Leopold Center - Hope's Edge book review

Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet
Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé
J.P. Tarcher, 2002
448 pp., $26.95

The 2003 John Pesek Colloquium on Sustainable Agriculture in March featured author and social activist Frances Moore Lappé, who presented “Food, Farming, Fear: The Power of Ideas to Create the World We Want.”

Lappé's first book, Diet for a Small Planet, was released in 1971 and was instrumental in helping people rethink issues on food and hunger. In 1975, she founded the Institute for Food and Development Policy, now known as Food First. Her most recent work, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, is a narrative of small-scale democratic movements working to solve hunger problems.

In keeping with the purpose of the colloquium – to stimulate discussion about food and agricultural issues -- we’ve asked Lappé to share her ideas with you. The colloquium is an activity of the Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture; the Leopold Center is a co-sponsor of the annual event.

You have devoted your life to understanding and eliminating the causes of hunger. The biggest obstacle you have found is not food scarcity– our planet has enough natural resources to produce enough for everyone – but in our belief systems. You talk about primitive marketism and the role that it plays. What is primitive marketism and how has it affected agriculture?

Primitive marketism is a market driven solely by the logic of highest return to existing wealth. It is an arbitrary premise that concentrates wealth and excludes millions of poor from the market altogether. It is based on the simplistic notion that if the market is left to its own devices, it will create beneficial outcomes for us all.

Moreover, primitive marketism undermines the power of elected governments to solve problems by doing away with limits on corporate concentration and reducing more and more of life’s essentials to commodities for sale, from farmers’ seeds to drinking water. This mindset, what President Reagan called the “magic of the market,” has led to massive concentration, benefiting fewer and fewer corporations.

Today only a few companies control the meat packing industry, and 10 multinational corporations account for one-half of the food items in a typical American supermarket. But this incredible concentration is invisible to the average consumer.

What can we do about it? Isn’t concentration inevitable in our economic system?

Absolutely not. The market is just a tool: it’s what we make it. There are many ways to organize the market with values and boundaries, which have always been there, but gradually these limits have been allowed to erode.

The choice of what should be left to the market and what is essential to life is for us to decide. We’ve already determined in this country that education is not a commodity, and we have laws to make education available to every citizen. Other Western countries have decided that health care is essential to life.

Where are the citizens making the market work to help eliminate hunger?

In researching Hope’s Edge, my daughter and I traveled five continents to see where people were following alternate paths than the one to global corporatism. We visited Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, which in 1993 declared food a basic right of citizenship. Rather than food handouts, the city worked within the market to trigger innovations that have begun to end hunger in this city.

Patches of city-owned land were made available at low rent to local organic farmers as long as they would keep produce prices within the reach of poor, inner-city dwellers. The city redirected the 13 cents provided by the federal government for each school child’s lunch to buy local organic food rather than corporate, processed foods. Manioc leaves and eggshells, always tossed out as waste, were processed into a nutritious additive for bread for school children. All of these efforts consume, we were told, only one percent of the municipal budget.

Farmers in the United States are living under tremendous pressure to be more productive, cut costs, remain competitive, yet lessen the impacts of practices on neighbors, land and water. How can they go against powerful market forces?

I believe that a new mental map is emerging, one that puts market back into community. For example, the number of farmers markets has grown 80 percent since 1994 to more than 3,100 nationwide. Community-supported agriculture (CSA), in which farmers and consumers share the risks and the harvest, has increased to more than 3,000 groups that serve 30,000 families.

Iowa also is at the forefront with the Leopold Center, the Iowa Food Policy Council and an endowed chair devoted to sustainable agriculture. For one thing, the Leopold Center has raised public awareness by featuring Iowa-raised food at its events and conferences. It also led the Center to explore the impact of food purchasing decisions by Iowa schools, state government and businesses, and recommend state policy supporting local purchases.

Policies encouraging local buying, farmers markets and CSAs all reflect a letting go of primitive marketism. They acknowledge the community’s need to set values and parameters within which the market works. In this way, the market returns to its function as a means to healthier communities, not an end in itself.

What hope do you offer the people of Iowa?

Within a year and a half after we returned from our trip, two movements that were facing overwhelming odds helped bring about enormous political change. In Brazil, the landless workers’ movement helped elect a new president whose major goal is to eliminate hunger. In Kenya, the leader of a grassroots effort to turn back the encroaching desert is now deputy minister of the environment.

We ourselves would never have predicted these changes. Hope, I am learning, does not come from just assessing what is possible and striving for that. It is in the awareness of possibility itself – the limits of which are always unknowable – that we are free to focus on creating the world we want. Hope is not something we seek out and find in evidence, but what we become as we take action.