18 "we grow more food than we need."

More Food Doesn’t Guarantee Less Hunger

Increasing the world's food supply won't end hunger unless we address inequality and injustice.

 

By Jill Richardson

October 9, 2013

Every October, world leaders and corporate executives gather in Iowa to present the World Food Prize. Intended to celebrate those who make the largest contributions to increasing the world’s food supply, the recipients are announced each year by the U.S. Secretary of State.

On the same day that award is bestowed each year, so is another one. It’s less well-known but, in my view, far more important.

This alternative accolade is called the Food Sovereignty Prize. Like the World Food Prize, it deals with food and hunger, but in a very different way.

The corporations that fund the World Food Prize may not entirely drive its agenda, but they certainly influence it. By focusing on the sheer volume of food in the world, they aim to reduce global hunger to a simple matter of science. Then they sell us on the idea that we need their products to increase the amount of food farmers harvest from each acre.

But producing more food doesn’t always mean feeding more hungry mouths. The Food Sovereignty Prize recognizes that ending hunger is not a simple matter of growing more food. It involves social science as well as physical science.

When a farmer produces an extra ten bushels of crops from each acre of land, perhaps more people will eat — or maybe not. Americans don’t have to travel around the world to see this, we must only ask our grandparents. During the Great Depression, farmers grew a great surplus of food, and food prices crashed. Both farmers and consumers suffered, as farmers went into bankruptcy while the urban poor starved.

Today, we grow more food than we need — and then throw 40 percent of it away. Meanwhile, many Americans can afford to eat enough calories but only by buying cheap junk food that will ultimately make them sick. And that’s just in America, a wealthy nation. What about poor countries?

Smallholder farmers from around the world came together in 2007 and dreamed of “a world where all peoples, nations and states are able to determine their own food producing systems and policies that provide every one of us with good quality, adequate, affordable, healthy, and culturally appropriate food.” They called this idea “food sovereignty.”

In the U.S., food sovereignty means that a North Carolina family won’t wake up one day to find out their property value has tanked because a factory hog farm set up shop next door and the air smells like manure day in and day out. Or a small farmer in Maine who raises a few chickens for meat won’t be told that she can’t slaughter and sell them unless she first spends $30,000 on a government-approved facility for this purpose.

In the rest of the world, it means that peasant farmers who have farmed their family’s land for generations but lack formal land titles won’t have their land sold out from under them to a foreign corporation by their own government. And it means that indigenous farmers in the Andes will not suddenly find that they can’t grow their traditional potato varieties because the climate changed.
This year’s Food Sovereignty Prize goes to several Haitian groups who have together helped their nation’s peasant farmers conserve traditional seeds, improve farming practices, recover from the country’s massive 2010 earthquake, and alleviate poverty.

Why are world leaders rubbing elbows with corporate executives at the World Food Prize ceremony instead of the Haitian peasants who won the Food Sovereignty Prize? Perhaps because advocates of food sovereignty understand that achieving their goal will upset the social order in which the 1 percent holds all the cards and the rest of us hope to be trickled down upon.

And yet, if we aim to make any real progress toward ending poverty and hunger, we must start by challenging the inequality in our world today.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org

17 "we are measuring hunger incorrectly."

An interest new approach to measuring hunger via NY Times:

GRAY MATTER

A Taste Test for Hunger

By ROBERT JENSEN and NOLAN MILLER

Published: July 9, 2011

CONSIDER this paradox: according to conventional wisdom, hunger is supposed to decline as a country’s wealth increases. Yet in China and India, hunger appears to be growing even as incomes increase at phenomenal rates.

There are a few possible explanations: unequal distribution of wealth, inefficient or indifferent governments and aid agencies, and recent increases in world food prices. While these factors may play a role, at least part of the answer may be much simpler: we are measuring hunger incorrectly.

Suppose you want to figure out if someone has enough to eat. The standard approach is to compare the number of calories eaten to the number needed, with “need” defined by a statistical average across a population. In effect, policy makers tell people whether they are hungry based on whether the amount of calories they take in conforms to some externally imposed standard.

Of course, very few people actually conform to a statistical average. So what if, instead, you looked not just at how many calories people consumed, but at the food they chose to eat?

The best way to do this, we’ve found, is to start with a baseline, namely the share of calories people get from the cheapest foods available to them: typically staples like rice, wheat or cassava. We call this the “staple calorie share.” We measure how many calories people get from these low-cost foods and how much they get from more expensive foods like meat. The greater the share of calories they receive from the former, the hungrier they are.

The rationale behind this approach is straightforward. We are all familiar with the unpleasant sensations associated with hunger. These are the body’s way of telling us that we need more calories. Once those needs are largely met, people will switch to more flavorful, but more expensive, foods.

Imagine you are a poor consumer in a developing country. You have very little money in your pocket, not enough to afford all the calories you need. And suppose you have only two foods to choose from, rice and meat. Rice is cheap and has a lot of calories, but you prefer the taste of meat. If you spent all your money on meat, you would get too few calories. You might do this every so often, but usually you would spend almost all of your money on rice; when faced with true hunger, taste is a luxury you can’t afford.

But suppose you had a bit more money. You would probably add some meat to your diet, because now you can afford to do so while still getting the calories you need. You might even like meat so much that you start to switch away from rice even if you haven’t quite met your complete calorie needs, as long as you aren’t too far below.

Now think about the two approaches to measuring hunger. Researchers taking the standard approach would add up all the calories in the rice and meat you ate and declare you hungry if that total was less than your caloric need, regardless of the choices you made.

