Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

Originally published by Huffington Post on 05/08/2013 On February 10, 2012, Ronald McDonald held court in a packed elementary school auditorium. Ronald was visiting the Lexington, Kentucky elementary school as part of his sweep of that state. The visits are meant to teach “the value of leadership and community involvement,” says Ronald, and kick off fundraising drives for Ronald McDonald Houses. According to WheresRonald.com, he’s planning to visit at least 117 more schools there this year. Could you imagine sending your kid off to school only to discover an all-school assembly has turned into an advertisement opportunity for a fast food chain? Today, junk food marketing happens in so many places, and in so many ways, that it’s often behind parents’ backs and beyond our control. This school assembly is just one way McDonald’s does marketing. This Mother’s Day, moms are telling McDonald’s, with the help of the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, that they’re not lovin’ it. Marketing junk food and drink to kids is big business. McDonald’s alone spent close to $1 billion on advertising in the United States in 2011 with 40 percent of this on marketing directly to kids, according to researchers at Yale University’s Rudd Center. We know this food marketing works: it gets kids to prefer McDonalds and to just eat more — period. With diet-related illnesses afflicting so many young people, marketing to kids and teens is downright dangerous. I talked about all this at a TEDx event earlier this year. My point was simple: If we want to improve the health of children and teens and turn back the epidemic of preventable illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes, and more, we need to talk about marketing to kids. Some people, when they learn about all the ways our kids are targeted, still insist it’s up to parents to make the right choices. Just turn off the TV. Talk to your kids about ads. Wisen ‘em up. Don’t blame McDonalds if your kids don’t eat right. This argument sounds reasonable. As a mom, I couldn’t agree more: parents should take responsibility for their kids’ health. My two girls take their cues from me — at least I hope so! — perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in the kitchen. That’s why I work hard to put good food on the table and keep junk food out of the house. I seek out stuff without high-fructose corn syrup, colorants, and additives; I analyze labels, shop at farmers’ markets, and choose organic when I can. You get the idea. But this is the thing: The ways the food industry now targets kids are so pervasive and the tactics so deceitful that even the most diligent parent cannot prevent their kids from being inundated at the most impressionable stages in their development. Even schools are no longer havens from marketing. The food industry advertises in gyms, yearbooks, and playgrounds. They’ve succeeded in getting ads in school buses — and Ronald into school assemblies. Corporations sponsor school curriculum, like the Oreo Cookie Counting Book, Skittles Counting Book, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Counting Fun Book. No offender is greater than McDonald’s, who has written the script on this tactic. One McDonald’s first-grade program asks kids to design a McDonald’s restaurant and provides information about applying for a McDonald’s job. If your jaw is hanging open right now, you’re like me: I was stunned when I first learned about it. ( Corporate Accountability International’s “ Clowning With Kids’ Health ” is a great source for more jaw-dropping examples). McDonalds also has a long history of using charity as a form of marketing — and reaching kids. The corporation is a “platinum sponsor” of the 2013 Washington State Parent Teacher Association convention, for instance. Partnerships like this warm up the “gatekeepers” — McDonald’s own internal descriptor for “mothers” — to a brand that is a big negative for their children’s health. Then there’s “McTeacher’s Night.” The corporation puts teachers behind the register for a night and, in exchange for their free labor and in-school promotion of McDonald’s, donates a percentage of the evening’s profits to the local school. Though dubbed as “charity,” McDonald’s is the one getting the real benefit: The typical take for schools is only about $800 or the equivalent of a Saturday morning car wash sans the junk food marketing. Meanwhile McDonald’s gets the benefits of associating with role models like teachers and parents. To make matters worse, other corporations are taking McDonald’s lead. McDonald’s supplier Coca-Cola, for instance, has the popular My Coke Rewards program, which offers points for Coke products purchased. Some PTAs are now pushing My Coke Rewards as a fundraising tool, and the Coca-Cola website has a prominent way to donate to your school. Never mind this essentially means turning school communities into a grassroots marketing arm for a corporation that made $8.6 billion in profits in 2011 . And yes, you can turn off the TV, but is that what kids are really watching? Kids and teens are now spending many hours online, on social media or playing videos games or interacting with apps. With hundreds of websites and apps , some targeting children as young as preschool age, the food industry has come to dominate many children’s social media and online experience. Again, McDonalds’ is leading the way. Its HappyMeal.com attracts more than a half million unique visitors during the summer months when kids spend more time at home. The site features a host of advertising disguised as games, or “adver-games.” The site even features a virtual world for children to become immersed in. To unlock “all kinds of cool stuff” in McDonald’s virtual world (the “Happy Meal gone digital” to borrow from the web site’s description) kids are encouraged to frequent McDonald’s and look for special codes found on the Happy Meal’s “healthier” items (apples with caramel dipping sauce, Chocolate Milk Jugs). In other words, in order to maximize fun in this “free” virtual space, children are incentivized to buy Happy Meals. In McWorld, “where kids rule,” buying Happy Meals is the best way to obtain “accessories for your avatar, treehouse, or interactive pets” and visit with popular movie, comic, and TV characters. Many of these websites also ask for personal information, sometimes requiring it for viewers to engage fully in a game or offering incentives for providing it. All this can go on without parents realizing it. McDonald’s, for instance, buries the line: “Hey kids, this is advertising!” in a small font in a tree branch in the upper left hand corner of its newly revamped online platform. Perhaps most pernicious of all, McDonald’s also pays people the public trusts to serve as “brand ambassadors” for the junk food corporation. Ahead of the 2012 Summer Olympics, for example, McDonald’s amassed a group of 400 food bloggers to write positively about the chain in exchange for “free gifts and parties.” In 2010, the burger giant provided 15 mom-bloggers an all-expenses paid trip in return for their trumpeting the brand to their networks. The corporation also enlists kid-favorite celebrity athletes like Lebron James and Gabby Douglas. So you see, you can turn off the TV — hey, you could even throw it out the window — and your kids will still be exposed to McDonald’s junk food marketing, from all-school assemblies to the internet. For kids today, marketing is ubiquitous — and McDonalds has been front-and-center in making it so. That’s why I’m joining moms everywhere today in calling on McDonald’s to set an example — and conclude five decades of setting a bad example — and stop marketing to kids. You can join me by sharing the image above, adding your voice in social media with #MomsNotLovinIt, and taking action at MomsNotLovinIt.org .

