Finding room at the table for all
The average American knows that grocery prices are rising, but for the world’s poor — including some in United States — reality is harsher: in a world of plenty, millions may die from lack of food.
 By Michael Jennings
The food crisis first caught the developed world’s attention last year. In less than 12 months the price of rice doubled and the price of wheat nearly doubled. Price increases for these and other food staples led to protests and rioting in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, Haiti and other countries. The threat of civil unrest prompted even relatively developed countries like Russia and Mexico to freeze prices on basic foods.
Even before the crisis hit, many of the world’s poor paid up to 80 percent of their income for food. In contrast, the food bill for most American families absorbs only about 10 percent of their income.
Tony Hall, a former U.S. representative from Ohio who served as U.N. ambassador for humanitarian issues (2002–05), says there is an “immense” potential for mass starvation and an upsurge in food-related violence around the world in the near future. He sees this as a moral issue.
“There are over 2,500 verses in the Bible that deal with the issue of helping the poor, the sick, the hungry,” said Hall, an evangelical Christian who identifies himself as Presbyterian, on the PBS television program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly last fall. “God set it up that we are to address this issue ...”
What are the causes?
It took what United Nations World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls a “perfect storm” of forces to raise the specter of hunger in such menacing form.
The causes include:
Exploitative trade practices
© istockphoto/PidjoeRuth Farrell, coordinator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Hunger Program, and Andrew Kang Bartlett, the program’s associate for national hunger concerns, say the world produces enough food to ensure everyone on the planet an adequate diet, if only food is produced, priced and marketed in ways that make it available and affordable locally.
Fundamental to that goal, they say, is the concept of food sovereignty: farmers, communities and nations should control what crops and livestock they raise, how they are marketed and what local people will eat.
The food crisis, says Bartlett, sheds a glaring light on how far the world has gone in the opposite direction — toward letting those decisions be dictated by the richest nations, international financial institutions and giant agribusinesses.
“We’re looking at decades of agricultural and trade policies that pushed countries to export crops at the cost of local production and food self-sufficiency,” he says.
Farrell worked as a missionary in Peru for 10 years. There she saw the kind of flourishing, locally based food production that she and others call the surest bulwark against hunger. She also saw that bulwark begin to crumble as the country was pressured to comply with international free-trade agreements that treat food as just another commodity.
The United States and the European Union worsen matters by heavily subsidizing their own food growers, erecting trade barriers to food imports and dictating trade agreements that forbid poorer countries to subsidize their own farmers. Those trade agreements and international lending rules — also dictated by wealthy nations—pressure poorer countries to produce specialty crops for export. That diverts land and labor from local food production.
This pattern, replicated worldwide, has caused country after country in Asia, Africa and Latin America to go from being self-sufficient or a net exporter of food to being a net importer. That leaves these countries vulnerable to widespread hunger when global food prices rise.
Industrialized farming
© istockphoto.com/Xavi ArnauCompanies such as Cargill, Monsanto, ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland control large parts of the world market for agricultural products, seeds and fertilizer. They shape government food policies and try to ensure that international trade agreements favor their production methods and fatten their bottom lines. Most of these companies have feasted financially, even as their industrialized farming methods undermine local methods that are far better adapted to local soils, topography and rainfall, especially on marginal lands.
While living in Peru, Farrell observed that “the food they ate was much healthier than it is here.” But as the agribusiness model takes over and small farmers are forced out, she says, “probably what will happen is that processed food will become cheaper and fresh food will become more expensive,” and people will become dependent on the United States for their food.
Rising energy costs
The massive amounts of energy required for industrial-scale food production drive up food costs. The diversion of crops and land to fuel production drives those costs up still more.
Rich countries promote a farming model heavily dependent on fossil fuels to power farm equipment, produce non-organic fertilizers and ship farm products overseas. When the price of oil goes up, so does the price of the food produced.
Biofuel production
The biofuels boom has removed cropland from food production, adding to the upward pressure on food prices. Last April a World Bank assessment called biofuels “the major cause of the increase in food prices.”
Subsidies for corn-based ethanol production in the United States are just one piece of what has become a worldwide industry. European farmers grow soybeans to produce biodiesel. In poor countries, forests are burned to clear land for a variety of biofuel crops — a practice that contributes to environmental degradation as well as hunger.
Tony Hall, who chaired the House Select Committee on Hunger, says ethanol subsidies are “taking a lot of food out of hungry mouths,” and it’s time to end them. But he says members of Congress get few calls or letters on that issue, so it’s not high on their agenda.
“In other words, nothing’s going to happen unless people get involved,” he says
Changing consumption and population patterns
For the past century growth in food production has outstripped population growth, but rising energy and fertilizer costs and changing consumption patterns may end that pattern. Better-paid people in India and China are consuming more meat — a foodstuff that multiplies the drain on food supplies because of the grain fed to non-grazed livestock.
