“The Existence of Hunger Belies Democracy”
By Frances Moore Lappé
Prepared for the Fifth Annual P7 Meeting (Gathering of the world’s
poorest countries).
Food Sovereignty and Democracy, The Greens/European Free Alliance,
European Parliament, Brussels, December, 2001
At least half the world’s people now suffer a serious food
problem. In November the U.N. Population Fund reported that two billion
of us lack access to adequate food. An additional billion, according
to other sources, are overweight from consuming high-fat, high-sugar
diets linked to a host of diseases – a trend turning diabetes,
for example, into a worldwide epidemic.
Feeding oneself and one’s offspring is the first task of all
living creatures. Why are we, the dominant species, failing?
We can’t blame nature. The world’s food supply is more
than sufficient. Our failure is a symptom of something bigger,
wider, deeper than food and farming per se. The impoverishment and
degradation our diets is a symptom of something touching every aspect
of our lives; a sign of the increasing voicelessness of citizens in
both the global North and South. The food crisis is, I believe, the
planet’s most powerful indicator of the crisis of democracy,
in part a victim of market fundamentalism sweeping the planet.
No one chooses to starve. Nobody consciously decides to eat that
which makes one ill. Yet human beings are doing both, suggesting that
we – regular citizens -- are not in control of our lives. The
existence of hunger belies the existence of democracy.
The World Forum on Food Sovereignty in September produced a strong
manifesto challenging the dominant assumptions and policies governing
world food production and distribution. It defines food sovereignty
as “the peoples’ right to define their own policies and
strategies for the sustainable production, distribution and consumption
of food that guarantee the right to food for the entire population.”
To make this goal even clearer, I would like to suggest complementing
the term “food sovereignty” with another: “food democracy.” Food
sovereignty – “dominion over” – focuses attention
on control, but it doesn’t tell us who is in control. Adding “food
democracy” makes clearer that we mean policies developed by those
affected and benefiting all citizens.
Words have power. Language shapes our thinking. We need language
that frees our imaginations to see solutions—solutions now at
hand that still elude us. Historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written: “We
have two languages. One rooted in Adam Smith and one rooted in Karl
Marx. Neither provides a theory of the democratic state…You can’t
create a society you can’t imagine. And if you can’t imagine
a democratic state, you can’t have one.”
The Economist recently derided Seattle and Genoa protestors
as “warriors in the struggle between the forces of global capital
and something-or-other.” The Economist was unable to
recognize that “something-or-other” as democracy. For me,
the challenge of this conference -- the challenge of each and every
occasion to capture public attention -- is to communicate that what
we have now, sovereignty by unaccountable global corporations, is not
democracy. Neither is it the end of the road. Globalization’s
interpreters, including Thomas Friedman of The New York Times,
would have us believe that this is it, that we’ve finally arrived
at the end of history. They are wrong.
History is moving rapidly in two contradictory directions at once:
In one, control by global economic bureaucracies is tightening. The
first half of the 90s saw 800 mergers in the agrochemical industry
alone. Yet, at the same time, emerging democratic movements are breaking
out on every continent demonstrating the possibility of re-imbedding
economic life into democratic, community-strengthening institutions.
The second trend, however, remains largely invisible. How do we communicate
the possibility and emerging signs of genuine democracy—what
I call “living democracy” in order to suggest that it is
ever evolving and embedded in culture? How do we allow people to see
and believe in the possibility of a living democracy, not democracy
as a removed structure of government but as a way of life in which
regular citizens have a voice? (Others are adopting the term “living
democracy” as well, as I learned last year when visiting tiny
villages in the foothills of the Indian Himalya. Farmers there, part
of the sustainable farming network called Navdanya, use the term to
suggest consideration in decision making not just of the consequences
for people but for the entire biotic community.)
Only living democracy – in which citizens increasingly gain
a voice in decisions determining our essential well being and that
of the earth itself -- can get to the root of needless and spreading
hunger and disease-generating diets. In such a democracy government
becomes a vehicle through which citizens express their values.
Fortunately, most human beings value life, so “food democracy” suggests
that citizens are able to express that value by putting first the well
being of all people – as consumers and as producers -- and the
earth.
Food democracy and consumption.
In other words, few would vote for hunger! Few of us would
allow a single child to starve if we felt able to stop it. Most human
beings would likely agree that the right to safe food and water is
more basic to life than even the right to vote and the right to education,
two rights now assumed in many countries. In similar vein, those working
to end hunger must demonstrate that safe food and water can also practically be
regarded as, not mere commodities, but essential rights of membership
in the human community. Access to these essentials can be re-embedded
in community institutions.
Example – story -- is a powerful means of creating a new language
of possibility, as my daughter Anna Lappé and I try to accomplish
in Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. There
we tell of the municipality of Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s fourth
largest city. In 1993, Belo declared food a right of citizenship. That
single shift of frame unleashed dozens of innovations.