Originally published on GDAE in September 2013 Download the working paper Download the related ActionAid Report Read the Executive Summary Download the working paper in French Since the 2007-8 food price crisis, alarms have sounded regarding our ability to feed a growing population in 2050. Some warn that we need to double food production; other estimates range from 60-70%. All feed the alarmist notion that global hunger is the result of flagging food production amid looming resource constraints. The policy prescriptions that follow -- the expansion of industrial-scale agricultural development – are deeply flawed. They ignore the true threats to our global food supply: biofuels expansion, inadequate investment in climate-resilient agriculture, especially for small-scale and women food producers, and the massive loss of food to spoilage and waste. Most of the recent warnings come from a group of economic modeling studies, which GDAE’s Timothy A. Wise reviews in detail for this GDAE Working Paper, which was adapted for the ActionAid report, “ Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050 .” He finds that many of these public pronouncements calling for a doubling of global food production are based on outdated or flawed economic forecasting and misleading characterizations of the research. More reliable estimates of current supply, productivity, and demand trends – assuming business-as-usual policies – suggest the need and the ability to increase agricultural production by 60% over 2005-7 levels by 2050. This is a far cry from doubling food production, especially since an increasing share of the world’s agricultural production goes not to food or feed but to biofuels. Wise suggests that the goal of such economic forecasts should be to help policy-makers identify what needs to change in those business-as-usual policies that are contributing to high and volatile prices, food insecurity, and looming resource constraints on agricultural production. Notably, he finds that most economic forecasting fails to adequately guide decisions regarding several key variables: Biofuels expansion - Biofuels expansion is a relatively recent phenomenon that has been poorly captured by most economic modeling to date. Few models adequately account for current trends, with some underestimating business-as-usual expansion by 100%. With national mandates and targets significantly driving biofuels expansion, new updated forecasts are urgently needed to help policy-makers assess the food security implications of current policies. Those policies are projected to divert as much 13% of cereal production from needed food production by 2030. Inadequate and poorly targeted agricultural investment – Agricultural investment is key to ensuring growing food production. Whereas many projections stress the importance of agricultural productivity growth, few models assess differing priorities for agricultural research and investment. A growing consensus supports increased investment in climate-resilient food production, focusing on small-scale producers in food-insecure parts of the world. Yet most research, private and public, focuses on large-scale, input-intensive agricultural development. So too does most investment, driven by private-sector-led projects, such as the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition” initiated by the G-8. Food waste and spoilage – One-third of global food production fails to nourish anyone. In industrialized countries, wasteful consumption patterns result in tremendous losses, while in developing countries poor infrastructure leads to high rates of spoilage before food makes it to market. Most forecasts assume the continued waste of the food we now produce, making the alarmist calls for increased food production ring hollow. Climate change – We are just beginning to understand the implications of climate change for agriculture and food security. The impacts, plagued by multiple layers of uncertainty, are poorly incorporated in most economic forecasts. With international climate negotiations stalled, urgent attention is needed to mitigate industrial agriculture’s tremendous contribution to global warming and to help developing country food producers to adapt to a changing climate. Meanwhile a growing body of evidence, based on experiences at local and regional levels, demonstrates the long-term value of investments in smallholder farming and sustainable agricultural methods. Strategic policy changes and investments can scale-up successful approaches and expand them to regions where they are most appropriate and most needed, especially regions in which food security is tenuous despite high agricultural potential. This working paper, and the ActionAid report based on it, reviews the economic forecasting on which most of the alarmist 2050 pronouncements are based, presents alternative modeling that can add useful insights, and identifies important areas in which further research can guide policy-makers in assessing changes to failing business-as-usual policies. Download “Can We Feed the World in 2050? ” Download the ActionAid report, “ Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050 ” Read the Executive Summary Download the working paper in French Visit the ActionAid site to learn more about their outreach on this topic.

Originally published by FirstPost on 12/07/2013 1. India’s food security and stockholding program uses precisely the same policies that the United States used in its early farm policy coming out of the Great Depression. Exactly the same: price supports, food reserves, administered markets,subsidies. We used them because they work. India and other countries should be allowed to use them too. Because they work. 2. The WTO’s Green Box, which is meant to hold non-trade-distorting subsidies, is now home to about $120 billion of the US’s $130 billion in nutrition programs and farm supports. This dwarfs India’s commitments. 3. The allowed levels of trade-distorting support – the Aggregate Measure of Support (AMS) – for the US is about $19 billion. Why so high? Because the level was set back in 1994, based on the prevailing high levels of US support, and it was reduced only 20% since then. India? Like 61 of 71 developing country WTO members at the time, India’s AMS is zero. Like most developing countries, it couldn’t afford such expensive policies. Now such countries are punished for their past good behavior. 4. The United States has been unfairly notifying the WTO of its trade-distorting subsidies for years. A WTO dispute panel ruled that insurance subsidies and direct payments should count as trade-distorting subsidies because they go to producers of a defined set of crops. If one counted such payments correctly, US AMS notifications for 2010 would rise from $4 billion to $15 billion. 5. India’s procurement program and stockholding is for domestic producers and for domestic consumption. Where is the trade distortion? Meanwhile, US subsidies – AMS and Green Box – go to crops like corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton that are heavily exported. 6. Not only are those crops exported, corn and soybeans serve as inputs for livestock feed, and corn is the main input for ethanol. Input subsidies should be notified as trade-distorting, yet these are treated as non-trade-distorting subsidies. The US exports both meat and ethanol. 7. The US is calling India out for its food security program even though India has ten times the beneficiaries, provides less than one-quarter the food, and spends one-sixth the amount per person. The United States spends about $75 billion per year for its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the main domestic food aid program. That provides on average 240 kg of grain for each of the 47 million beneficiaries, valued at $1,608 per year. Before expanding its food security program, India was reaching 475 million much hungrier people with food aid of just 58 kg per person, valued at roughly $27/year. 8. In 2005, the WTO committed itself to resolve the issue of the US’s trade-distorting cotton subsidies “in an expedited manner.” Eight years later, Africa’s cotton producers are still waiting for US compliance. In Bali, the US has offered nothing on cotton, continuing the damage to some of the world’s poorest farmers. 9. India’s simplest demand is truly simple, if technical. Its administered prices for farmers are calculated as subsidies by comparing them not to market prices in India but to an international “reference price.” That reference price is archaic, from 1986-88. Inflation since then has been about 500%, so any price today will look like a high support price and will result in a high subsidy estimate. India asked simply that the reference price be updated for inflation, so its administered prices can be compared to something vaguely resembling current market prices. No go, says the US. Never mind that those 1986-88 reference prices were even lower because the US and the EU were at the time dumping huge surpluses on the international market, crashing the prices. 10. Last but not least is the audacity of calling for a Peace Clause at all. Peace Clause? Really? For those who don’t remember recent history, the US and the EU imposed a Peace Clause in 1994 at the end of the round of negotiations that launched the WTO. It protected them from WTO suits over their hugely distorting subsidies. How long did it last? Nine years, and it covered Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. The current Peace Clause being offered to India and the G-33 countries is just four years, excludes the subsidies measures, and expires even if there has been no resolution of the outstanding Doha issues. Instead of “special and differentiated treatment” for developing countries, India gets special and differentiated punishment.

