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Stuffed or starved, feast or famine - The politics of food

Two sets of statistics that bookend a single issue have been kicking around for at least a year, but suddenly they’ve made headlines in everything from Scientific American to the Guardian and Medical News .

Depending on the metrics used — one set quantifies the number of people who are obese, the other the number who are overweight — there is an amazing but disturbing verisimilitude or an amazing but disturbing imbalance.

By one estimate, nearly 800 million people in the world go hungry every day. The same number of people are clinically obese.

The other set of bookends puts 1.3 billion people, or nearly one-sixth of the world’s population, as overweight, and 800 million as underweight. By that reckoning, for the first time in world history there are more fat people than hungry people.

Statistically, the only debate seems to be over obesity vs. overweight and the numbers at that end of the scale. Since the UN Food and Agriculture Organization established the number of the world’s undernourished at an annual average of 854 million during 2001-03, those statistics have stabilized around that point.

This reveals another sad truth: Despite the fact that the world produces enough food to meet the energy and protein needs of every living person and despite concerted efforts such as the 1996 World Food Summit, where political leaders from virtually every country on Earth agreed to reduce the number of hungry people by half by 2015, the number of people not getting enough food has remained about the same. (China has succeeded in decreasing its hungry population, but in about half the countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, the numbers of hungry people have increased.)

Morally, the debate is not over what is wrong with this picture, but what to do about it. For while the corollary makes for predictable headlines, the contradiction is almost too bleak and — dare I say it? — too weighty to sink in.

The image looms of 800 million people scraping the food off the plates of another 800 million unfortunate souls and stuffing their faces with it.

Some obese people literally carry around the weight of a whole other human being. If you characterize the two symbolic humans to be, say, one bloated overweight Canadian or Briton and one skeletal Nicaraguan or Nigerian, you get the picture.

Much of the blame for this miserable inequity, says people like local food activist Herb Barbolet or former World Bank employee turned food activist, Raj Patel, lies in the radical vertical integration of food supply. As Patel puts it in his new book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System , it’s the way a handful of corporations have been allowed to capture the value of the food chain.

Barbolet estimates that four or five companies control 60 to 80 per cent of global food supply and everything along the entire system from production and transportation to warehousing and packaging.

As they do so, they squeeze out tiny, independent producers and food supply systems, and flood the marketplace with products and advertising that changes traditional ways of eating. (Many fingers point to soft drink producers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi for creating sugar-heavy diets in developing countries. In Mexico, one in seven people have diabetes.)

One example Barbolet uses is Cadbury’s (or, more properly, Cadbury Schweppes, adding another stick to the /integration fire), the largest confectionery company in the world, which even owns the dairy farms that supply the milk for its “dairy-milk” chocolate bars.

To be fair, Cadbury’s was one of the first mainstream companies to go with Fair Trade organic chocolate, although it did so in 2005 by buying Green and Black’s, a small independent company started by Craig Sams and his wife, Josephine Fairly.

Green and Black’s, so-named for the “green” of its environmental values and the “black” of the dark chocolate used, won the right to use the UK’s first Fair Trade trademark for its ethical and good business practices in purchasing cocoa from Mayan farmers in Belize. But the subsumption of Green and Black’s is exactly the kind of sweeping power and market integration people like Barbolet and Patel lament.

As fewer companies grow larger and more powerful, and more heavily capitalized and subsidized to further dominate the market, Patel says they are helped along by free trade agreements. As signatories to NAFTA, we Canadians were party to the first agreement that linked two developed countries, Canada and the U.S., to an undeveloped one, Mexico.

Proponents of free trade agreements argue that by forcing food producers to compete, prices fall, benefiting the poor who live in cities and don’t produce their own food. But agencies such as Oxfam and Christian Aid argue the opposite is true.

Post-NAFTA Mexico is a case in point. As the price of corn in Mexico collapsed when U.S. corn flowed in, small Mexican producers could not compete. According to Patel, the livelihoods of 3 million farmers, or about 8 per cent of the population, were destroyed.

On top of that, the price of corn tortillas, which is how most corn in Mexico is consumed, stayed the same. Who benefited from falling corn prices were the two corn flour processors that control 97 per cent of the Mexican corn flour market.

The whole issue is further complicated by things like climate change and GMO food crops, which, as far as Oxfam can tell, have done nothing to relieve hunger.

So what can be done? Patel urges people to go beyond the “honey trap” of ethical consumerism, like buying Fair Trade products, and regain “food sovereignty” by establishing their right to define agriculture and food policies. The shining example: the peasant farmer organization, La Via Campesina.

There Barbolet is right in step, establishing a co-operative, organic farm that supplied a co-operative restaurant, connecting urban consumers with their rural food supply through FarmFolk/CityFolk, and continuing to work on B.C. food supply issues.

As for we overweight folks in the land of plenty, we can support world organizations that alleviate hunger and, more locally, support our local farmers trying to make a living. We can also watch not just how much we eat, but where it comes from, and keep asking questions of our federal politicians to ensure they do the right thing when it comes to world food imbalances.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who believes in fair play and fair trade.