In numerous central urban sites, for example, the city began leasing
plots of its unused land to local organic farmers at below market rates—on
the condition that they sell their produce at affordable prices. Everyone
gains: Unused city land is rented, small organic farmers find a huge
new market, and low-income buyers get great food. At the publicly sponsored
Popular Restaurant in mid city almost 4,000 healthy meals are served
each day at prices well below the market rate. At bus stops, on radio,
in newspapers, the city –backed up by a local university research
team – posts prices of basic commodities at all the city’s
major markets, thus putting downward pressure on prices. The $.13 the
federal government provides for each school child’s lunch no
longer goes to buy corporate-processed food but healthy food from local
growers. These are only a few of dozens of initiatives triggered by
the shift in perception -- by deciding to view food as a right of citizenship.
Adriana Aranha facilitates these many-faceted activities for the
city of Belo Horizonte. When we asked if she realized how out-of-step
Belo’s approach is with market fundamentalism of corporate globalization,
she spoke at length. Then her eyes began to moisten: “What really
surprised me.” she said, “is how easy it is. We know how
to end hunger.”
Food sovereignty, food democracy and production.
Similarly, most people grasp that that which is necessary to grow
food – healthy farmers, soil, and water -- is too important,
too essential to our survival, to be treated as just another commodity.
In fact, surveys show that citizens are willing to pay more for food
in order to insure the protection of food-producing resources.
We can make clearer and more graphic the consequences of a global
food system in which producers do not receive fair return for their
labor: Most people can grasp, for example, the illogic and immorality
of a world agriculture system now generating 150,000 refugees and famine
conditions in communities in Central America, Latin America and Africa
all because the price of a single commodity – coffee – plummets
to historic lows. Despite hard work, people go hungry because of speculation
and market glut. Displaced farmers further crowd ill-equipped cities
and, in some cases, feel forced to risk their lives to immigrate. This
avoidable human catastrophe offends a widely shared sense of fairness,
as well as commonsense.
In this light, we can make clear that fair trade is not a wacky,
utopian idea. Yes, it is still at the margins of public consciousness,
but it’s a fast growing movement that is today protecting families
from hunger. Likewise, from the framework of food sovereignty and food
democracy, policies shifting tax support away from the largest producers
(based on volume) to underwrite the protection of water and topsoil
make perfect, practical sense.
In articulating the benefits to all of food sovereignty and food
democracy, we can show how the logic of producers changes when they
gain a real voice over their futures. In Brazil, for example, the Landless
Workers Movement (MST) has settled 250,000 formerly landless families.
For the first time these new farmers feel in charge of their destinies.
As one consequence, many are now able to think through the consequences
of their production choices. Before we asked MST members, in our research
for Hope’s Edge, why they were moving to organic farming methods,
we guessed it was largely to avoid pesticide exposure to themselves.
Yes, that’s part of the reason, they told us, but they looked
at us with some surprise as they also said, “You mean you think
we’d risk our lives and work this hard [in facing violence and
legal maneuvers against them] just to end up producing something that
might harm someone else?”
Where people are gaining voice, realizing their power, they are to
think through the ripples of their choices, benefiting all.
Food sovereignty, food democracy and the myth of scarcity.
A powerful force encouraging consumers to acquiesce to the concentration
of control over the global food system is the myth that only large-scale,
chemical-heavy farming can feed the world. A strategic educational
effort must deflate this myth. In the last 20 years, breakthroughs
in sustainable farming practices, valuing traditional wisdom, show
that more not less food can be grown using sustainable approaches.
Last winter, a research team based at Essex University in the U.K.
-- funded by the university, Greeenpeace and Bread for the World --
released a survey of sustainable practices in 52 countries involving
four million farms. It shows that switching to sustainable methods
increases farm yields over 70 percent on average.In sum, we must stretch
for language that links the interests of average citizens, both consumers
and producers, in both North and South. We must seek a language of
values—and that’s why I would add “food democracy” and “living
democracy” to our lexicon. They suggest the value of citizens
themselves gaining voice to manifest universal human sensibilities
to life itself.
The tragedy of September 11 is a shrill alarm. It says: Look what
happens when a belief system justifies death on the alter of a higher
good. Can we ignore this blood-chilling alarm? Doesn’t it call
all peoples to examine their own belief systems, asking: How do we – very
practically – put life first? How do we stop justifying as societies
what we as individuals cannot?
We do not have to tolerate rules (which, after all, human beings
invented) that result in starvation because coffee beans are too cheap!
Or funnel tax monies overwhelmingly to the largest growers using hazardous,
chemical methods while driving smaller producers into the poverty and
hunger of landlessness. We can demonstrate and make visible the real,
practical possibility of food sovereignty, food democracy and
living democracy – based in values uniting all peoples.
To uproot the myths that stymie us, let us create a new language
and share ever more widely our stories of possibility. This is the
honest hope our world so desperately seeks.
Frances Moore Lappé, www.dietforasmallplanet.com,
is the author of twelve books, including the 1971 international best
seller Diet for a Small Planet. A sequel, co-authored with
her daughter Anna Lappé, Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet
for a Small Planet was released by Tarcher/Putnam in February,
2002. While writing Hope’s Edge, Lappé was a
Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently
she is a Fellow at Second Nature, a Boston-based environmental organization.
She is also co-founder of the 26-year-old Institute for Food and Development
Policy/Food First, based in Oakland, as well as the Center for Living
Democracy, a ten-year initiative promoting citizen participation in
every arena of American public life.
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