Originally published on GDAE in May 2013 Read the Report The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) created a stir in October 2012 with its revised estimates of global hunger. After revising the methodology used in its annual State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) reports, the FAO reported that the number of hungry had not surpassed one billion following the 2008 food price spikes. Indeed, the new estimates showed barely an upward blip. Moreover, new trend lines based on revised estimates of past hunger suggested significant progress in reducing the incidence of hunger. “New estimates show that progress in reducing hunger during the past 20 years has been better than previously believed,” the FAO concluded, “and … given renewed efforts, it may be possible to reach the MDG hunger target [of halving world hunger] at the global level by 2015.” Now, a group of hunger researchers led by Frances Moore Lappe and Jennifer Clapp, and including GDAE’s Timothy A. Wise, have published a detailed critique of the SOFI 2012 estimates and report. “ Framing Hunger: A Response to ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012' ,” offers recommendations to the FAO as much in relation to the presentation of its hunger estimates as on the methodology itself. Key recommendations include: The estimate represents a lower-bound because it is based on food availability and the caloric requirements required only to lead a “sedentary lifestyle.” A less restrictive FAO threshold leads to an estimate of 1.33 billion hungry in the world rather than SOFI 2012’s widely cited 868 million. The words hunger, food insecurity, and chronic undernourishment are used interchangeably, but the FAO methodology is designed to estimate the latter: undernourishment lasting more than one year. Partly for this reason, the methodology is poorly designed to capture the hunger impacts of short-duration events such as food price spikes. The focus on global hunger masks wide regional variation. In fact, progress in China and Vietnam alone account for more than 90% of the estimated reductions in the number of hungrypeople in the world. National success stories – Ghana, Brazil – are lost in the global estimates, as are countries and regions in crisis. SOFI 2012 implies that a return to pre-recession economic growth will allow the world to resume progress in reducing hunger, but this obscures the many other enabling government policies that are needed to harness growth to guarantee the right to food. “Framing Hunger” has already prompted a very productive dialogue with FAO officials, who share the goal of improving the measurement and eradication of hunger. Read " Framing Hunger " from the Small Planet Institute, by Frances Moore Lappé, Jennifer Clapp, Molly Anderson, Richard Lockwood, Thomas Forster, Danielle Nierenberg, Harriet Friedmann, Thomas Pogge, Dominique Caouette, Wayne Roberts, Timothy A. Wise, Sophia Murphy, Brother David Andrews, Susan H. Holcombe, Robin Broad, Ellen Messer, and Christina Schiavoni.

Originally published by Timothy A. Wise at Tufts University on 10/08/2013 In relation to biofuels, the obligation of the CFS is to ensure that the rapid and recent expansion of first-generation biofuels, and its projected continued expansion, is not undermining agreed rights to food, land, and natural resources. We strongly believe it is, and the evidence is clear. The HLPE report is unambiguous about the contribution of biofuels to food price increases, added pressure on land and water rights, and gender inequities. Other independent research has confirmed such findings, particularly in relation to the US and EU biofuel programs. A report last month to the European Commission by the Joint Research Centre showed that eliminating current EU tax incentives and blending requirements would lower vegetable oil prices significantly and prevent the conversion of 6 million hectares of land to biofuel production, with much of that land instead devoted to cereals production for human consumption. In the United States, 40% of maize is consumed by ethanol production, accounting for 15% of global maize supplies. Estimates on price impacts range from 20-79%, as Prof. de Gorter argued yesterday. The oil industry can find or hire scientists who will claim to prove that climate change is not happening. That does not make it true. The scientific consensus is otherwise. So too is the consensus on biofuels and food security, as confirmed by the HLPE, in two different reports, with comprehensive literature reviews, as well as by a wide range of international agencies and experts. The time to act is now. As an open letter from 80 civil society organizations, released this afternoon, states: “We are deeply concerned that the recommendations in the current CFS draft Decision Box would not protect the right to food from existing biofuels policies and the growing demand for biofuels. Instead, the text proposal refers to the alleged benefits of biofuels, which have not been shown to exist at any significant scale.” As the Special Rapporteur has pointed out, the delegates to the CFS would betray their obligations if they fail to take action to address the very real impacts of biofuel expansion on world food security. Thank you. Read the full text of the open letter

This is the fifth of a five-part, weekly series celebrating Earth Day. How do we know the difference between head-in-the-sand hope and eyes-wide-open hope? One is a killer; the other, a life-giver. First, it helps to ask, what is hope? Some of my Buddhist buddies pooh-pooh the whole idea of hope. Hope keeps us from experiencing this moment, they tell me. It feeds our yearning for some future one. Hope is rooted in desire, even craving — and aren’t they the root of suffering? For me, hope is about something else. It doesn’t keep me in a future world. It helps me love this one. Hope isn’t a sunny attitude, and it certainly isn’t a calculation that something will get better. It is a stance toward life. And, Harvard Medical School’s Srinivasan S. Pillay beautifully captures what I mean: “Hope is not an answer,” he writes; but because it stimulates the imagination, “hope helps us to pose the right questions.” As I explore in a companion blog , fear often triggers the wrong questions. Pillay likens hope to a scientist’s hypothesis. “It provides a way of moving through the world.” He adds that, “because hope seems to travel in the same dungeons [parts of the brain] as fear, it might be a good soldier to employ if we want to meet fear.” I live in Boston, and in this moment our whole, beautiful city seems to be listening to his truth — using love to block fear. So, for me, “hope” has nothing to do with wishful thinking; it is a stance toward life we can choose and actively cultivate. It relies on a special type of humility that flows from what I love to call an eco-mind . Thinking like an ecosystem, we see that the nature of reality is that all elements are shaping all other elements moment to moment. And that means that nothing — including you or me — is stuck. In a universe in which everything is connected and ever-changing precise predictions are, well, impossible. Yes, we do know now that we’ve spiked the atmosphere with so much carbon that a hotter planet and less stable climate are unavoidable . We know little, though, about how humans will ultimately respond to these unprecedented changes. Given the reality of connectedness, there’s one thing we do know with absolute certainty: The only choice we don’t have is whether to change the world. We change it with every act. Our only choice is whether the act moves us toward the world we want... or not. Thinking like an ecosystem also brings awareness that we humans are like every other organism and element in the universe, shaped by the forces around us: Context is all . And for human beings, the most powerful aspect of our “context,” making us who we are, is each other. Right there is a big clue about how to change ourselves and thus “the world.” Probably unique among species, we humans can consciously choose our context — arrange it to shape us the way we want to be shaped. So if we want to make a positive impact in our beleaguered world and know we need guts to step up, here’s what we do. We bring people into our lives who are stepping outside their comfort zones. We’ll become more like them — we can’t help it. And recent findings in neuroscience suggest that in this process we have more power than we’d ever imagined — both to gain and to give. When we are merely observing another’s actions, it turns out that so-called mirror neurons in our brains fire as if we