In the staple-calorie-share approach, however, they would look at the first case and say that since you were choosing to get almost all of your calories from rice, you must not be getting enough to eat; otherwise you would have switched to meat. But looking at the second case, they would say that since you are now eating some meat, you must be getting enough or nearly enough calories; otherwise, discomfort would cause you to seek more calories via rice. Thus, the decline in the share of calories from rice reveals that the person has had enough to eat.

In principle, both approaches can tell you who is hungry and who is not. So, why look at staple calorie share?

With the standard approach, you need to know how many calories the person has taken in and how many the person needs. But that need varies widely based on age, sex, activity level and dozens of other factors. Though some of the factors affecting calorie needs are measurable, many are not.

Moreover, it’s hard to know how many calories a person is actually getting, since health factors, including the widespread incidence of diarrhea, often mean that only a fraction of calories eaten are absorbed by the body.

The staple-calorie-share approach eliminates both problems. Your choice of foods reveals whether you have enough calories. Staple-calorie-share “need” is less variable across people; though one person may need more calories than another, they will both begin to switch away from staple foods when their needs are met. And your body isn’t fooled by how many calories you put into your mouth; the physical sensation of hunger is regulated by the amount of calories you actually absorb.

The staple-calorie-share method can give us a radically different view of who is hungry and who is not. The standard approach reveals that in China, the fraction of people consuming fewer than 2,100 calories increased to 67 percent from 53 percent between 1991 and 2001. However, the fraction who appeared hungry, as measured by staple-calorie share (using a threshold of 80 percent of calories consumed through staples), declined to 32 percent from 49 percent.

Thus, instead of 150 million more hungry people in China, there were actually almost 200 million fewer. Rising incomes have indeed made people better off; however, they have used their increased purchasing power to buy better-tasting foods, and nonfood items, rather than to increase calories.

None of this is to say that hunger is not a critical issue: no matter how you measure it, hundreds of millions of people around the world aren’t getting enough to eat. But aid money is a scarce resource, and policy makers have to decide whether it is best spent on food aid or other forms of vital assistance, like health care. Adopting a more nuanced and accurate measurement of hunger would be a big help in making those lifesaving decisions.

Robert Jensen is an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nolan Miller is a professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign.

16 "over 50% of the global requirement for proteins and calories are met by just three food crops: maize, wheat and rice."

After six months with no movement on my end, I am back and blogging about hunger issues and my personal journey in trying to figure them out.

Update about my life: Currently, I am working (well, interning = no money) with CATIE - El Centro Agronomico Tropical de Investigacion y Ensenanza (Tropical Agriculture Center of Research and Higher Education) - in Turrialba, Costa Rica. This extremely unique institution was originally started by then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in 1940 in order to bolster the relations between American countries - remember, Costa Ricans are "Americans" too! Now, there are CATIE offices in many Latin American countries, as well as Spain, all of which have dedicated scientists, economists, etc working towards increasing human well-being and reducing rural poverty through education, research and technical cooperation as well as promoting sustainable agriculture and natural resource management - perfect for my Masters program.

Specifically, I am working on a proposal for funding a project on the reintroduction of neglected and underutilized species (NUS). As the title of this post says, the human diet consists of so few food crops compared to what exists. And the saddest thing is that these foods aren't even the healthiest for us! We are eating nutritionally-retarded crops and not reaping the benefits of indigenous or forgotten species that people have been living off of for years. The quinoa popularityexplosion in US health food stores has put that ancient grain back into the line of vision of many people, but it represents so many more foods that we have just neglected to cultivate on the large scale. Arracacha, jackfruit, camu camu, amaranth, soursop, lucuma, mangosteen, purslane, sapote, jicama, ulluco, the list goes on and on and on. And most likely you've only heard of maybe one or two of these crops, but most likely you don't recognize any. These crops are packed with some of the nutrients, micro and macro, that are needed to overcome many of the nutrient deficiencies in this world - iron, iodine, vitamin A, zinc, calcium, and selenium. And most are fruits, roots, tubers, or vegetables which means that their reintroduction into mainstream diet would not only mean an end to micronutrient malnutrition, but also the decline in overweight and obesity trends that have become rampant in the last couple decades all over the world.

Looking at the nutritional importance and diversity of these crops it's hard to believe that they are not being cultivated at higher levels. It's important, however, that if these foods were to be introduced into the world's diet, that they reach the people that need them the most. Let's look at quinoa again. Quinoa is cultivated primarily in Bolivia, but instead of benefiting from it's high iron and zinc levels, local Bolivians simply export their entire harvest off to the US and Europe for high payments based on foreign demand. They don't eat it, they don't cook with it, they don't see if for more than a couple weeks once it is harvested. So if these crops are to be reintroduced, it is necessary that the local communities that grow these important crops are able to use and eat them thereby improving local nutrition and health.

This work so far (only been here for 2 weeks!) has been eye-opening. I am learning about foods that I didn't even know existed. I am learning about the saddening diet trends in Latin Americans. And most importantly, my passion for improving worldwide food security has been strengthened and revived. So educated yourselves, folks! Stay away from highly processed and refined foods, and start getting your nutrients from good, wholesome foods instead of enriched crap and nutritional supplements. Know where your food comes from, and have faith that everything will work out in the end.

Mixed roots and tubers served at an integrated, organic farm in Costa Rica (yum!)

15 "clinton hunger award video submission."

The following is my 2011 Clinton Hunger Award video submission. Please watch!!