]]
Publications
Griffith University and the Department of the Environment, Sport & Territories, 1997
John Fien
Griffith University
Australia
Two issues about development that always draw attention are population and food. Usually, these are considered together to produce notions of the problems of 'over-population' and 'the starving millions'. Such notions are Western constructions and do not really reflect the perspectives of people of the South on their situation nor do they take account of the processes that cause unequal development in the world. This workshop seeks to address misconceptions about food supply and population levels that result from these notions.
As a result of completing this workshop, participants should be able to:
The workshop contains seven activities.
Two introductory activities focus on the presentation of food and population issues and the reasons for, and problems in, teaching about these issues.
This activity allows participants to express their views on statements about the causes of food shortages, hunger and famine and to consider possible solutions.
Participants work on editing a newspaper story that explores the scope of the world food crisis and some reasons behind it.
Building on ideas developed in previous activities, participants critically examine myths about hunger and population.
Participants match up the myths encountered in Activity 4 with positive principles, or Food First Fundamentals.
An activity in which participants evaluate a teaching activity on the global food system and suggest adaptations to their area of teaching.
Overhead Transparency Masters
OHT 1: Headlines from History
OHT 2: Population Views
OHT 3: Population - Whose Problem?
Resources
Resource 1: Views on Population and Hunger
Resource 2: Editing the News
Resource 3: Myths: True or False?
Resource 4: Exposing the Myths
Resource 5: Ten Food First Fundamentals
Abraham, J. (1991) Food and Development: The Political Economy of Hunger and the Modern Diet, WWF and Kogan Page, London.
Bread for the World Institute (1994) Hunger 1995: Causes of Hunger, BWI, Silver Spring.
Delpeuch, B. (1994) Seed and Surplus, CIIR Farmers' Link, London.
Fien, J. (1985) Alternative Approaches to Development, Longman, Harlow.
George, S. (1986) How the Other Half Dies, 2nd ed., Penguin, Hammondsworth.
George, S. and Paige, N. (1982) Food for Beginners, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative, London.
Kelly, E. (ed.) (1987) Food Matters: The Question of Feeding the World, Development Education Centre, Birmingham.
Lappé, F.M. and Collins, J. (1982) Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Abacus, London.
Lappé, F.M. and Collins, J. (1988 )World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Grove Press, New York.
New Internationalist, No. 267, May 1995.
The activities on hunger myths, Food First Fundamentals and the Sahelian drought in this workshop are based upon curriculum materials developed by the author for the UK Schools Council Geography 16-19 Project.
This activity focuses on participants' perspectives of the issues involved in teaching about population and food issues.
A. Introduction
Ask participants to comment on whether or not - and how and why - the headlines on these issues are similar today. Why?
B. Teaching Issues
This activity allows participants to express their views on ten statements about the causes of food shortages, hunger and famine in the South and about possible solutions.
This activity helps participants explore the scope of the world food crisis and some reasons behind it. Participants take on the role of a newspaper editor preparing a story on 'The World Food Crisis Bites' for publication. Participants may work individually or in pairs. The instructions for this activity are on Resource 2.
This activity builds on the notion of 'myths' developed above. It is based upon Lappé and Collins' critique of ten of the myths about hunger and population in their books, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity and World Hunger: Twelve Myths.
Lappé and Collins believe that one solution to world hunger lies in identifying a number of Food First Fundamentals or principles. They argue that these principles can provide the basis for agricultural development policies that will guarantee an adequate and nutritional diet for everyone in the world.
Lappé and Collins found their Food First Fundamentals by studying the ten myths of world hunger (Resource 1) and their answers to them (Resource 4). From that study emerged ten positive principles for world agriculture. For example, from the first myth, 'People are hungry because of scarcity - both of food and land', they developed the Food First Fundamental : 'Every country in the world has the resources necessary for its people to free themselves from hunger'.
Resource 5 contains ten of Lappé and Collins's Food First Fundamentals. However, they are not in the same sequence or order as the myths presented in Resource 1. They have been mixed up.
|
Myth |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
|
FFF |
A |
D |
H |
F |
B |
I |
J |
E |
C |
G |
POPULATION BOMB AND FOOD SHORTAGE: WORLD LOSING FIGHT FOR VITAL BALANCE
New York Times
WHY THE POPULATION EXPLOSION IS TOPPING THE AGENDA
The Guardian
TOO MANY BABIES CLOG INDIA'S DEVELOPMENT
The Times
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: THE PROBLEM THAT WON'T GO AWAY
The Guardian
THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS BITES
The Guardian
It's not a problem of the number of people. The real problem is the availability of world resources for those people.
