This is an article from the Global Hunger Alliance exposing agricultural colonialism and why its practices create--not solve--world hunger:
The Hunger for a Solution
By: pattrice le-muire jones
Oct. 11, 2001
Starving children and suffering animals. We've all seen the images again and again: lonely little boys with distended stomachs...sad caged hens with mutilated beaks...all of them wishing to be anywhere else.
Because we usually see the images in isolation, we rarely realize how closely the fates of these children and animals are intertwined. The lives of starving people and enslaved animals are held hostage by the same powerful corporations in affluent nations. The boy is hungry in part because the hen is caged. Now, in a perverse reversal of reality, livestock corporations are promoting increased industrial animal agriculture as a solution to world hunger.
"Never doubt," we are fond of reminding each other, "that a small group of committed individuals can change the world." And indeed such a small group is hard at work right now. They are the owners and stockholders of multinational corporations who, with the aid of their supporters at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are literally reshaping the world as they spread their environmentally destructive practices across the globe.
Among those practices are the industrial animal agriculture operations commonly known as factory farming. Facing a flat market for their products at home, U.S. and European vendors of meat, eggs, and dairy products want to develop new markets in low-income nations where people have traditionally eaten a predominantly vegetarian diet. At the same time, these corporations are actively planning to relocate and expand their operations in those nations, where they hope to be far from the prying eyes of environmental, labor, and animal welfare activists.
The livestock industries can count on the IMF to use its influence over "debtor" nations to ensure that low-income nations accept the plans of the corporations and do not impose environmental or animal welfare regulations. The IMF wields power by means of Economic Structural Adjustment Programs (ESAPs), which low-income nations are obliged to undertake if they cannot afford to pay their alleged debts to the IMF. These debts arose when previously colonized nations had to borrow funds from their wealthy former oppressors to finance their newly independent but long impoverished countries. Other debts were incurred in the 1970s by dictatorial leaders of nations whose people did not democratically authorize the loans, which were later misappropriated or squandered. Despite worldwide calls for these debts to be erased, they remain on the books.
Nations that cannot afford the payments must agree to ESAPs in order to obtain debt relief. Typically, ESAPs require debtor nations to be more open to foreign investment; countries must allow corporations to come in and use their natural resources and the labor of their citizens to create corporate profits. Thus, nations that are struggling to feed their people may find themselves forced to devote agricultural resources to factory farming operations that produce commodities for export, with most of the profits going to foreign corporations.
For its part, the World Bank has funded projects specifically intended to increase consumption of foods derived from animals. For example, one project promotes the consumption of dairy products in China, despite the fact that a high proportion of Chinese people are lactose intolerant. The World Bank also exercises significant influence over the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
That's where tragedy becomes obscenity. The World Food Security Committee of the FAO is the international body officially responsible for crafting global policies to end world hunger. Swayed by World Bank influence, the FAO now supports the expansive plans of U.S. and multinational livestock industries, even going so far as to promote those plans as hunger relief efforts. For example, the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security asserts that "governments are responsible for creating an enabling environment" for private investment in agriculture; a footnote to the document explains that the term "agriculture" always includes livestock.
Of course, as Francis Moore Lappé demonstrated in the influential Diet for a Small Planet and John Robbins confirms in The Food Revolution, meat and other animal products are the least efficient ways to nourish people. Meat, dairy products, and eggs require far more land, water, and energy to produce per calorie or unit of protein than vegetable foods. The failure of hunger relief agencies to embrace a vegetarian agenda mystifies scholars and activists who promote plant-based solutions.
However, the fact remains that hunger is largely caused by inequitable distribution and inefficient use of existing resources. According to Union of Concerned Scientists chairman Henry Kendall and Cornell Agricultural Sciences professor David Pimentel, "With the world population at 5.5 billion, food production is adequate to feed 7 billion people a vegetarian diet, with ideal distribution and no grain fed to livestock."
Of course, since people in affluent nations are not going to stop consuming animal products overnight, food production must be sustainably increased in the regions where people are hungry. Self-directed cultivation of indigenous and locally adapted food crops represent the most cost-effective, environmentally sustainable, and culturally appropriate means of increasing the food supply in low-income, food-deficient nations.
