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Approximately one-fifth of the world’s population, over one billion people, earns less than $1.00 a day.\u00a0 According to the\u00a0World Centric Organization<\/a> wealthiest 1% of people makes each year what the poorest 57% earn and a few hundred millionaires own more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people of the world.\u00a0 Each day, over a billion people in the world lack basic food needs.\u00a0 And each day\u00a017,000 children under the age of five die of starvation<\/a>\u00a0or preventable infectious disease.\u00a0 Furthermore, the problems of growing inequality, poverty, and hunger are getting worse in spite of the huge surge of global economic growth over the past 50 years. In this section we will \u00a0address the issues of the amount of food in the world, the role it plays in a capitalist economy, why people are poor, and what measures can be taken to eliminate poverty and hunger.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A. Hunger and the World Food Supply<\/strong><\/p>\n We often hear about the world running out of enough food to feed our growing population.\u00a0 For various reasons, however, that is not likely.\u00a0 The overwhelming evidence is that people are not hungry because of a lack of food; they are hungry because they don’t have the money to pay for it.\u00a0 The following readings address the issue of the world food supply<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Exercise 1:\u00a0The Hunger Quiz See how much you know about global hunger with this quick quiz<\/p>\n Reading 1:\u00a010 Myths About Hunger Check out some of the things you thought you knew about world hunger.<\/p>\n Reading 2:\u00a0 The Myth: Scarcity.\u00a0 The Reality: There IS Enough Food A common view about hunger is that it is caused by a scarcity of food.\u00a0 As this article from Food First reveals, scarcity is not the problem.\u00a0 The article questions the idea that we are running out of land to farm, even in areas where hunger is most severe<\/p>\n Reading 3.\u00a0Food Supply Gap This brief report and graphic from the\u00a0Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations<\/a>\u00a0displays and discusses the availability of food from one part of the world to another.\u00a0 It calculates the DES for each area,\u00a0 an estimate of the average daily food energy available per person over a given period.\u00a0 Note that this is not what is simply available in a given area or country; it is what people have the ability to pay for.\u00a0 As they make clear, there is sufficient food for everyone (in spite of the fact that growers ostensibly grow what they believe can be paid for, not what is needed). As one UN official said, “If you look at the world as a whole, there is enough food produced to feed each person, each day. \u00a0 But it isn’t happening because it’s access to food that’s the real problem.”<\/p>\n Reading 4.\u00a0Increase in the Number of Undernourished People in the World<\/a> This brief summary of the UN 1998 State of Food and Agriculture report provides you some basic information on the present-day food situation, as well as some of the future prospects.\u00a0Though strides have been made, there is still much work to do as discovered during the Borgen Project<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n B. Food as a Commodity<\/strong><\/p>\n To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy.\u00a0 Food is a commodity.\u00a0 Furthermore, agricultural producers choose to grow, not only what people will and can buy, but they grow things for which they will get the best price.\u00a0 This has various implications.\u00a0 For example, much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are maginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market.\u00a0 Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.\u00a0 More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed.\u00a0 Furthermore, growers must be careful not to “overproduce”; that is they must not grow or raise more food than people\u00a0can\u00a0pay\u00a0for.\u00a0 In many countries agricultural producers are discouraged from producing; furthermore, as food producing corporations grow larger, they are able to control production to ensure they don’t “overproduce.” \u00a0 The problem, of course, is that people who don’t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don’t count in the food equation.\u00a0 In other words, if you don’t have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.\u00a0 Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM (“Supermarket to the World”) to produce food for them.\u00a0 Aid programs or governments may take up some of the slack by purchasing food from producers, and distributing it; but, as we discuss in\u00a0Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, this may do more harm than good. What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food.<\/p>\n Exercise 2.\u00a0Food Outlook<\/a> Each month Food Outlook produces a newsletter that reports on the international food situation. \u00a0 It might report, for example, that grain production in certain countries is down because of flooding or hurricanes (as in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch), or that rice production is up, or that prices on one commodity or another have declined.\u00a0 However, you have to remember\u00a0that when there are reports of production declines, the decline is relative to how much of a given crop was planted, and the decision of how much to plant is a market decision; that is, the amount planted depends on what the grower believes the market demand for the product will be.