Myth 1: Not Enough Food to Go Around
Reality: Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. That doesn't count other foods including vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide.
Myth 2: Nature is to Blame for Famine
Reality: Nature is not to blame. Human-made forces are making people increasingly vulnerable to forces of nature. Food is available for those who can afford it-starvation during hard times hits only the poorest. Natural events rarely explain deaths; they are simply the final push over the brink. Human institutions and policies determine who eats and who starves during hard times.
Myth 3: Too Many People
Reality: Rapid population growth is not the root cause of hunger. Like hunger itself, it results from underlying inequities that deprive people, especially poor women, of economic opportunity and security. Rapid population growth and hunger are endemic to societies where land ownership, jobs, education, health care, and old age security are beyond the reach of most people.
Myth 4: The Environment vs. More Food?
Reality: Efforts to feed the hungry are not causing the environmental crisis. Large corporations are mainly responsible for deforestation - creating and profiting from developed country consumer demand for tropical hardwoods and exotic or out-of-season food items. Most pesticides used in the Third World are applied to export crops, playing little role in feeding the hungry, while in the U.S. they are used to give a blemish-free cosmetic appearance to produce, with no improvement in nutritional value.
Myth 5: The Green Revolution is the Answer
Reality: The production advances of the Green Revolution are no myth. Thanks to the new seeds, millions of tons more grain are being harvested each year. But focusing narrowly on increasing production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly concentrated distribution of economic power that determines who can buy the additional food. That’s why in several of the biggest Green Revolution successes - India, Mexico, and the Philippines - grain production and, in some cases, exports have climbed, while hunger has persisted and the long-term productivity capacity of the soil has degraded.
Myth 6: We Need Large Farms
Reality: Large landowners who control most of the best land often leave much of it idle. Small farmers typically achieve at least four to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems.
Myth 7: The Free Market Can End Hunger
Reality: Every economy on earth combines the market and government in allocating resources and distributing goods. The market’s marvelous efficiencies can only work to eliminate hunger, however, when purchasing power is widely dispersed. Those who believe in the usefulness of the market and the necessity of ending hunger must concentrate on promoting not the market, but the consumers. In this task, government has a vital role to play in countering the tendency toward economic concentration, through genuine tax, credit, and land reforms to disperse buying power toward the poor. Recent trends toward privatization and de-regulation are most definitely not the answer.
Myth 8: Free Trade is the Answer
Reality: Promoting free trade has proven an abject failure at alleviating hunger. In most Third World countries exports have boomed while hunger has continued unabated or actually worsened. While soybean exports boomed in Brazil - to feed Japanese and European livestock - hunger spread from one-third to two-thirds of the population. Where the majority of people have been made too poor to buy the food grown on their own country’s soil, those who control productive resources will, not surprisingly, orient their production to more lucrative markets abroad. Export crop production squeezes out basic food production. Pro-trade policies like NAFTA and GATT pit working people in different countries against each other in a 'race to the bottom,’ where the basis of competition is who will work for less, without adequate health coverage or minimum environmental standards. Mexico and the U.S. are a case in point: since NAFTA we have had a net loss of 250,000 jobs here, while Mexico has lost 2 million, and hunger is on the rise in both countries.
Myth 9: More U.S. Aid Will Help the Hungry
Reality: Most U.S. aid works directly against the hungry. Foreign aid can only reinforce, not change, the status quo. Where governments answer only to elites, our aid not only fails to reach hungry people, it shores up the very forces working against them. Our aid is used to impose free trade and free market policies, to promote exports at the expense of food production, and to provide the armaments that repressive governments use to stay in power. Even emergency or humanitarian aid, which makes up only five percent of the total often ends up enriching American grain companies while failing to reach the hungry, and it can dangerously undercut local food production in the recipient country. It would be better to use our foreign aid budget for unconditional debt relief, as it is the foreign debt burden that forces most developing countries to cut back on basic health, education and anti-poverty programs.
Myth 10: We Benefit From Their Poverty
Reality: The biggest threat to the well-being of the vast majority of Americans is not the advancement but the continued deprivation of the hungry. Low wages - both abroad and in inner cities at home - may mean cheaper bananas, shirts, computers and fast food for most Americans, but in other ways we pay heavily for hunger and poverty. Enforced poverty in developing countries jeopardizes U.S. jobs, wages and working conditions as corporations seek cheaper labor abroad. In a global economy, what American workers have achieved in employment, wage levels, and working conditions can be protected only when working people in every country are freed from economic desperation.
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Source: 12 Myths About Hunger based on World Hunger: 12 Myths, 2nd Edition, by Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza (fully revised and updated, Grove/Atlantic and Food First Books, Oct. 1998) Institute for Food and Development Policy Backgrounder Summer 1998, Vol.5, No. 3