Increases in the consumption of animal products also will result in higher rates of diseases associated with heavy consumption of animal-based foods. This has already happened in China, where the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project has found strong correlations between increased consumption of livestock products and greater incidence of such degenerative ailments as coronary heart disease and certain forms of cancer.
Imperial Impoverishment
Agricultural colonialism is another cause of world hunger. During the era of European imperialism—which began with the conquest of the Americas and did not end until after World War II—colonized nations were forced to grow cash crops for export on lands previously devoted to sustainable production of plants for local consumption. In this era, the former colonizers use their economic power to promote the continuation of cash-crop agriculture and to promote specific agricultural practices, such as the heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides vended by multinational corporations. The result has been further impoverishment, hunger, and degradation of natural resources.
The livestock industries are the latest agricultural colonizers. Their plans will starve the very people they claim their projects will help to feed.
Factory farms pollute the water and degrade the soil, destroying the environment upon which local animals and people depend. As the chief source of worldwide water pollution, factory farms and meat processing plants are largely to blame for the impending global water crisis. The World Resources Institute predicts that by 2025, at least 3.5 billion people will experience water shortages. The expansion of factory farming into nations already experiencing water stress will lead to local and global environmental disaster.
The harm these socially and environmentally destructive plans will do to farmed animals cannot be overestimated. By moving existing operations into low-income nations, agribusiness corporations hope to remove themselves from government oversight and the scrutiny of animal welfare activists. By expanding their operations, factory farming operations will torture and kill billions more animals than they already do. Both the number of animals abused and the extent of the abuse will significantly increase.
For these reasons, many organizations devoted to farmed animal liberation have placed globalization at the top of their agenda. "Factory farming is spreading its tentacles globally," says Compassion in World Farming Director Joyce D'Silva. "Animal activists must campaign to reverse this destructive trend." Karen Davis, founder of United Poultry Concerns, notes that "meat production in 'developing nations' has increased by 127 percent in the past 20 years and, unless we intervene, will increase at a much higher rate over the next decade. The poultry industry in particular has actively promoted both consumption and production in China and other populous nations. We must be just as active in our opposition."
A growing number of environmental, animal liberation, and anti-globalization groups have come together to endorse the Statement of Principles of the Global Hunger Alliance (GHA) (available at www.globalhunger. net/sop.html). Initially a collaboration between the Farm Animal Reform Movement and the Italian organizations Progetto Vivere Vegan and Societé Vegetariana, the GHA has grown to include such diverse members as the Gay/Straight Animal Rights Alliance of Salt Lake City, Utah; EarthFirst Nigeria; and the Women's Emancipation & Development Trust in Tamil Nadu, India.
Most immediately, the Alliance aims to influence the outcome of the FAO World Food Summit in Italy this November, where global food policy for the next decade will be set. The GHA is lobbying Summit participants and other food policy-makers concerning the hazards of factory farming and the promise of plant-based solutions to world hunger. Recognizing that grassroots protest can bolster such efforts and raise public awareness, the Alliance is also planning demonstrations in Rome and Washington, D.C., at the time of the Summit.
In the long run, the Global Hunger Alliance will develop and maintain international coalitions among animal liberation organizations, with a particular emphasis on sharing resources with organizations in low-income nations. This will help activists in nations targeted by the livestock corporations to organize local opposition.
The Global Hunger Alliance will also develop and maintain coalition relationships among animal liberation, environmental, and anti-globalization activists and organizations. This will facilitate joint actions and also will expose activists in other movements to the concerns of the animal liberation movement. In addition to bringing new people to animal liberation, this will ensure that the concerns of animals will not be left out of the growing worldwide movement against globalization.
At the November demonstrations, activists will be shouting "Basta... Enough!" There is already enough food to feed everyone, if only we would distribute it more fairly and wisely. There has been enough of agricultural colonization, animal exploitation, and corporate domination. The world has seen a bellyful of pictures of starving children and suffering animals. We can and we must feed the children and free the animals at the same time.
pattrice le-muire jones is the Coordinator of the Global Hunger Alliance. She lives in rural Maryland, where she and her partner run the Eastern Shore Chicken Sanctuary.
Visit www.globalhunger.net to learn more and to download materials, or call (410) 651-4934 to receive information by mail.
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