘80’s, even at that time—when food aid was being sent—Ethiopia
was exporting beans to Europe.
So food aid is not the answer?
At Food First we believe that yes, food aid might sometimes be important,
when it has to be done urgently and can be provided without political
conditions. However, instead of sending food aid from Canada or the
U.S., we should try to buy it from the local resources. In the case
of Ethiopia, all this food aid came from the U.S. and other countries,
finding new markets for Western corporations, even though the local
farmers had crops in their fields.
Most of the time when we think of food aid, we presume it is free but
a lot of it is sold at a low interest rate, so in the name of food
aid
we actually find new markets for U.S. corporations. For example, even
though Indonesia received the gold medal for food self-sufficiency
from
the Food and Agriculture Organization in 1984, this country became
the largest recipient of food aid in the world in 1998. The problem
was
not a shortage of food production; the reason was that people were
too poor after the Asian financial crisis. 15,000 people were being
laid
off per day in Jakarta alone. I met numerous farmers with crops in
their fields, but for the first time ever, the U.S. had found a market
in
Indonesia for wheat. Indonesians don’t eat wheat!
What role does debt play in hunger?
One of the biggest things that we talk about is annulment of debt.
These are from loans that were given for bad projects in which local
communities had no say. Let’s look at examples of World Bank loans,
for projects like a nuclear reactor in an area prone to seismic activity
in the Philippines—a bad idea; or the building of large dams that
have displaced hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. If you
look at when these loans are given and who gets the contract—say
to build a large dam—very often it is European or American companies.
You give it with one hand and you take it away with the other.
The debts need to be annulled right away, because these countries have
paid far more than they actually took loans for. The loans are resulting
in programs that violate governments’ obligations to its people;
so, to make up for the debt, you find money going away from social safety
nets, you find countries being forced to engage in export agriculture—growing
coffee or tulips or whatever—instead of feeding their own people.
Do you have a policy at Food First where you say “this is what
we really need to do to end hunger”?
We advocate the right to food as a human right. It’s an approach
we need to take to be able to reshape the terms of the debate. However,
we do not just focus on one solution, we talk about all kinds of different
alternatives. On one hand, we challenge the whole global food system,
whether it is through the world’s agricultural trade policies,
industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, or whether it is looking
at existing alternatives such as the sustainable farming in Cuba. Our
research also shows that small farms actually produce much more than
the large corporate farms, so Food First advocates these alternatives.
To accept alternatives, people need to understand what causes hunger:
it is not some supernatural force that causes it, or something beyond
our control, it is something called human decisions. Since human decisions
are responsible, we feel empowered because those decisions can be changed.
For more about Food First and the Institute for Food and Development
Policy visit www.foodfirst.org
or call 510-654-4400.