Diets laden with meat and out-of-season and imported foods exact costs in land, energy and water that could be more efficiently used to produce locally grown foods. In adopting such wasteful diets, newly affluent families in China and India are, of course, merely replicating patterns long prevalent in the developed world.
Droughts and other catastrophic weather events
Some experts estimate the fossil fuel emissions and other greenhouse gases associated with livestock and crop production account for a third of all global warming gases. Climate change leads to droughts, desertification, intense storms and flooding. As these conditions worsen, industrial agriculture seeks to compensate by ramping up its use of fertilizer and irrigation, both of which require still more energy, in addition to depleting water supplies and topsoil. The result is ever-greater expenditures of energy and resources for the same or declining yields.
Addressing the crisis
Where to start?
Church leaders say that beyond offering food aid and reforming trade practices something far more fundamental needs to happen. Citizens of developed countries need to see how their nations’ political and trade policies, and their own beliefs and consumption patterns, contribute to world hunger. And they need to make the necessary changes through their political leaders, within their communities and families, and in their own behavior.
Instead of just looking at price stickers on food, say Farrell and Bartlett, we should apply “true-cost accounting.” Depending on the item, that could mean adding in costs of environmental degradation, energy or subsidies.
Eat locally produced food
Bartlett says true-cost accounting may come about naturally as rising energy costs force our nation toward a more localized food economy. Farrell says we should hasten that shift by making locally produced food a larger part of our diet. “And when we do that, all this processed junk will suddenly become more expensive and local food will become less expensive.”
Treat causes, not just symptoms
People can aid the hungry in their communities, but Farrell urges them to distinguish between symptoms and causes of hunger. Donations to food pantries, while commendable, treat symptoms.
To help the millions of Americans who can’t afford nourishing food, people should urge Congress to raise the minimum wage, enact a universal medical plan and strengthen labor laws that help workers organize, says Leslie Woods, associate for domestic policy and environmental issues in the church’s Washington Office.
Meaningful reform of food policies at the national and international levels requires a healthy dose of trust busting aimed at giant agribusinesses, says Woods, adding that the lack of enforcement of existing laws “has been incredible.”
Get Congress to do the right thing, says Catherine Gordon, associate for international issues in the Washington Office. For example, passing the Jubilee Act would make 67 impoverished, heavily indebted countries eligible for debt cancellation, freeing resources for health care and poverty alleviation.
Join others in fasting
Church members may also take part in a monthly fast to discern ways to respond to the crisis (see “One bite at a time”).
No one should underestimate the power of fasting, says Tony Hall, who still works internationally on hunger, reconciliation and development issues. He recommends fasting in the spirit of Isaiah 58: “and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry / and satisfy the needs of the oppressed / then your light will rise in the darkness / and your night will become like the noonday.”
Hall tells about walking with Mother Teresa through the teeming streets of Calcutta, India. Overwhelmed by what he saw, he blurted out, “How can we possibly make a difference with all this poverty around us?”
She responded, “Do the thing in front of you.”
Fasting, Hall says, can open your eyes to the thing in front of you, even if it was there all along.
—Michael Jennings is a freelance writer based in Louisville, Ky.
One bite at a time
The daunting scale of the world food crisis makes it all the more appropriate that people of faith seek insight and solutions through prayer and fasting, says Jim Deters, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hibbing, Minn.
“The issue surrounding the world food crisis baffles economists and international politicians alike,” says Deters, whose congregation is responding to a churchwide call for monthly fasts. Even when a problem defies understanding, “prayer still works,” he says.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has invited church members to begin fasting on the Friday evening preceding Communion Sunday (normally the first Sunday of each month), and to break their fast with Communion on Sunday morning. Those not able to fast are encouraged to eat simple meals, skip a meal or design a fast that fits their circumstances. Churchwide fasting, which began in October, is intended to help participants discern ways to respond to the global food crisis.
One advantage of making the fasts a month-by-month exercise is that “you can divide the problem up,” says Andrew Kang Bartlett, associate for national hunger concerns with the Presbyterian Hunger Program. “You can take it one bite at a time.”
Fasting is not itself a response to world hunger, but a way to inspire people to seek God’s will for the proper response, Deters says. Prayer and fasting can develop the spiritual muscle required for such a search.
“I think that our faith is in one way very similar to our bodies, in that without rigorous exercise, we lose what we have,” Deters says. Through the discipline of prayer and fasting and meditation on Scripture, church members will conduct their own search for answers.
Deters says asking people of faith to engage with the issue of worldwide hunger “could not be more timely,” given the nation’s ongoing financial crisis, which can lead people to fixate on close-to-home issues.
“When we focus on ourselves, we are in a very unhealthy spiritual condition,” he says. “For our own sake and the sake of the world, expanding our radar is the path to vitality.”
—Michael Jennings
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