\u00a0 In other words, what and how much is planted does not depend on people’s need for food; it depends on what they are able and willing to pay for it.\u00a0 \u00a0 Browse the latest issue of Food Outlook.\u00a0 Read the Highlight section, browse through the rest.\u00a0 From your browsing through the report, what do you think determines what farmers (largely agribusiness) grow?\u00a0 What determines how much of a given commodity they plant?\u00a0 If they can get a larger return on one commodity over another which will they grow?<\/p>\n Reading 5.\u00a0Public Action to Remedy Hunger Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen is one of the foremost spokespersons on global hunger and poverty. His book, written with Jean Dreze, Hunger and Public Action, is one of the most comprehensive studies of hunger yet written. In this address, Sen summarizes the major points of the book. There are, he says, two types of hunger: famine and endemic depravation– the daily lack of sufficient food. Famine, while receiving the most attention, is less prevalent that the largely hidden endemic hunger from which some one billion people suffer. While the problem of hunger is widespread, Sen warns about being pessimistic. People are hungry, says Sen, because they lose their entitlement to food–they lack either the land to grow food, the money to buy it, or access to state programs of food or wage distribution. With the will, he says, no one needs to go hungry. Among the most important features necessary to prevent hunger, he says, is a democratic (and thereby accountable) government and a free press that publicizes the threat of hunger.\u00a0 Many of these ideas come to fruition through the empowerment of women as illustrated by The Hunger Project<\/p>\n <\/p>\n C. Why are People Poor?<\/strong><\/p>\n If, as most researchers claim, people are hungry because they lack the money to buy food, then eliminating hunger requires eliminating poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people, particularly women and children, receive food entitlements.\u00a0 But that requires understanding the reasons for global poverty.\u00a0 The following readings address that issue.<\/p>\n Reading 6.\u00a0Poverty and Globalization\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This lecture by Vandana Shiva,\u00a0founder Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi\u00a0comprised one of the BBC’s Reith Lecture series.\u00a0 She argues that, contrary to popular opinion, it is the small farmer that feeds the world.\u00a0But, she says, the small farmer is being destroyed, driven into poverty by the spread of corporate agriculture and the introduction of genetically engineered crops.\u00a0What is also being destroyed, she says, is an agricultural method that is sustainable and more efficient.\u00a0She also points out that it is women who are at the center of this sustainable agriculture and who are being systematically driven into poverty.<\/p>\n Reading 7.\u00a0The Politics of Hunger<\/a> In this article from Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet argues that world hunger is a political problem that arises from the uneven distribution of wealth.\u00a0 Citing a UN report, Ramonet points out that “the whole of the world population’s basic needs for food, drinking water, education and medical care could be covered by a levy of less than 4 % on the accumulated wealth of the 225 largest fortunes. To satisfy all the world’s sanitation and food requirements would cost only $13 billion, hardly as much as the people of the United States and the European Union spend each year on perfume.”\u00a0\u00a0 Little has changed since 1998 when this article was written.\u00a0 As John Gray writes in the New Statesman<\/a>\u00a0“World Hunger is the Result of Politics, not Production” most famines have been the result of the exercise of power.<\/p>\n Reading 8.\u00a0Global Poverty in the Late 20th Century In this paper, economist Michel Chossudovsky presents a different perspective from that offered by the authors of Reading 7.\u00a0 He proposes that increased poverty is a consequence of the global integration of the capitalist economy that we examined in the readings on the Merchant\/Capitalist. \u00a0 He also explains how the “globalization of poverty” is affecting the former Soviet Union, as well as other Western countries.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n D. How Can We Eliminate Hunger and Poverty?<\/strong><\/p>\n There is widespread agreement across the political spectrum that poverty and hunger can and must be alleviated; The World Bank has even set the elimination of poverty as its\u00a0major goal.\u00a0 The problem is how do we do it?\u00a0 In theory, it’s easy; just increase taxes on the wealthy and redistribute the income.\u00a0 But since the wealthy control most global institutions, that’s not too likely to happen.\u00a0 Once we eliminate that option, proposals to eliminate poverty range from accelerating economic growth in poor countries (although that doesn’t do much for the poor in rich countries), to overhauling our way of living, to helping the poor create their own economic opportunities.\u00a0 The following selections each address these ideas.<\/p>\n Reading 9.\u00a0Global Economic Inequality: More or less equal? Is global economic inequality increasing or decreasing?\u00a0 This article from\u00a0The Economist<\/a>\u00a0attempts to answer that question, concluding, generally, that there are worse things that the expansion of global capitalism<\/p>\n Reading 10.