The world's population is growing too fast.
The question is, who controls the world's resources and who uses most of them?
Until both women and men want to have fewer children, birth control on its own will never be successful.
For many people who are poor, children actually add to their wealth and do not make them worse off.
The population crisis should be solved by massive programmes of birth control.
If people had fewer children they would be wealthier. Poor people must be stupid to have large families.
Many Third World countries are not heavily populated. Population density in Britain or the Netherlands is comparatively high but those countries can cope.
The Third World is poor because it is overpopulated and it doesn't have enough resources to cope.
The reason why many people choose to have a lot of children is because they are poor - not the other way round.
Source: New Internationalist, No. 79 September 1979.
1. Next to each statement, circle either TRUE (T), FALSE (F) or NOT SURE (NS).
2. After each statement, write one fact you know which supports your view.
STATEMENT
1. Scarcity: People are hungry because of scarcity, both of food and land.
FACT:
T F NS
2. Overpopulation: The world's population is growing rapidly. An exploding population means there is less food for everyone.
FACT:
T F NS
3. Increased production: Hunger will be overcome by concentrating on producing more food.
FACT:
T F NS
4. Large landholders: To achieve food security the hungry world must rely on large landholders.
FACT:
T F NS
5. Food versus environment: We are faced with a tragic trade-off. A needed increase in food production can only come at the expense of the ecological integrity of our food base. Farming must be pushed onto marginal lands at the risk of irreparable erosion. The use of pesticides will have to be increased even if the risks are great.
FACT:
T F NS
6. Export agriculture: An underdeveloped country's best hope for development is to export crops in which it has a natural advantage and to use the earnings to import food and industrial goods.
FACT
T F NS
7. Rich world versus poor world: Hunger is a contest with the First World on one side and the Third World on the other. Our standard of living would suffer if we devoted too many of our resources to feed the Third World.
FACT:
T F NS
8. Passive peasants: Landless rural workers are so oppressed, malnourished and conditioned into a state of dependence that they themselves are beyond the point of being able to mobilise themselves.
FACT:
T F NS
9. Redistribution: Hunger can be overcome by redistributing food from areas where there is a surplus to areas where there is a shortage.
FACT:
T F NS
10. Foreign aid: To solve the problem of hunger we must increase our foreign aid.
FACT:
T F NS
Source: Fien, J. (1985) Alternative Approaches to Development, Harlow, pp. 19-20.
Instructions
Imagine you are the newspaper editor to which the article has been sent for final editing prior to publication. Your task is to complete the five marked spaces. The first four are for sub-headings. The fifth is for a key sentence from the article to focus the attention of the reader on the article's theme.
1. Read the news report and decide where the following four sub-headings should be placed:
(i) My Television
(ii) Real Causes of Hunger
(iii) Good Intentions
(iv) Size of the Crisis
2. To fill the fifth space, you need to select a couple of phrases or a sentence from the article that will focus the attention of the reader on the theme of the article. You have space for no more than fifteen words. What phrases or sentences from the article would you put in the fifth space? Why?
3. The sentence the real sub-editor chose to fill the fifth space was: 'Oxfam: 90,000 people die of starvation or under-nourishment every day.'
What do you think was the reasoning behind this choice? Do you think there is a contradiction between the selection of this focus sentence and the theme of the article? Why?
4. What does the author believe is the root cause of the world food crisis? Do you agree? Why?
1.
At the start of 1983, there are more organisations concerned with world hunger than there have ever been. Yet the number of people dying, or likely to die, from hunger and associated diseases is also higher than ever before - and increasing daily. And the gap between the well-fed and the underfed is growing alarmingly. There is little real prospect, on present trends, of it ever being closed.
In Britain every self-respecting High Street now has its Oxfam shop, a style in patronage inconceivable a few years ago. At national level, there has been a slow but steady proliferation of non-government agencies that care about the world's poor and hungry. Elsewhere in the so-called First World the same trends have been discernible.