were actually performing the observed actions ourselves. Now that’s influence! So we have science behind what humans have long intuited. In southern Africa, the concept of ubuntu , meaning “I am because we are,” originating in the Bantu languages, suggests both a worldview and a way of being with others. And the power of companions to fortify us — keeping us in the stance of hope — is suggested by a simple experiment in 2008 at the University of Virginia. Students with weighted back-packs were put at the foot of a hill and asked to estimate how steep it was. Some subjects stood next to friends; others stood alone. Students with friends next to them estimated the hill to be less steep than did those standing by themselves, and the longer a friend was known, the less steep the hill appeared. Buddies matter. With friends by our side, challenges that drain hope look less daunting. Knowing this, we can actively seek out those who share our passion and encourage us to risk for what we believe in. Think about it, if we don’t experience ourselves changing, how in the world could we imagine “the world” to change? Above, I claimed that a kind of humility is required for eyes-wide-open hope. Here’s what I mean. If change, expressed through countless influences, is what happens in an ecosystem, then living with an eco-mind means being ever ready for surprises: Knowing that we just can’t know. To stay in that frame, my trick is to carry around a mental list of big surprises — changes I wouldn’t have given much chance of ever happening. Then, regularly I review my “surprises list,” I have to admit to myself that, well, I could be wrong to dismiss something as impossible the next time around. It is humbling. But it’s a hopeful humility that’s growing in me. One item on my “surprises” list? Aware that each year forested land the size of Costa Rica is destroyed, the UN’s Plant for the Planet campaign set a global goal of planting 1 billion trees a year, starting in 2007. My response? I was sure it was way too ambitious; I wished them the best, and went on with my life. But, was I off! If the UNEP had met its goal, we would now be at 7 billion. But guess what? The campaign has surpassed 12 billion — that’s nearly two trees for every person on earth. In other words, with an eco-mind, it’s not possible to know what’s possible. And that’s where honest hope lives, in the uncertainty in which there is only one certainty: That what we do, however big, however small, ripples forth in ways we’ll never know. And, unbeknownst to us, one may even create a cascade. So we are free, free — unapologetically and eyes wide open — to go for the world we want. Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want, new April 23, 2013 in paperback from Nation Books. Photo: Open eyes. Image from Creative Commons Originally published by Huffington Post on 04/30/2013

Originally published by Grist on 05/26/2013 Last week at the McDonald’s shareholder meeting , the world’s largest fast food chain heard from a brave 9-year-old, Hannah Robertson. She was among a growing chorus of parents, teachers, and kids calling out the company for its relentless marketing to kids, especially with the use of its iconic clown, Ronald McDonald. (Who, by the way, I’ve always found creepy). “It would be nice,” said Robertson at the company’s annual meeting in Chicago on Thursday, “if you stopped trying to trick kids into wanting to eat your food all the time.” CEO Don Thompson responded, “We are not marketing unjustly to kids.” Mr. Thompson, I’d like to introduce you to someone you might know: Ronald McDonald. Last I checked, he was on your payroll, and he’s been busy peddling your products directly to kids, especially through relationships with the nation’s public schools. Interesting that Thompson also claimed, “We’re not marketing to schools. We don’t do that.” Even though Ronald McDonald — or really, guys dressed up in the ridiculous clown costume — regularly visit public schools as part of the charity arm of the mega-company. In Kentucky, all-school assemblies are held with Ronald sharing ideas about “giving back to community.” And in Minnesota, Ronald invites elementary school kids to lunch. That’s what my friend Mike McMahon found out when he got a notice from his daughter Gwen’s third-grade class: The end-of-year field trip to McDonald’s was touted as a celebration for the students who had collected more than 100,000 soda pop tabs to benefit Ronald McDonald Charity Houses. Two third-grade classes, including his daughter’s, would be taking the tabs to the local McDonald’s, in walking distance of the school, and having lunch there. “It’s so tough,” said Mike. “Ronald McDonald Charity Houses provide an important service but they’re also integrated into McDonald’s corporate image and branding. It’s a lot for adults to work through, let alone as an 8-year-old.” As parents, Mike and his wife had been working hard to raise their kids on a well-balanced diet and to teach them how to make informed choices about what they eat. So a school-day visit to McDonald’s was hard to explain to Gwen. “I can count the times she’s eaten at a fast food chain on one hand, and never at McDonald’s,” explained Mike. “In fact, McDonald’s had always been a line in the sand, largely because of the marketing!” So he decided to talk with Gwen about it. “We didn’t want to pull her out of it,” Mike said. “We wanted to teach her about engagement.” And that’s just what they did. After talking with her parents, Gwen decided that she wanted to write a letter to CEO Thompson and give it to Ronald. Excited by the idea, she went off with materials from Corporate Accountability International that Mike had given her about the company and its marketing tactics. She wrote her letter, addressed it to Don Thompson, CEO of McDonald’s, sealed it, and packed it in her bag for school. The next day, Ronald gave a warm greeting to the group of nearly 50 students, teachers, and parents who carried with them the thousands of soda pop tabs for the Ronald McDonald Houses. “The kids were very excited. The visit from Ronald was clearly a reward for a job well done. Yet McDonald’s represents just about everything that’s wrong with our food system and it goes against everything we’ve taught Gwen,” Mike said. “So sending her to McDonald’s on a school sanctioned trip didn’t sit right with me.” The school made it clear the kids didn’t have to actually eat food from McDonald’s. Gwen was one of three kids in her class who didn’t eat at McDonald’s that day. As Ronald gathered the kids together, they piled big bags of soda tabs into his arms. A heap of them sat at his feet. As he presented an award to the teachers and students, Gwen stepped up. She handed her letter to Ronald. Ronald looked at the envelope with CEO Don Thompson written across it. “I don’t know who this is,” he said. Gwen didn’t back down. “I’m … I’m not a mailman. What do want me to do with this?” Ronald stammered. When it was clear that Gwen was insistent he take the letter, Ronald quietly slipped the envelope into his pocket and got back to the regularly scheduled PR. If any 8-year-old could understand the need for supporting families caring for kids in hospitals, it would be Gwen. Her younger brother spent 121 days in the hospital after he was born due to complications from his pre-term birth. Luckily, her family lives near the hospital, so they could stay at home. But, as Mike says, Gwen knows Ronald McDonald Charity Houses “are helpful to families with children in the hospital.” That’s all the more reason her letter to the CEO was so poignant. This is what she wrote: Dear Mr. Thompson, I think that in order to help the Ronald McDonald houses even more, you should cut down on the advertising and spend the money that you’ve saved on the Ronald McDonald houses. For example, if you stopped advertising the Happy Meals you could spend 115,000,000 dollars more on the houses, and that would be a lot more families helped. Gwen, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

