Message-ID: <36511E01.5A526136@jps.net>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 22:56:01 -0800
From: Ted Toal <ttoal@jps.net>
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To: ppn <ppn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: New Report Exposes Myths About World Hunger
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I'd like to respond to some of the points made in the recently posted article
about the myths of world hunger.

The article says there is abundant food available.  I'm wondering if that takes
into account the inevitable losses of food due to spoilage, vermin, and
imperfect distribution?  Regarding the latter, I think it should be clear to
everybody that we wouldn't want a world where food was distributed with 100%
efficiency, because that would put the entire world too close to the edge. If
disaster hit, there would be no leeway, no room for improving distribution to
help cope with the disaster.

The article said that some countries with malnourished children had food
surpluses.  But, was it the right kind of food?  A surplus of bananas might not
help those malnourished children.

"The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food."

Obviously if people are too poor in the extreme, they die of starvation.  I
assume that the problem is that people are poor enough that they have a lousy
diet, leaving them quite alive but rather malnourished.  Why would people have
children when they are living in such an impoverished state?  Is the answer
that they have no choice, they have no access to contraceptives or can't afford
them?  Or is it that they believe that children will improve their economic
position?  If the latter, does it usually work out that way?  It must not.  If
it did, there would gradually be fewer and fewer people living in poverty.

I agree with the article, that increasing food production would not be an
answer.  That simply allows the population to grow some more, and the problem
actually becomes worse.

The article says that in many places a powerful few control much of the land.
But you could look at that as simply another statement that income is very
unevenly distributed.  If the poor had more money, they could buy more land, I
would presume.  Even in the USA we are seeing increasing disparity in wealth
distribution.  One of the more intriguing hypotheses about overpopulation is
that it reduces democracy, which then leads to greater concentration of wealth
and power in a few.  Having moved from a large city to a small town, I have
seen the dramatic difference that population density makes in my own ability to
have some degree of influence over my community.  In the small town I've been
able to have a voice in ways I never could have done in the big city.

The article mixed up population density with hunger and food resources, leaving
me a bit unsure how well the connection between population density and hunger
had been studied.  It pointed to Nigeria, Brazil, and Bolivia as places where
abundant food resources coexist with hunger, but didn't say anything about what
their population density is.  If it were true that hunger usually were (was?)
found together with high population density, then I would think you'd want to
look carefully at population, even if you knew the country had abundant food.
The high population density could somehow be affecting how well food was
distributed.

The key point of the article seemed to be that the main cause of hunger is
concentration of wealth in a few hands.  We should be looking, then, at what
factors predispose such concentration, and how we can change them.  The article
mentioned land reform in some countries that led to better distribution of land
ownership.  I wonder how that works, how it happened that those in power
allowed such a dramatic change to occur?

We can never expect, nor I think would we want, perfectly equal distribution of
income.  If we get to the point where we are saying that hunger exists because
we still have a bit of a disparity in wealth, and by getting rid of that
disparity we can support another billion people on the planet, then we really
need to reconsider why we think we need another billion people.  But it is
clear that right now, vast differences in wealth exist, and I'd like to see
this change.  It affects a lot more than the food supply.

Can we be pretty certain that if we were to distribute wealth significantly
more evenly, hunger would disappear?  Can we be reasonably certain that that
wouldn't simply lead to further population growth, and eventually back to the
same situation where people are malnourished?  I'm not so sure we can be
certain of those things.  It seems to me that the most prudent approach is to
keep working on ways to reduce family size below 2 average, while we tackle the
more immediate problems such as uneven distribution of wealth (which itself
will tend to reduce family size).

The article seems to contradict itself by saying that comprehensive land reform
has markedly increased production is several countries, since it said earlier
that the problem is not one of production.

Ted Toal.