Originally posted on the CSRwire website.
By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon
Like just about every other American, right now I am obsessed with thoughts and plans about food. Thanksgiving is coming, and recipes for the groaning board are dancing in my head. Should we have two pies or one? The cornbread stuffing or wild rice stuffing? Then there’s the soup and salad and cranberry relish and wild mushroom gravy and maple-roasted brussels sprouts and yam casserole. And, last but not least, the turkey! My belly is full just thinking about it.
But the bellies of more Americans are going empty these days. A new report by the USDA shows nearly 15 percent of U.S. households - some 45 million people - are now “food insecure.” That’s an almost 30 percent increase since 2006.
About a quarter of that figure are kids. Their mothers are the most likely of all Americans to go hungry - like the mother who broke down in front of cameras at a food pantry, weeping that she didn’t know what to do when her daughter asked her, “Mommy, can I have lunch?”
Food insecure means, during any given month, 17.4 million American families will be out of money, out of food, and forced to miss meals or seek assistance to feed themselves. Many will be able to count on charity for Thanksgiving dinner, when better off Americans (like the members of the Boca Raton Country Clubs) and companies will team up with local agencies to provide Thanksgiving dinner to the poor. But that doesn’t help with the other 364 days of the year.
After skyrocketing in 2008, the rate of food insecurity stayed level last year, largely because of food programs like school lunch and SNAP (food stamps). But Republican wins in Congress may threaten that. During the campaign Newt Gingrich urged Republicans to go after these programs, and their recent successful bid to block the extension of unemployment benefits indicates a certain unwillingness to do what it takes to end food insecurity.
So what will it take? At the recent BSR 2010 conference I attended, I heard Monsanto’s CEO Hugh Grant and Jason Clay, Senior VP of Marketing for the World Wildlife Fund, use identical language to describe the food problem. They warned of a planet where currently 30% of the land is used for food - and in the next 50 years, 24 percent of that will be gone. The falling curve of farmland will be matched by the increasing curve of population, projected to be up to 9 billion in 2050. If Malthus’ grim predictions are to be avoided, more will need to be produced with less. Monsanto’s chief went so far as to say the definition of sustainability is “producing more with less.”
But is it? Or, rather, is that a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition? Today, there’s enough food to go around. As the World Food Program states, “food has never before existed in such abundance… In purely quantitative terms, there is enough food available to feed the entire global population of 6.7 billion people. And yet, one in nearly seven people is going hungry” [emphasis added].
So maybe the problem goes beyond production—to distribution and how the global food market is organized. Food insecurity is increasing worldwide, fueled by poverty. A multitude of assaults that interact and feed on each other are driving destitution.
Some seem natural, but aren’t, like loss of farmland from floods and desertification increasingly caused by climate change. Others are directly market-driven, like development, the diversion of food crops to fuel, the dispossession of smallholders’ through indebtedness to multinational seed and agrochemical companies (like Monsanto), and inflation in the prices of basic foodstuffs, like wheat and corn through speculation.
Food is a human right, enshrined in Article 25 of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. The UN has long been involved in trying to do something about food insecurity. Rick Leach was one of the creators of the UN’s World Food Program-USA and he has recently returned to head it up. He sees some hope in addressing the distributive needs for food, including using market mechanisms to do it.
He’s working on the Feed the Future Program, a public-private partnership bringing together the UN, US federal government and private businesses (including Monsanto). “This is an incredibly exciting moment,” he told CSRwire. “The political will has been put forth by the Secretary of State, USAID and Obama.”
The program has four key pieces: emergency response, after disasters like the Pakistan flood or drought; nutrition, especially for children during their first three years of life; creating and increasing government safety nets in developing countries, much like the US domestic food stamp program; and, finally, agricultural development, through increasing access to markets by farmers.
These are laudable goals. My fear, however, is that implementation will serve several - and competing - masters. For example, the initiative’s “Purchase for Progress” program will, according to Leach, “use the procurement capacity of the World Food Program to support small farmers, 600 million of whom are chronically hungry, many of them women.” Supporting small farmers is key to ending hunger, both on the production and the consumption side of the equation.
To help the small farmer supply the WFP, the program will strive to “increase productivity on the farm, improve access to markets, market information and credit.” But with the plan depending largely on large corporations like Monsanto to do so, it’s a fair bet that the model being pushed is the very industrial, globalized market model that has been so implicated in pushing small farmers into poverty and contributing mightily to climate change. Some in the sustainable agriculture community are asking tough questions, like “will the Feed the Future plan combat hunger or just bolster Big Ag?”
There are many who say farming sustainably and tackling hunger will depend on making local, organic, small-scale (but well-networked) food systems the dominant paradigm. They argue that the food produced by such systems isn’t just for the well-heeled, but a critical element in creating resilient communities that can lift all boats together.
I’ll be thinking about this when I pick up my organic, free-range turkey from North Sea Farms on the East End of Long Island. And I’ll be thinking about how supporting my local farmer can translate into supporting local farmers - and eaters - everywhere.
About Francesca Rheannon
CSRwire Talkback’s Managing Editor is Francesca Rheannon. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO, and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally-syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.
Talkback Readers: Will you be thinking of sustainability on Thanksgiving? Have any charity-driven stories to share? Tell us on Talkback!