The Canadian Agriculture Minister, Eugene Whelan, complained recently that there were now at least 20 UN organisations dealing with food questions. There was more and more duplication of work, he said, and there was overlapping, even competition, among the organisations themselves.
At the last council meeting of the biggest of these organisations, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, the Indian delegate S.P. Mukerji declared: "I have a feeling that while on the one hand we are increasing the number
of resolutions, determinations, pious hopes, the number of organisations at the world level, regional level, country level, at the grassroots level nothing much is done "
2.
Yet, the size of the task is almost too big to grasp. On recent Oxfam estimates, 90,000 people die of starvation or under-nourishment every day - more than one a second, or a Falklands death toll every quarter of an hour. One in four of the world's population - equalling the US, the Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe and a few more besides - are not getting enough to eat to meet normal energy requirements.
The problems are usually most acute in those countries where the population is growing fastest. The average sub-Saharan African is now eating measurably less than he was eating 10 years ago but in a large number of African and Asian countries, where the population may well be going up by as much as 3 or 4 per cent a year (meaning that 10 million today equals about 17.3 million in the year 2000), food production is growing, at most, by 2 per cent a year.
It is a situation where the people of Bangladesh may be reassured that they have had one or two good harvests in recent years but family planning remains a central problem and the world market for their jute has virtually evaporated. Nigerians, who are also very fertile, are spending far more on food than they can afford. And they are only two countries out of more than 30 thought to be in a similar boat. Add to them the millions of refugees, the landless and the otherwise deprived, and the scope of the problem becomes apparent.
At the FAO, they estimate that the world's population in the year 2000 will be well over 6,000 million, and that farm output will therefore have to be more than half as high again as it is now. Demand for food and other farm products will double in the Third World - requiring an input, in money terms, of about $10,000 million every year. Today, if they are lucky, they are getting less than half that amount.
3.
Meanwhile, the numbers of landless poor and urban unemployed are growing daily - another way of saying that poverty is increasing. Third World governments, seduced (for instance) by multinational companies wanting to promote grand agribusiness schemes and large-scale farming, or by varied pressures to spend more than they would like on defence, cannot give priority to the landless and the hungry. Agriculture and food production ministries are rarely the most important ministries in any government.
The third World's terms of trade are also deteriorating alarmingly, with overt trends towards protectionism inducing a reaction which is political as much as it is commercial. A ton of tea bought 17 tons of fertiliser ten years ago; today it buys less than half as much. Sugar, coffee, bananas, and a host of other ostensibly life-giving commodities, have gone the same way.
In economic terms, the hungry countries have been deeply affected by the world recession. A reduction in the annual growth rate of the industrial countries of 0.8 per cent will, according to the World Bank, reduce the growth rate of the poorer countries by at least 1.2 per cent. But if population size and growth in relation to the size of the national economy are also taken into account, then the multiplier, which in World Bank terms is only 1.5 to one, leaps staggeringly to nine to one. That is the measure, in statistical terms, of how the poor's development is governed by the rich.
4.
At such a scenario of personalities, politics and stark economies, the novelist C.P. Snow would doubtless give a wry smile. Not long before he died, he forecast that the world would be hit by a terrible famine in the Eighties. The rich, he suggested, would sit in their armchairs and watch the hungry and the poor die - on television. Then they would switch off and do nothing. The forecast has a ring of hauntingly plausibility.
The Guardian, 11 January, 1983.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Source: Fien, J. (1985) Alternative Approaches to Development, Longman, Harlow, pp. 24-25; adapted from F. M. Lappe and J. Collins (1979) World Hunger: Ten Myths, Institute for Food and Development Policy; and F. M. Lappe and J. Collins 'Food First' New Internationalist, August 1976.
Can scarcity seriously be considered the cause of hunger when even in the worst years of famine in the early 1970s there was plenty to go around-enough in grain alone to provide everyone in the world with 3000 to 4000 calories a day, not counting all the beans, root crops, fruits, nuts, vegetables and non grain-fed meat?
And what of land scarcity?
We looked at the most crowded countries in the world to see if we could find a correlation between population density and hunger. We could not. Bangladesh, for example has just half the people per cultivated acre that Taiwan has. Yet Taiwan has no starvation while Bangladesh is thought of as the world's worst basket case. China has twice as many people for each cultivated acre as India. Yet in China people are not hungry.
