Myths About Hunger
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1. There is not enough food to go around: again, the world produces enough
food to give every person on the planet enough food to well exceed his or her
recommended daily caloric intake. “Even most ‘hungry countries”
have enough food for all their people right now. Many a re net exporters of
food and other agricultural products” (www.foodfirst.org).
2. Nature is responsible for the famine: “It’s too easy to blame
nature. Human-made forces are making people increasingly vulnerable to nature’s
vagaries. Food is always available for those who can afford it – starvation
during hard times hits only the poorest. Natural events rarely explain deaths;
they are simply the final push over the brink. Human institutions and policies
determine who eats and who starves during hard times” (www.foodfirst.org).
(permission pending) photo courtesy of www.secondharvest.org
3. People in developing nations are too hungry to fight to change their situations:
“Bombarded with images of poor peoples as weak and hungry, we lose sight
of the obvious: for those with few resources, mere survival requires tremendous
effort. If the poor were truly passive, even fewer of them could even survive”
(www.foodfirst.org). There is movement within starving countries to stop hunger
on the grassroots level, but the poor can do little right now when faced with
obstacles created by “large corporations, the U.S. government itself,
and World Bank and IMF policies” (www.foodfirst.org).
4. Large farms are good: Actually, those who own large farms tend to leave much
of them idle. “By contrast, small farmers typically achieve at least four
to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work the land more
intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems”
(www.foodfirst.org). The solution would seem to suggest that large land owners
give their tenant farmers “secure tenure” in order to give these
farmers incentive “to invest in land improvements, rotate crops, or occasionally
leave land fallow” to increase small farm output even more (www.foodfirst.org).
5. The Green Revolution is a way out of hunger: While the Green Revolution has
indeed helped the world to produce millions of tons more food each year, “focusing
narrowly on increasing production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to
alter the tightly concentrated distribution of economic power that determines
who can buy the additional food” (www.foodfirst.org).