Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Kirschenmann: The challenge of ending hunger

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By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

The current issue of the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture (July-August 2012) contains an editorial crafted by five of our leading thinkers in sustainable agriculture. The title of their editorial is sagacious: “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People . . . and Still Can’t End Hunger.” As the authors unequivocally stated, “Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity.”

This suggests the need for a conversation that farmers in the industrial world are seldom encouraged to have. The warning that farmers constantly hear is “How are we going to feed 9 billion people by 2050” with the implication that they have a moral obligation to simply bear down and continue to do whatever is necessary to increase their yields of a few commodity crops in order to “feed the world.” This continues despite the fact that Mark Muller and Richard Levins pointed out in 1999 that “less than three-tenths of 1 percent of our total corn exports” went to countries “with at least 35 percent of their populations undernourished.” (Muller, 1999). The reason is obvious: “people making less than $2 a day -- most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating un-viably small plots of land -- cannot afford to buy this food.” (Holt-Gimenez, 2012)

So how do we go about addressing the problem of hunger? The United Nations has issued four reports in the past five years on common themes that point to new, practical directions for solving the problem of hunger. While each report contains nuances that focus on different aspects of the same problem, all point in the same general direction. New technologies and increased yields in the industrial world may play a minor role in meeting this challenge. The central issues that remain to be addressed are empowerment of local farmers using agro-ecological methods, making food accessible to all (especially the poor), investment in agricultural knowledge adapted to local ecologies, multi-stakeholder participation and the empowerment of women!

Some of the reports are relatively brief -- The Right to Food --  while others are more lengthy -- Save and Grow, Agriculture at a Crossroads, and Toward the Future We Want. Probably very few of us have the time or inclination to read all four reports. Fortunately, the staff at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future has produced excellent summaries for each of these reports, easily read and comprehended within a few hours. The summaries can help us better understand what we must do as a global family to solve the problem of hunger. The Center for a Livable Future has given the Leopold Center permission to put their reports on our website, so our readers can download and view at their leisure.

Another example that illustrates how the problem of hunger can be successfully addressed appears in an article by Francis Moore Lappe published in Yes!  magazine. Using approaches similar to those suggested in the UN reports, the mayor of Belo Horizonte, Brazil initiated a food-as-a-right policy in 1993. Within a decade infant malnutrition was reduced by 50 percent and infant death rates were similarly cut in half. (Lappe, 2012)

Additionally, a paper by Molly D. Anderson on how to implement food rights in the United States, based on international human rights law, provides practical scenarios for addressing the problem of hunger. (Anderson, 2012)

As important as solving the problem of hunger is, those of us interested in sustainability recognize that hunger cannot be treated as an isolated, singular issue. Wendell Berry reminded us several decades ago that one of the great faults in our culture is a tendency to design solutions which “involve a definition of a problem that is either false or so narrow as to be virtually false. To define an agricultural problem as if it were solely a problem of agriculture  or solely a problem of production or technology or economics -- is simply to misunderstand the problem, either inadvertently or deliberately, either for profit or because of a prevalent fashion of thought. The whole problem must be solved, not just some handily identifiable and simplifiable aspect of it.” (Berry, 1981)

When we “solve for pattern,” as Wendell proposes, we begin to recognize that we cannot solve the problem of hunger simply by producing more food; we must also entertain the problems of poverty, inequality and the carrying-capacity of the planet, as well as the problem of the “density” of any species. Aldo Leopold told us that the “health of the land” depended on the health of the entire biotic community and for that reason nature always abhors the density of any species. Consequently, “in all species one is impressed by one common character: if one means of reduction fails, another takes over.” (Leopold, 1946)

References:

Holt-Gimenez, Eric, A. Shattuck, M. Altieri, H. Herren, and S. Gliessman, 2012. “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People...and Still Can’t End Hunger, Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, No 6, July/August.

Muller, Mark and R. Levins, 1999. “Feeding the World?  The Upper Mississippi River Navigation Project,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, December.

Berry, Wendell, 1981. “Solving for Pattern,” Chapter 9 in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, North Point Press.

Leopold, Aldo, 1946. “The Land-Health Concept and Conservation,” in J. Baird Callicott and Eric Freyfogle, (eds) 1999. For the Health of the Land, Washington, DC, Island Press.

Lappe, Francis Moore, 2012. “The City That Ended Hunger,” Yes Magazine, November 22

Anderson, M.D., 2012.  “Beyond Food Security to Realizing Food Rights in the US,” Journal of Rural Studies. (in press: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrustud.2012.09.004)

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