Finally when the patterns of what is growing sank in, we simply could no longer subscribe to a scarcity diagnosis of hunger. In Central America and in the Caribbean, where as much as 70 per cent of the children are undernourished, at least half of the agricultural land and the best land at that, grows crops for export not food for the local people.
If 'too many people' cause hunger, we would expect to find more hungry people in countries with more people per agricultural acre. Yet we could find no such correlation. China, for example, has merely half the cultivated acreage for each person that India has. Yet in only 25 years China has succeeded in eliminating visible malnutrition.
Countries with comparatively large amounts of agricultural land per person have some of the most severe and chronic hunger in the world. While severe hunger is a daily reality for most Bolivians, they live in a country with well over one-half acre of cultivated land per person, significantly more than in France. Brazil has more cultivated acreage per person then the United States. Mexico, where most of the rural population suffers from undernourishment, has more cultivated land per person than Cuba, where now virtually no-one is underfed.
Rapid population growth often reflects people's need to have many children in an attempt to provide labourers to increase meagre family income, to provide old age security and to compensate for the high infant death rate, the result of inadequate nutrition and health care. Moreover, high birth rates reflect the social powerlessness of women which is intensified by poverty.
Neither the size of the country's population nor its growth is today the cause of hunger. Both hunger and rapid population growth are symptoms of the same disease - the insecurity and poverty of the majority result from the monopolising of national productive resources by a few.
Diagnosing the cause of hunger as scarcity inevitably leads to the conclusion that greater production in itself will solve the problem. Techniques to boost production have thus been the central thrust of the 'war on hunger' for at least 30 years. Governments, international agencies, and multinational corporations have promoted 'modernisation' - large-scale irrigation, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, machinery and the seeds dependent on such inputs - all to make the land produce more. Such farming practices have been labelled the 'green revolution'.
But when a new agricultural technology enters a system shot through with power inequalities its profits only those who already possess some combination of land, money, 'credit-worshippers' and political influence. This selectivity alone has excluded most of the world's rural population and all the world's hungry.
Moreover, once agriculture is turned into an investment in which control over basic physical resources promises financial success, a catastrophic chain of events is set into motion. A new class of 'farmers' - moneylenders, military officers, bureaucrats, city-based speculators, and foreign corporations - buy up agricultural land. Competition for land sends land values soaring. For instance, land values have jumped three to five times in the 'green revolution' areas of
India. Higher rents force tenants and share croppers into the ranks of the landless, who now make up the majority of the rural population in many countries. With their increased profits, the powerful by out small land-holders gone bankrupt. Fewer and fewer people gain control over more and more food producing resources.
We are made to believe that, if we want to eat, we had better rely on the large landowners. Thus governments, international lending agencies and foreign assistance programmes have passed over the small producers, believing that concentrating on the large holders was the quickest road to production gains. A study of 83 countries, revealing that just over 3 per cent of the land-holders control about 80 per cent of the farmland, gave us some idea of how many of the world's farmers would be excluded by such a concentration.
Yet a study of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala found the small farmer to be three to fourteen times more productive per acre than the larger farmer. In Thailand plots of one to two hectares yield almost 60 per cent more rice per acre than farms of 55 hectares or more. Other proof that justice for the small farmer increases production come from the experience of countries in which the redistribution of land and other basic agricultural resources like water has resulted in rapid growth in agricultural production: Japan, Taiwan, and China stand out.
We need not romanticise small producers. They get more out of the land precisely because they are desperate to survive on the meagre resources allowed to them. Nevertheless, many believe that our food security is enhanced by entrusting production to large agricultural entrepreneurs. Fewer and fewer rural people are left able to grow or to buy adequate food. Given the widening circle of impoverishment, the national market for food stagnates or even shrinks. But as the domestic market stagnates, toward whom do the agricultural entrepreneurs orient their production? Toward high-paying markets - a few strata of urban dwellers and foreign consumers.
Haiti offers a shocking picture of environmental destruction. The majority of the peasants ravage the once-green mountain slopes in a desperate effort to grow food. Has food production for Haitians used up every safely cultivated acre so that only the mountain slopes are left? No. These peasants seeking to farm the fragile slopes can only be seen as exiles from their birthright - some of the world's richest agricultural land. The rich valley lands are in the control of a handful of elites (and their American partners) whose concern is not food but dollars to pay for an imported lifestyle. These fertile lands are thus made to produce largely low-nutrition and feed crops (sugar, coffee, cocoa, alfalfa for cattle) exclusively for export.