This is the fourth of a five-part, weekly series celebrating Earth Day. “We’ve hit the limits of a finite planet!” How many times have I heard this dire warning and felt myself banging against a wall — ouch! Or, I’ve read that endless growth is killing our planet, and we have to “just say no” to growth. Sure, such pronouncements can seem like common sense, but even common-sense metaphors can get us into trouble. The problem is, if we conceive of our challenge as squeezing within the limits of a finite planet, our imaginations stay locked inside an unecological worldview of separateness and lack — precisely the thinking that got us into this mess. Not good. It’s true, of course, that for all practical purposes our planet and atmosphere are made up of a limited number of atoms. But their configurations are essentially infinite. By conjuring up a fixed and static reality, the “finite-limits frame” draws us away from the deeper reality of our world — that of interconnection and dynamism offering stunning possibility, if we learn to align with nature’s rules. Think of music. Yes, there are just eighty-eight keys on the piano. But if we instruct ourselves to focus primarily on this limit, we won’t get very far in creating beautiful sound. It is the possible variations we play on these eighty-eight keys that are important. And they are virtually endless. Some are gloriously harmonious, others harshly discordant. Such quality is what must command our attention. A limits frame asks us to focus on the number of keys we use, but creating beautiful music requires deep learning of the principles of harmony. It requires both discipline and invention. Only by focusing on harmony can we know whether more or fewer keys are needed. Making this core shift, of course we uncover real limits on what we can do without disrupting nature’s regenerative flows. But our sight remains clear: We make these discoveries as we focus on uncovering and aligning our choices, public and private, with laws of biology and physics. We can learn, for example, how to cool our homes from a zebra’s stripes. Really. A zebra reduces its surface temperature by more than 17 degrees Fahrenheit with microscopic air currents produced by the different heat absorption rates of its black and white stripes. In similar fashion, in Sendai, Japan, the Daiwa House office building uses alternating dark and light surfaces to create tiny air currents that control the building’s exterior temperature. So indoor summer temperatures are lowered enough to save around 20 percent in energy use. Once we see ourselves living within ever-evolving systems, we move from metaphors such as “hitting the limits” toward those emphasizing the destruction and waste built intothe DNA of our economic and political systems themselves. Over 40 percent of food in the U.S. is wasted. Two-thirds of the energy entering power plants is wasted, and so on. A mechanical, quantitative frame doesn’t work: We know that reducing quantities alone isn’t enough. Humanity could, for example, reduce plastic disposal by half and still be creating an oceanic plastic soup the size of Texas. A further drawback of the “hitting the limits” frame is that for the most part finitude does not explain much of today’s suffering. True, there is a finite amount of forests we can destroy or water we can pollute without killing ourselves and other species, along with finite land area, finite rare minerals, and on and on. But let’s not be confused. Even as 868 million people suffer long-term, extreme undernourishment — and many more experience food insecurity — the supply of food is not only sufficient for all but continues to increase: now at about 2,800 calories for each of us each day. Plus, ecological farming could increase production, and it stores more carbon than chemical farming. And energy? We’ve barely begun to tap renewable sources. So, today’s deprivation in food and energy is not the result of the earth’s “limits.” The root lies in rules concentrating wealth and power : Income of less than two percent of the world’s people is as great as that of the bottom 77 percent. Finally, naming the problem as “hitting the earth’s limits” could communicate that the obstacle is not in our economies, but rather it’s out there — in nature’s inability to provide. Understandably, then, some people will respond: “Well, we’ve gone as far as nature can take us, so we’ve got to do one better than nature!” Thus, a “nature’s limits” message could inadvertently make people vulnerable to claims of promoters of bio-engineering and genetic engineering, who swear that only their tools can overcome nature’s limits and save us. Similarly, “growth,” identifying it as our core problem can distract us from seeing that what’s killing us is, as noted, the destruction and waste built into the system. Railing against our “addiction to growth” can also blind us from the truth that our economic system isn’t designed to grow wealth, even narrowly defined; more centrally, it’s built to accumulate wealth in the hands of the already well-placed. Plus, trying to turn the word “growth” into a negative saddles us with a big challenge: We love seeing our children, gardens, or retirement funds grow! And in a world where at least one-third of us experience the pain of absolute scarcity — lacking clean water, education, health care and more — people will likely see opposition to growth as downright frightening. From “Limits” to Alignment with Nature Through an ecological lens, however, we can move toward defining the problem as mal-alignment with nature. So we stop calling ours a “growth economy” and start naming it the “waste and destruction” economy. From there, we can get focused on remaking the ground rules of our economies to align with nature’s generative power. We can tap the commonly understood truth that it’s a whole lot easier to swim (or float!) with the current than fight against it. This is alignment. Moving with nature’s flow of energy is suggested in metaphors like “ cradle to cradle “ and “ zero-waste “ and “ biomimicry “ in design, for example. Nature is no longer a threat, nor a too-skimpy source of stuff. Nature is a wondrous teacher. To name but one tiny example: the humble spinach plant is such an efficient converter of sunlight to energy that, by combining its unique photosynthetic capacity with silicon, we can greatly multiply the power of current photovoltaics . As users of material in our daily lives, our attention expands to questions such as: What is the item made of, where is it produced, and under what conditions? Speaking personally, applying such judgments to daily choices, I don’t feel that I’m “limiting” myself to serve a moral imperative, but I’m enlarging my world and experiencing more meaning — maybe experiencing less need for connection through “common purchases” and enjoying more connection through “common purposes.” Seeing ripples, I feel more powerful. All this is what stirred me in 1971 to write Diet for a Small Planet. It was alignment: the joy of realizing that eating what is best for my body is also best for the earth and best for all of us. In working to reframe of our metaphors, which can reshuffle how we think and act, I’m motivated by findings of neuroscience. Fear easily trumps other emotions in our brains, we learn. Psychologists also tell us that fear often makes humans more self-interested, blaming, materialistic, and stuck. Thus it’s worth our care and effort to replace incoming fear stimuli with images of possibility. “Minding our metaphors”—the emotions and images they conjure up—we can communicate the power, the pleasure, and the monumental consequences of aligning with nature. Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want , new April 23, 2013 in paperback from Nation Books. Photos: Piano with leaves; Zebras. Images from Creative Commons Originally published by Huffington Post on 04/24/2013

“If it bleeds, it leads”... ever hear that maxim of journalism? If you want readers, go with the scary, gruesome story — that’s what gets hearts pumping and grabs attention. Yeah, but what grabs our attention can also scare the heck out of us and shut us down. Scary news might “sell,” but we can also feel so bombarded with the negative that our “why-bother” reflex kicks in. Fear stimuli go straight to the brain’s amygdala, Harvard Medical School’s Srinivasan Pillay explains . But, he adds “because hope seems to travel in the same dungeons [parts of the brain] as fear, it might be a good soldier to employ if we want to meet fear.” So let’s get better at using hope. It’s a free energy source. Hope isn’t blind optimism. It’s a sense of possibility — delight in the new and joy in creativity that characterizes our species. So, let’s break the good-news ban and become storytellers about real breakthroughs. (Below, don’t miss our top ten go-to’s.) I’m convinced that, in the process, we strengthen — as we must — our capacity to incorporate and act on the bad news as well. After all, it’s only in changing the small stories that we change the big, dangerous story — the myth of our own powerlessness. Remember, what we do and say doesn’t just influence our friends, but also our friends’ friends and our friends’ friends’ friends. Yes, three layers out, research shows. That’s