\u00a0 What kind of growth Theologian John B. Cobb questions the assumption made by most economists that the growth in a countries GNP or GDP is synonymous with “progress,” and improvements in “standard of living.” \u00a0 He suggests that “economic policies designed to increase gross national product repeatedly work against human community.” Cobb suggests that we must pay more attention to local communities, and that local communities must, if quality of life is to be improved, detach themselves to some extent from the global market. Most of his essay address life in the United States, but it applies globally.<\/p>\n Reading 11.\u00a0Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?<\/a> Economic growth is often cited as the major way to end poverty.\u00a0 A major proponent of this view is Jeffery D. Sachs who has spent the last 15 to 20 years advising developing and emerging countries on economic policy.\u00a0 Sachs begins his paper by claiming that for all the centuries prior to the industrial revolution human beings lived in wretched poverty, facing constant threats from disease and famine.\u00a0 While this assumption is often contradicted by archeological and ethnographic evidence, Sachs takes off from this point to argue that economic growth has already lifted 5\/6s of the world out of extreme poverty and that with modest economic reforms and help from wealthy nations, the rest may also escape destitution.\u00a0 As a foremost proponent of economic growth has the solution to the world’s ills, Sachs is worth reading and discussing.\u00a0 This article from\u00a0Scientific American summarizes the main points that he makes in his book,\u00a0The End of Poverty<\/p>\n Exercise 4.\u00a0\u00a0Social Indicators of Development<\/a> As an alternative to measuring “progress” by the GNP or GDP (the quantity of goods and services produced) social scientists developed the Social Indicators of Development, that attempts to include various quality of life indicators in the measure of progress and standard of living. \u00a0 This site contains the World Bank’s most detailed data collection for assessing human welfare to provide a picture of the social effects of economic development. Data are presented for over 170 economies, omitting only those for which data are inadequate.\u00a0 Find out how different countries stand in relation to each other.\u00a0 After reading the text, go to the\u00a0search interface<\/a><\/p>\n Reading 12.\u00a0\u00a0Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization: The World Bank and Corporations One of the major institutions that seeks to promote economic development is the World Bank, and its subsidiaries collectively known as the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs).\u00a0 Yet in spite of lending billions of dollars to so-called developing countries, poverty in most has continually increased.\u00a0 One of the reasons, suggest the authors of this article, is that most of the aid functions far more to promote corporate profit than it does to alleviate poverty<\/p>\n Exercise 5.\u00a0The Microcredit Movement This is the PBS Web site that accompanied their two-part documentary on microcredit.\u00a0 Microcredit represents an attempt to target particularly vulnerable portions of the population–largely women–and, through a small loan program, assist them to start small businesses.\u00a0 In\u00a0the book Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism\u00a0we discuss the best known of these programs,\u00a0The Grameen Bank<\/a>\u00a0in Bangladesh.\u00a0 Browse the site beginning with the\u00a0summary and then review some of the facts about the Grameen Bank.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47552,"menu_order":7,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[]","CANDELA_OUTCOMES_GUID":"","pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-43","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47552"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/43\/revisions\/72"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/43\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-plattsburgh-anthro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/www.worldhunger.org\/hunger-quiz\/<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttps:\/\/foodfirst.org\/publication\/world-hunger-ten-myths\/<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttps:\/\/foodfirst.org\/the-myth-scarcity-the-reality-there-is-enough-food\/<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.fao.org\/NEWS\/1998\/981204-e.htm<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.fao.org\/NEWS\/1998\/981103-e.htm<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.fao.org\/giews\/english\/fo\/fotoc.htm<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.thp.org\/<\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/hi\/english\/static\/events\/reith_2000\/lecture5.stm<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/mondediplo.com\/1998\/11\/01leader<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.hartford-hwp.com\/archives\/25a\/043.html<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.economist.com\/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2498851<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.religion-online.org\/article\/what-kind-of-growth\/<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/can-extreme-poverty-be-el\/<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.ciesin.org\/IC\/wbank\/sid-home.html<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.corpwatch.org\/article.php?id=963<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.pbs.org\/toourcredit\/home.htm<\/a><\/p>\n