Still we found ourselves wondering whether people's legitimate need tor food might not require injecting ever more pesticides into our environment. With the urgent need to grow more food, won't we have to accept some level of harm from deadly chemicals?
Nearly half the pesticides in the United States are used not on farmland, but on golf courses, parks and lawns. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 30 years ago American farmers used 50 million pounds of pesticides and lost seven per cent of their crop before harvest. Today, farmers use 12 times more pesticides yet the percentage of the crop lost before harvest has almost doubled. In underdeveloped countries most pesticides are used for export crops, principally cotton and to a lesser extent for fruits and vegetables grown under plantation conditions for export. The quantities of pesticides injected into the world's environment therefore have little to do with the hungry's food need.
Since school geography classes where we were taught to identify a country with a single crop, most of us have come to see an underdeveloped country's concentration on one or two export crops as practically God-ordained. In reality, there is nothing 'natural' about the concentration on a few, largely low-nutrition crops. These crops were chosen by the colonial powers solely on the basis of what would bring the greatest profit in the high-paying markets back home. The same land now made to grow cocoa, coffee, rubber, tea, or sugar, could grow an incredible diversity of nutritious crops - grains, high-protein legumes, vegetables, fruits and root crops.
The success of export agriculture can further undermine the position of most of the rural population. For example, an increase in the world price of a crop can actually mean less income for the plantation worker or peasant producer. For instance, when in 1974 the world price of sugar increased several fold, the real wage of a cane cutter in the Dominican Republic actually fell to less than it was 10 years earlier, a nominal increase in a cane cutter's wage did not compensate for the inflation set off by the sugar boom.
Export-orientated agricultural operations invariably import capital-intensive technologies, such as chemical fertilisers and pesticides, to maximise, yields as well as to meet the foreign markets 'beauty standards' and processing specifications. Basing an agricultural system on imported technologies helps ensure that whatever is produced will be exported to pay the import bill - a vicious circle of dependency.
Terms like 'hungry world' and 'poor world' make us think of uniformly hungry masses. They hide the reality of vertically stratified societies in which hunger afflicts the lower rungs in both so-called developed and underdeveloped countries. Terms like these make hunger into a place - and usually a place over there.
Worse still, the all-inclusiveness of these labels leads us to believe that ev]4one living in a 'hungry country' has a common interest in eliminating hunger. Thus, we look at an underdeveloped country and assume its government officials represent the hungry majority. We then are tempted to believe that concessions to these governments, e.g. lower tariffs on their exports or increased foreign investment, automatically represent progress for the hungry. In fact, the 'progress' may be only for the elites and their partners, multinational corporations.
The hungry in underdeveloped countries and ordinary Europeans and Americans are linked through a common threat: the tightening of control over the most basic human need - food. The very process of increasing concentration of control over land and other productive resources that we have identified as the direct cause of hunger in underdeveloped countries is also going on in our own.
Corporations are busily creating a Global Farm to serve a Global Supermarket, by finding production sites in underdeveloped countries, where land and labour can cost as little as 10 per cent of those in the First World.
Under the banner of food 'interdependence', multinational agribusiness corporations right now are creating a single world agricultural system in which they would exercise integrated control over all stages of production from farm to consumer.
The Global Farm and Supermarket create the type of interdependence on-one needs. 'Interdependence' in a world of extreme power inequalities becomes a smoke-screen for the usurpation of food resources by a few for a few.
Such a view ignores a fundamental reality in every country today. Because of the selective way news is transmitted to us, we are often unaware of the courageous struggle of millions of people everywhere to gain control over food-producing resources rightfully theirs.
So many who question what peasants can do for themselves seem unaware that in countries comprising over 40 per cent of the population of the underdeveloped world, people have, in our lifetimes, freed themselves from hunger through their own efforts. Even during the worst years of the war, the North Vietnamese were improving their agriculture. Yields were going up, and irrigation was extended from 20 per cent of the cultivated area in the mid-fifties to nearly 60 per cent in the mid-sixties. The Chinese people, formerly at the mercy of droughts and floods, have built reservoirs and multiplied their irrigated land through a system based on local self-reliance and local initiative. The Chinese now cultivate one third of all irrigated land in the world. They have doubled their yields of major grains in two decades, despite recurring droughts.