power! Besides, it’s a great way to start the day. Here are some recent items that have “made my day.” Renewables ramping up . With news of Keystone and tar sands and coal-crazy China, it’s easy to think that renewable energy is going nowhere, but we’d be so wrong. Between 2008 and 2012, the U.S. nearly doubled its renewables capacity. And in the first three months of this year, 82 percent of newly installed domestic electricity-generating capacity was renewable. Plus, installed capacity of new solar units during the first quarter of this year is more than double that of same period last year. Globally, thirteen countries now get 30 percent or more of their electricity from renewable sources. And Germany — with cloud cover worse than Alaska’s — gets 21 percent of its electricity from renewables. In 2010, Germany — slightly smaller in size than Montana — produced about half the world’s solar energy. That could depress you, or, it could remind us of the vastness of untapped potential. In April, at the first Pathways to 100% Renewables conference in San Francisco, I heard scientists declare that there’s absolutely no technical obstacle to our planet’s reaching 100 percent renewable energy in a few decades. Abetting the process, the cost of renewables is plummeting worldwide — that of electricity from large solar power plants fell by more than half, from $0.31 per kilowatt-hour in 2009 to $0.14 in 2012. Wind wows. Denmark’s wind energy alone provides about 30 percent of the country’s electricity, making it the world leader ranked by the share of a country’s electricity that wind power provides. And U.S. wind power? We’re second only to China among the world’s wind energy producers, with wind power equal to about 10 nuclear power stations or 40 coal-fired power stations. Growing up in oil-centric Texas, I would have been the last person to predict my home state’s leadership. But in the 1990s eight utility companies brought groups of citizens together to learn and to think through options. By the end of the process, they’d ranked efficiency higher than when they began, and the share of those willing to pay for renewables and conservation increased by more than 60 percent . Apparently, the utility companies listened: If Texas were a country, it would now be the world’s sixth ranking wind energy producer. Cities, states, countries pledge to go clean: Eight countries, 42 cities, and 48 regions have shifted, or are committed to shifting within the next few decades, to 100 percent renewable energy in at least one sector, e.g. electricity, transportation, heating/cooling. In California, San Francisco , Lancaster , and San José have officially set their goal at 100 percent renewable electricity within the next decade. And if you’re thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s just California”: Greensburg, Kan., set its goal at 100 percent renewable power for all sectors after the town was wiped out by a tornado in 2007. In Colorado, the state’s target is 30 percent renewable electricity by 2020, a standard that’s helped spur success — especially when it comes to wind . And Vermont’s energy plan is set to get the state to 90 percent renewable energy in all sectors by mid-century. And whole countries? Iceland already gets 100 percent of its electricity from renewables — three-quarters from large hydro and 25 percent from geothermal. In Costa Rica, it’s about 95 percent — mainly from hydroelectric (which it’s working to diversify), along with wind, biomass, and geothermal. Costa Rica’s sights are set on becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral country in time for its 2021 bicentennial. Absorbing more carbon will speed it along, so Costa Rica’s forestry-financing agency is working with landowners to plant 7 million trees on cattle and coffee farms in the next few years. Monaco, Norway, New Zealand, and Iceland are also shooting to become the first carbon-neutral country. And Ethiopia unveiled plans to become a middle-income carbon-neutral country by 2025. Citizens clobber coal. Just since 2005, as part of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign , citizens across the country have stopped more than 165 coal plants from opening and successfully pushed for the retirement of more than 100 existing ones. The campaign aims to retire one third of America’s remaining 500 coal plants by 2020. And if you’re not registering how important this is, consider that coal accounts for more than a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Forests forever. In India, ten million families take part in roughly 100,000 “forest-management groups” responsible for protecting nearby woodlands. Motivation is high, especially for women, because firewood still provides three-fourths of the energy used in cooking. Working collaboratively with the Indian government, these groups cover a fifth of India’s forests; and they’re likely a reason that India is one of the few countries in the world to enjoy an increase in forest cover since 2005. And if you are not excited yet? Try just two final tales: Close to home: Four years ago in Magnolia Springs, Ala ., the conservative town government passed the toughest land regulation in the south. It’s spending a quarter million dollars on a comprehensive plan to restore and protect its charming river from agricultural chemical runoff. “I’m a tree hugging, liberal — I mean a tree-hugging conservative Republican! Which I know some people may say is an oxymoron,” said Mayor Charlie Houser of this small town near Mobile. Brown pelicans are showing up again, says Houser, and he adds: “Cormorants up in the treetops... Beautiful site!” Around the world: Three-fourths of Niger is desert, and news headlines focus on hunger there. But over two decades, poor farmers in the country’s south have “regreened” 12.5 million desolate acres. In all, Niger farmers have nurtured the growth of some 200 million trees — discovering that trees and crops are not competitors but are complementary. The trees protect the soil, bringing big crop-yield increases, and they provide fruit, nutritious leaves, fodder, and firewood. Now young people are returning to villages in Niger, and school kids are learning to care for the trees, too. Are you willing to step up as a solutions-news ban breaker? Neuroscientists tell us our brains are “plastic,” with new neuronal connections being created all the time, forming new “streambeds” in our brains that shape our responses to life. So, isn’t actively choosing what shapes our brains perhaps the most powerful ways to change ourselves, enabling us to change the world? Facing unprecedented challenges, we can choose to remain open to possibility and creativity — not mired in despair. Surely, the latter is a luxury that none can afford. We can create and enthusiastically share a solutions story today, every day. It is a Revolutionary Act. Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want — filled with solutions stories for your retelling. ————————- Ten allies to help you “break the ban”—Small Planet Institute Yes! MagazineSolutions JournalEcologic Development FundHandprinterSierra ClubZERI (Zero Emissions Research Initiatives)Your Olive BranchWorld Future CouncilOdeWire: News for Intelligent OptimistsPhoto: Sun ray through hand. By Viditu. Image from Creative Commons. Originally published by Huffington Post on 05/09/2013

