Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 10:57:33 -0800 (PST)
From: John Bellamy Foster <Jfoster@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Subject: Re: New Report Exposes Myths About World Hunger
To: ppn@csf.colorado.edu
Message-id: <1.5.4.16.19981117110741.35efdc96@oregon.uoregon.edu>
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Ted, 

I think you are getting the idea!  Yes, there are food surpluses.  And yes,
you are right that it is not "the right kind of food": 'a surplus of
bananas" does not "help those malnourished children."  The immediate problem
is the agribusiness system which produces more food and more hunger too, by
undermining subsistence production and promoting the production of luxury
crops for export (among other ill effects).  This does not mean that
population size, density and growth is not an issue, but it has to be looked
at, as always, in terms of the concrete historical context.  If you want to
learn more about the critique of agribusiness you might look at the special
issue of MONTHLY REVIEW, July-August 1998, edited by Fred Magdoff, Fred
Buttel and myself, entitled "Hungry for Profit: Agriculture, Food and
Ecology."  Rosset has a piece in that issue.  The general position that
Rosset takes is admirably summed up by Tom Athanasiou's article in the
Malthus bicentennial symposium of the December 1998 issue of ORGANIZATION
AND ENVIRONMENT--which is now out.  Athanasiou's article is entitled "Their
Anti-Malthusianism and Ours."  It rejects conservative cornucopian views,
as well as its Malthusian opposite, and replaces these with an argument on
how world hunger is actually generated through socioeconomic processes.  If
you are interested in this you can get information about O&E from the
following Web page: 

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/usdetails/j0151.html

John Bellamy Foster
 

At 10:56 PM 11/16/98 -0800, you wrote:
>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.
>
>
>