Over and over again we hear that North America is the world's last remaining breadbasket. Food security is invariably measured in terms of reserves held by the metropolitan countries. We are made to feel the burden of feeding the world is squarely on us. Our over-consumption is tirelessly contrasted with the deprivation elsewhere with the implicit message being that we cause their hunger. No wonder that North Americans and Europeans feel burdened and thus resentful. 'What did we do to cause their hunger' they ask with justification.
The problem lies in seeing redistribution as the solution to hunger. We have come to a different understanding.
Distribution of food is but a reflection of the control of the resources that produce food. Who controls the land determines who can grow food. What is grown and where it goes. Who can grow a few or all who need to? What is grown: luxury non-food or basic staples? Where does it go: to the hungry or the world's well-fed?
Thus redistribution programmes like food aid or food stamps will never solve the problem of hunger. Instead we must face up to the real question: how can people everywhere begin to democratise the control of food resources?
Many people concerned about hunger focus their energies on increasing our government's foreign aid budget. Such a focus may be both narrow and futile. Narrow because direct economic assistance through aid is only a small fraction of the local economic impact of our government on underdeveloped countries.
On another level, focusing on governmental aid as a solution to hunger may be futile. No official development assistance programme can address the social and economic causes of hunger because it would, of necessity, both threaten the very elites with whom overall policy must maintain relations and jeopardise the interests of corporations. Aware and well-meaning planners frequently tell us how few their options are, given the fact that policy makers choose not to rock the boat. The best they can do, given the political constraints as well as the limitations of time and money, is to assist a small portion of the smaller land-holders with the technical aspects of increasing production .
We fear that, by dealing with symptoms and by being limited by money and time to working with a small number of farmers in any one country, aid programmes help create an 'enclave' of prosperous commercial farmers who identify their prosperity with the current economic structure and with the multinational corporations who process and market their produces. Instead of igniting a far-reaching movement for fundamental social change in which the poor majority would take part, the new aid programmes willingly or not, threaten to co-opt the potential leaders of such a movement into becoming supporters of the status quo. And the status quo for the majority will still be hunger.
Thus foreign aid is appropriate only when given to those countries where serious steps are being taken to redistribute control over food-producing resources.
A. Every country in the world has the resources necessary for its people to free themselves from hunger.
B. People freeing themselves from hunger and safeguarding the world's agricultural environment are complementary goals.
C. Whoever controls the land controls who eats. If food grown in the First World is to be exported to the Third World, the First World will control who eats what, how much and how often in the Third World. It is land that must be redistributed, not food. Land reform is a necessary path to successful rural development.
D. To balance a country's population and resources, it is urgent to address the root cause of both hunger and high birth rates: the insecurity and poverty that result from the control over basic food resources by too few people.
E. Our role is not to go in and 'set things right', for wherever people are hungry there are already many ordinary, brave men and women working to democratise the control of food-producing resources.
F. Justice and production are complementary goals. The most wasteful and inefficient food system is one controlled by a few in the interests of a few.
G. The appropriate response of First and Second World people to hunger in the Third World is not more or even improved government foreign 'aid'. We must work instead to help remove the obstacles in the way of people's efforts for self-determination, especially those obstacles being built by the penetration of agribusiness corporations.
H. Hunger is only made worse when approached as a technical problem. Hunger can only be overcome by transforming social structures so that the majority directly participate in building a democratic economic system.
I. Export agriculture is not the enemy. But in a society where only a powerful minority control the productive resources, export-oriented agriculture strengthens their grip. To ensure food security, agriculture must become, first and foremost, a way for people to produce their food and livelihood and only secondarily a possible source of foreign exchange.
J. The hungry are our allies, not our enemies nor a perpetual burden. Our food security is not threatened by hungry people but by a system that concentrates economic power in the hands of a powerful minority which profits by the generation of scarcity and the internationalisation of food control.
TSW Home
Module 1 | Module 2 | Module 3 | Module 4 | Module 5
Module 6 | Module 7 | Module 8 | Module 9 | Module 10
Module 11 | Module 12 | Module 13 | Module 14 | Module 15
Module 16 | Module 17 | Module 18 | Module 19 | Module 20
Module 21 | Module 22 | Module 23 | Module 24 | Module 25 | Module 26