Originally published by La Jornada del Campo on 11/16/2013 A principios de octubre atendí una invitación del Consejo Nacional Agropecuario (CNA) para hacer una exposición en su foro anual, realizado en la ciudad de Aguascalientes. El tema del foro, “La nueva visión ante el reto de alimentar al mundo”, me hizo entender que viviría una experiencia surrealista, ya que a México, con una dependencia alimentaria del exterior de 42 por ciento, le falta mucho para alimentar a los propios mexicanos, y si no puede con eso ahora, menos con el reto de atender al “mundo”. Otra muestra del surrealismo que ya viven los mexicanos como realidad cotidiana la recibí en la fiesta de cóctel del CNA. El asesor agrícola de la embajada de Estados Unidos (EU) en México me comentó con orgullo que es muy viable que este año México logre un superávit comercial para el sector. Reconocí la trampa, conozco los datos. “¿La balanza agroalimentaria?”, le pregunté, y respondió: “Sí”. Repliqué: ““No la balanza agropecuaria, sino la que tiene la cerveza como exportación del agro”. “Sí, así es”, me respondió y explicó que la cerveza es un ejemplo emblemático del éxito del Tratado de Libre Comercio para América del Norte (TLCAN) para México, que muestra el valor de la integración continental. “¡Aún estamos nosotros exportando a México la malta para hacerla!” Y es cierto. Desde la entrada en vigor del TLCAN han crecido en siete veces las ventas de malta de EU a México. “Entonces, si México no contribuye ni con el grano ni con la malta, exactamente ¿cuál es el valor agregado desde el agro mexicano?”, le pregunté. Respondió sólo con una risa nerviosa. Eso es el TLCAN para México. Se entrega la soberanía alimentaria, con una apertura casi total y nada estratégica. Y aun con un producto como la cerveza en que el país sí tiene una ventaja comparativa frente a EU, se entrega casi todo el valor agregado a la contraparte comercial. Las ventas impresionantes no estimulan la actividad económica de los agricultores, ni siquiera a la industria doméstica de la malta. A cambio, México se convierte en una maquiladora para embotellar la cerveza. Contribuye con el agua, la cual cuenta el país en volúmenes limitados. Y ya con la compra parcial de los dos monopolios grandes de la cerveza por parte de empresas extranjeras, ni las ganancias se quedan en el país. Así ha sido la receta del gobierno mexicano, durante 20 años de un neoliberalismo intransigente. Se ha perfeccionado el arte de entregar valores. El saldo espantoso para los agricultores. Para los agricultores mexicanos, el TLCAN desató un estado de crisis permanente, con dos periodos distintos. El primero puede llamarse “La gran inundación”. Con la liberalización acordada, se desató una oleada de compras de cárnicos y granos provenientes de EU, muchos a precios dumping, debajo de sus costos de producción. Con la decisión de parte del gobierno mexicano de acelerar la liberalización incluso de los productos que contaban con plazos graduales de apertura, como el maíz, la oleada se convirtió en tsunami. He analizado a detalle ocho productos —maíz, soya, trigo, algodón, arroz, carne de res, cerdo y pollo— que compiten con productos mexicanos y cuyos niveles de exportación a México han crecido mucho desde antes del TLCAN. El volumen de las exportaciones creció considerablemente, con un mínimo de 159 por ciento en soya y un máximo de 707 por ciento en cerdo, entre el promedio 1990-2002 y 2006-08. Los ocho productos han sido cuantiosamente apoyados por las políticas agropecuarias de EU, con subsidios que promediaron 11 mil 500 millones de dólares por año entre 1997 y 2005, y con otras políticas aún más importantes que impulsaron la sobreproducción. La mejor estimación del efecto de las políticas de EU para apoyar exportaciones se tiene en un indicador llamado “margen dedumping”, que considera el porcentaje en que los precios de exportación están por debajo de los costos de producción. Los ocho productos registraron un margen de dumping positivo durante 1997-2005, de entre 17 y 38 por ciento en los cinco cultivos y de cinco a diez por ciento en los productos pecuarios. Los efectos sobre los precios en México también son significativos. Los precios al productor se redujeron drásticamente en todos los productos. Al comparar los precios de 2005 con los de principios de los 90’s (ajustados por la inflación) son de 44 a 67 por ciento más bajos. Y por los bajos precios, cayó la producción de algodón, soya, trigo y arroz. La demanda creciente por los cárnicos sostuvo tanto a la producción mexicana como a las importaciones. Igual ocurrió con el maíz, cuya producción aumentó en 50 por ciento, contrario a lo que podría esperarse. Esto dejó a México prácticamente autosuficiente en la producción de maíz blanco para consumo humano, pero muy dependiente de importaciones en el sector pecuario, que crece velozmente. La dependencia de las importaciones en México aumentó significativamente en los ocho productos. En el sector pecuario, la dependencia pasó de cuatro a siete por ciento a principios de los 90’s a niveles de 16 a 31 por ciento en 2006-2008. En los cultivos, los niveles de dependencia iniciales ya eran altos a principios de los 90’s (siete-74 por ciento), pero en 2006-08 alcanzaron 34 por ciento en maíz y 97 por ciento en soya. El costo para los productores mexicanos. Suponiendo que los precios de los productos en México se contrajeron en la misma proporción que el margen de dumping, el costo global de las pérdidas en los ocho productos se estima en 12 mil 800 millones de dólares para el periodo de nueve años, o mil 400 millones cada año. Las pérdidas anuales equivalen a más del diez por ciento del valor de todas las exportaciones agropecuarias de México hacia EU (incluyendo cerveza). Las pérdidas que ha costado el dumping de EU rebasan el valor total de las exportaciones de jitomate a ese país, que aumentaron vertiginosamente con el TLCAN. Los productores de maíz fueron, por mucho, los más afectados, con pérdidas por seis mil 600 millones de dólares, un promedio de 38 dólares por tonelada o 99 por hectárea. Esto es más que el pago por hectárea promedio a pequeños productores bajo el esquema de subsidios de Procampo. Termina la época ilusoria de la comida barata. Si esto fuera una apuesta del gobierno mexicano en el gran casino neoliberal por una política de comida barata y crecimiento dinámico, la perdió por ambos lados. Por su creciente poder, los monopolios agroalimentarios capturaron la gran parte del valor de las importaciones baratas, dejando una canasta básica cada año más costosa. Y bajo el régimen neoliberal, se estancó la economía, particularmente en aquello que más necesitaba México: empleos. Con una pérdida de al menos dos millones de empleos en el campo, y con un crecimiento lento en el sector industrial, no es de sorprender que la participación de mexicanos en el sector informal creció hasta 57 por ciento. Como resonó la consigna en el Zócalo durante la gran marcha por los zapatistas y en contra del TLCAN en enero de 1994: “¿Primer mundo?, já já já!” Si bien el chiste sobre la comida barata comprada con salarios industriales fue de mal gusto, se volvió cruel cuando se desplomaron los precios internacionales del maíz y de otros cultivos en 2007. Y aún peor cuando la crisis financiera en EU provocó la Gran Recesión, que para México tumbó la fuente más importante no sólo de demanda y de capitales sino también de empleos y de las remesas enviadas por los migrantes. Este segundo periodo del TLCAN puede llamarse “La dependencia costosa”. Se duplicaron los precios internacionales de cultivos básicos, provocando protestas violentas en decenas de países, incluso en México. Se aumentó el costo de la canasta básica de comida en 53 por ciento entre 2005-11. Y estalló el déficit en la balance comercial agropecuaria, llegando a cuatro mil 600 millones de dólares en 2008. De 1990 a 2011, el costo anual de las importaciones de alimentos subió de dos mil 600 millones a 18 mil 400 millones de dólares. En gran parte, las importaciones de maíz causaron el déficit, ya que las políticas de apoyo al etanol en EU ya estaban desviando hasta 40 por ciento del cultivo a la producción del agrocombustible. Según otro estudio mío, esas políticas habían costado a México mil 500 millones de dólares entre 2005 y 2011 por la alza al precio del maíz atribuible a la expansión de la demanda por el etanol. Hacia un futuro incierto. Los precios internacionales se han calmado este año. Pero se espera una volatilidad continua, por la carencia de reservas públicas, la creciente demanda por los agrocombustibles y una especulación financiera espantosa en los mercados de commodities desde la crisis financiera. Según la presentación que hizo en el foro del CNA el investigador Mark Rosegrant, del Instituto Internacional para la Investigación sobre Políticas Alimentarias (IFPRI, por sus siglas en inglés), el cambio climático hace aún más inciertas las perspectivas de México en el agro. Aun en el más optimista escenario, se prevén afectaciones significativas a la productividad agrícola. Ya emerge un nuevo consenso a nivel internacional, y esto es algo que a mí me tocó resumir en la presentación del foro del CNA: la prioridad es invertir en la productividad de los agricultores pequeños y medianos, con base en un extensionismo público enfocado en la producción agroecológica. Como enfaticé al final, no se puede lograr tales cambios sin reorientar las políticas comerciales, lo cual sirve también para reducir el alto costo de la dependencia. Como nos han mostrado tanto China como Brasil, se puede abrir la economía estratégicamente, sin desarmarse en sectores importantes. Como hemos mostrado en un estudio reciente, México podría recuperar su autosuficiencia en maíz. Se puede capturar el valor del comercio. Y en el proceso, se puede rescatar los valores humanos que deben de determinar las políticas económicas, no al revés. En lugar de entregar sus valores.

