Reciprocal Politics

The World Summit on Food Security begins today, November 16, 2009.

A) As noted in an Associated Press article, UN food summit to back new strategy against hunger - AP, November 12, 2009, and on the FAO’s website, more than a billion people on the planet are undernourished.

B) In an article in Canada’s Maclean magazine from the same week, What a waste - Macleans, Nov. 16, 2009, Nancy MacDonald states “The agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices, creating an abundance of food, and profits.”

I’m sensing a gap in … sense here.

Perhaps we could fill that gap with the wisdom of another article in the same Macleans issue, Do you mind if we pick your pears? a volunteer project in B.C. gets fruit that would have rotted to people who need it - Macleans, Nov. 16, 2009. In the closing quote, Dianne MacLean, the woman who initiated the project now known as the LUSH Valley Food Action Society, says “This is how easy it is. Anybody can do it. You can do it without money and without an organization. It’s important for people to know that.”

I wonder if Macleans would offer to distribute copies of the article to summit delegates?

I don’t suggest that feeding the world’s hungry is as simple as pulling up to a grocery store or a food distribution center, filling up a big truck with stuff that won’t sell, and shipping it to where people aren’t quite so picky. Not quite. Nor am I ignorant of the delicate realities and sensibilities that must, for the sake of human dignity, be taken into account.

I reject, however, the amazingly blind concept that “food security” is a matter of more money and then again more money. The FAO estimates that 44 billion dollars will be needed in yearly agricultural aid. Per What a waste, The UK alone wastes 16 billion yearly in discarded food - more than one third of the FAO’s figure.

If those are accurate numbers, we do not need to produce more food. We do not have a food “shortage.” We have, instead, a distribution problem, one that people like Dianne MacLean, on a small scale, have already solved.

That the distribution problem is exacerbated by the conflicting interests of groups large and small is a given. That all of those groups are, in the end, under the control of individuals who can choose to exercise, or not, choices of conscience as well as commerce, is also true.

It is not easy for politicians and bureaucrats to set aside their individual agendas. It is not easy for business to reconsider its understanding of what constitutes profit and how to make it. It is not easy for consumers to re-examine the aesthetics that motivate us in food choices.

None of that is easy.

But it is essential.