A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food

Our “modern” farm economy was actively creating scarcity from abundance, in part by feeding a third of the world’s grain to livestock.

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now not only do we feed a third of grain and most of soy to livestock, but we’ve turned more than a third of the global fish catch into feed as well. Of course, I couldn’t have guessed we’d also be “feeding” crops to cars via ethanol.

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Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs.

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And what is killing democracy, while generating hunger? It is a belief system.

The belief is two-fold: first, that an effective market works only by one rule, highest return to shareholder—that is, highest return to existing wealth; and second, that government is anathema to a market’s effectiveness. From this stance, control over resources inexorably tightens to the point that it warps public decision-making to benefit narrow, private ends. We end up with a frightening oxymoron: “privately held government.”

And from it flows what I call “faith-based economics” because it is detached from real-world evidence. History demonstrates that only a government accountable to citizens can keep a market competitive and open so that all citizens are able to access it.

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Unaccountable international agencies, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, made loans on the condition that recipient countries reduce public support for local producers and food buyers. So African governments cut help to small farmers, and India said only the poorest of the poor could access its public “fair-price” shops that sell below-market-price grain.

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And it gets worse. Trade agreements—most notably the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement—ended tariffs that protected local farmers. In Mexico, for example, more than a million farmers went under in the decade following the agreement.

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We can turn today’s tragedy into a breakthrough for common sense and real democracy as we:

•Get money out of—and citizens’ voices into—governance.

•Shift public support to family farmers using sustainable agroecology. A 2007 University of Michigan study concluded that moving globally to sustainable, organic farming methods could increase food output by about 57 percent. A four-year study to evaluate the impact of such practices—involving almost thirteen million farmers and more than ninety million acres in fifty-seven countries—showed on average a 79 percent production increase.

•Grow the number of family farmers. One of the world’s largest democratic social movements, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, has succeeded in transferring almost twenty million acres to almost a third of a million rural landless families, creating thousands of new farmers and enterprises and greatly reducing hunger.

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