We live in a strange, contradictory time. As the Millennium Development Goals ‘ target year 2015 fast approaches, the World Bank is already celebrating victories. We read , for example, that “target of reducing extreme poverty by half has been reached five years ahead of the 2015 deadline.” Sounds great. And last year the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) opened its annual report State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 forecasting that, if world economies return to pre-recession economic growth, the MDG goal for cutting the prevalence of hunger in developing countries by half would also be “within reach.” This year, the agency tells us that we’ve cut the prevalence of chronically hungry people in the developing world by 39 percent since 1990. Sounds pretty good. But untangling what’s behind the good news can be sobering. Turns out that, for both poverty and hunger, gains are highly concentrated: Without progress in China — mostly in the 90s — the world would have seen only a 6 percent drop in the number of chronically hungry people since 1990. On poverty, Yale Professor Thomas Pogge points out that if the World Bank’s extreme poverty line had been $2.50 per day, instead of $1.25, the number of poor would actually have risen slightly, not dropped, between 1990 and 2005. And given that, for example, in Dhaka, Bangladesh food alone for a family of three costs more than $2.00 a day , the higher cut-off point for measuring extreme poverty seems reasonable. Besides, inequality is increasing in most parts of the world. Since 2007 the global Food Price Index has stayed well above levels of most of the previous two decades. “Land grabs” by private speculators and governments in developing countries add up to an area adequate to feed a billion people, according to Oxfam International ; and good farmland continues to move into fuel production . Meanwhile, at least 842 million are suffering severe hunger, lasting longer than a year. Sounds terrible. So how do we untangle the apparent contradictions? For starters, we put new energy and resources into developing realistic measuring tools. And the great news is that key players are on it. The FAO, the UN agency entrusted with monitoring and communicating the extent of hunger, is taking big steps. For many years, the agency has measured hunger by what’s called the “Prevalence of Undernourishment” based on statistical probabilities of a share of a population failing to meet minimum calorie requirements. Explained carefully in its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013 (SOFI 13) released last month, the measure was adopted because a “headcount” approach is impractical; and, the FAO argues, an alternative statistical-probability yardstick would result in a “gross bias” overestimating hunger. The measure’s virtue is that its annual release reminds us all that hunger is still huge. But there’s been a big downside, too. This single number is received by the public and policymakers as a total even though it’s, well, a “partial.” For one, despite being called the “Prevalence of Undernourishment,” the indicator doesn’t capture undernourishment. It’s about calories only. (A soda’s calories, for example, fuel us with energy, but few kid themselves that soda is nourishing.) Thus, the indicator might more appropriately be labeled something like the “Prevalence of Caloric Deficiency.” Second, it represents only the most severe and long-term hunger. The agency’s Assistant Director-General for Economic and Social Development Jomo Kwame Sundaram — speaking at the World Food Prize Foundation’s Borlaug Dialogue on October 18th — explained that: “Our estimates are that at least 842 million people in the world are believed to be still suffering from chronic hunger. This is a very, very strict definition. In other words, they have been hungry for at least a year. So if they have [been hungry for most of a year but] not been hungry for a month or for a season of that year, they no longer qualify as being hungry by that very strict definition. In other words the number of hungry people is probably higher than that. This is very important for us to recognize.” Appreciating this definition’s limits, the agency is taking several important steps to create more comprehensive tools. Its new hunger report, SOFI 2013 , stresses that the agency is going “beyond chronic food deprivation” to present “a broader suite of indicators that aims to capture the multidimensional nature of food insecurity, its determinants and outcomes.” The indicators cover eight dimensions, including “vulnerability” (e.g. dependency on imports) and “shocks” (e.g., price volatility). “This suite, compiled for every country, allows a more nuanced picture of their food security status, guiding policy-makers [in] the eradication of hunger.” Shocking Contradictions Spur New Thinking Data in the report help readers grasp why the FAO is moving to supplement its primary measure. Particularly unsettling is evidence showing how grave and widespread are “stunting” and “wasting.” Diagnosed by measuring young children, wasting means being too thin for one’s height and stunting means being too short for one’s age. Stunting is “a largely irreversible symptom of undernutrition,” notes the report . Typically, consequences include cognitive impairment, a weakened immune system, and, for females, reproductive problems. One quarter of all the world’s children are stunted. And take note: Although diagnosis happens in childhood, consequences happen over a life time. Remarkably, data in SOFI 13 show many instances of no meaningful relationship between a country’s rate of stunting and the severity of hunger as now understood by the public and media — that is, according the FAO’s publicized “prevalence of undernourishment” number. Three dramatic examples stand out. All have won praise for meeting the MDG goal of cutting its share of hungry people in half since 2000: Vietnam. Only 8 percent are now chronically “hungry” but almost a third of its children are stunted. Ghana. Less than 5 percent of its people are chronically hungry; but the country’s rate of stunting is almost six times greater: at 29 percent. Niger. Only 13.9 percent are now undernourished, but half of its children are stunted , among the worst in the world. I’m grateful to the FAO for providing much of this disturbing data. They alert us all to the fact that the FAO’s hunger numbers are based on assumptions about calorie availability only, not nutrition; and increasingly the two are diverging. An Indian doctor told me recently that the 2,000 very poor patients his clinic sees monthly eat enough calories, but 60 percent are diabetic and suffer hypertension and related conditions. Surely, the fact that stunting — a truly dire measure of poor nutrition — isn’t necessarily reflected in the most common measure of hunger means we have work to do. Solutions? The time is right to get it right, as a “new global development agenda” is in progress to pick up the baton from the Millennium Development Goal framework. Next fall the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals , created early this year by the UN General Assembly, will deliver its report. “A data revolution for sustainable development” — that’s what the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda says we need. (And any body with a name like that must be worth listening to!) For the Panel, a data revolution means “a new international initiative...to improve the quality of statistics and information available to people and governments.” Frustrated by the lack of needed data, the FAO has put enormous effort not only into developing the “suite of indicators” just mentioned, but also into a new “ Food Insecurity Experience Scale “ to capture the personally reported experience of hunger. Called “ Voices of the Hungry ,” the survey gathers “direct responses to a series of questions regarding...access to adequate food.” It’s been successfully tested nationally in Brazil and Colombia, and pilots are now underway in four African countries. The FAO will fold its battery of hunger-related questions into the Gallup World Poll to generate cost-effective and “cross-culturally comparable” responses “...from a nationally representative sample of adults in a large number of countries.” The survey will allow “disaggregation at sub-national levels and across different population groups,” a big boon for policy makers. Distressingly, roll out of Voices of Hungry has been put at risk by recent FAO budget cuts, caused by fiscally strapped governments on which the agency depends. If restored, the world — and especially poor countries with limited resources for data gathering — could have an additional and very helpful way to track hunger. I can’t wait. Of course, better measuring tools don’t enable hungry people to eat. Ending hunger depends on citizens holding policymakers accountable for acting on the improved tools. That’s why the UN Committee on World Food Security is such an important forum: Reformed in 2009 in response to the food crisis, the Committee is the only global food policy forum in which representatives of small-scale food producers and those most affected by food insecurity can deliberate on the same footing as governments. In all this work, better measurements can help us untangle the contradictions so that solutions come into focus. And that’s why in this moment so rich in opportunity to set new, planet-wide goals, the quest for “better data” is stirring passions far beyond the wonks among us. Originally published by Huffington Post on 11/19/2013

Published in Ethics & International Affairs Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 251-259 (Fall 2013) Abstract Hunger continues to be one of humanity's greatest challenges despite the existence of a more-than-adequate global food supply equal to 2,800 kilocalories for every person every day. In measuring progress, policy-makers and concerned citizens across the globe rely on information supplied by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an agency of the United Nations. In 2010 the FAO reported that in the wake of the 2007–2008 food-price spikes and global economic crisis, the number of people experiencing hunger worldwide since 2005–2007 had increased by 150 million, rising above 1 billion in 2009. However, in its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (SOFI 12) the FAO presented new estimates, having revamped its methods and reinterpreted its hunger data back to 1990. The revised numbers for the period 1990–1992 to 2010–2012 reverse the trend to a steadily falling one. Based on the FAO's new calculations, extreme undernourishment peaked in 1990 at a record-breaking one billion, followed by a significant decline through 2006, when progress stalled but did not reverse (see chart below). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679413000191