Source: Democracy Now!
As the World Food Programme accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, we look at the growing global hunger crisis amid the pandemic, the climate crisis and war. In the United States, as many as 50 million people could experience food insecurity before the end of the year — including one in four children. “It’s important to remember that hunger does not always happen because of natural disasters,” says Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It is often the result of things that we do to each other deliberately.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
We look now at the growing hunger crisis and how the World Food Programme, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, projects 270 million people may be pushed to the brink of starvation amidst the combination of conflict, climate crisis and COVID-19. Here in the United States, the group Feeding America predicts more than 50 million people in the country could experience food insecurity before the end of the year — including one in four children.
We’re joined now by Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Can you start, Ricardo, by responding to the World Food Programme winning the Nobel Peace Prize today and the comments of its director, David Beasley, saying, “Food is the pathway to peace”?
RICARDO SALVADOR: Yeah, well, first of all, this is a very apt recognition for the organization. However, I think that executive director Beasley will also agree that the best circumstance would be that there be no need for an organization like the World Food Programme. What it is doing is heroic because it’s essentially delivering emergency food to populations that have no recourse. But we really need to be asking ourselves: How is it that in the 21st century, when the planet as a whole is producing almost half, again, as much in terms of calories that we need to feed everyone, that there are some people that are in such dire circumstances as he described? So, we must always do that work. We must support that work. We must congratulate the people that devote their lives to do that. But I think a more important calling is actually to prevent the incidence of hunger on the planet, which is entirely doable.
And to your question, the formula that food is the way to derive peace actually should be more properly understood in reverse. The answer to my question of why we have so many hungry people on the planet when there is no need for that is that it is a deliberate decision that some human beings make in order to appropriate the resources of others, or, as in the case of one of the hot spots on the planet right now for hunger, which is Yemen, it was a deliberate strategy to disrupt the food system specifically to weaken the country in the pursuit of the war between proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran. And so, it’s important to remember that hunger does not always happen because of natural disasters, which is a mental model that most of us fall back upon; it is often the result of things that we actually do to each other deliberately.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ricardo, also today, when Beasley was speaking, the head of the World Food Programme, he said that food is the pathway to peace. He’s also pointed out in a piece in The Guardian that even before the pandemic, in 2019, twice as many children died of malnutrition and hunger than have died in total from the pandemic so far. That is, over 3 million children died last year from hunger and malnutrition. Can you talk about what you think the underlying causes of this are? You hinted at it earlier. What are the problems with the global food system that creates this kind of systemic hunger in certain places?
RICARDO SALVADOR: Yeah, I’d be happy to lay that out. The most important thing to understand about the modern food system is that it is a creation of about the last 70 years, and it is a business model. It is a wonder of global logistics. And it is not a philanthropy. It costs a great deal to invest in the production, the processing, the distribution, the transportation logistics, all of the blinking lights that make it so that for those of us that have economic and political power, that food system can serve our needs. It literally can deliver on our whims in an instant. Most of us, per deliberate strategy of the food system, are just within arm’s reach of anything that it can manufacture and deliver. But note the qualifications that I just described. You need to have economic and political power in order to make that food system serve you.
Now, that system does not serve everyone. When we cite statistics like the ones that we’ve been hearing this morning about the millions who are hungry, another way of hearing that is to say the global food system that relies on wealthy people to be able to interact with it actually does not serve hundreds of millions of people on the planet. And the reason why these people are not served is that you provide your food in one of two ways. It’s very simple. You either grow it and produce it for yourself, meaning that you have access to land and you can apply your labor and entrepreneurship to produce your own food, or else you generate cash income from some other activity, and you interact with a global food system that does it all for you. If you’re hungry, then it means you have no access to land or else you’re not able to apply your entrepreneurship to produce your own food, and you also don’t have access to the capital, to the cash that’s required to be able to interact with the food system.
So, the questions are: Why is it that some people are not able to produce in their own backyards, on their own land, enough to feed themselves? And the answer to that is that often it’s the folks interacting with the food system, that second category of people that I mentioned, that are the explanation. Those of us that enjoy cocoa, coffee, tea, the products of most of the tropical part of the world, are actually utilizing tropical land, are actually utilizing the resources of other people. In our mind, we believe in such theories as comparative advantage: We’re actually trading for these artifacts. But in fact what is happening is that most of the time we’re appropriating the resources of very vulnerable, economically desperate people that are not able to fight back against millionaires that are investing in land leases in order to produce industrial crops, such as jatropha for biofuels, or to produce the luxury crops of the Global North.
And so, it is very important to understand that, as I mentioned at the outset, these are deliberate human decisions, tactics that look like investment decisions to other people but in fact actually have the perverse result of immiserating and making other people hungry in different parts of the planet.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ricardo, could you talk about that actually in the context of what David Beasley also said, these staggering figures, $400 trillion of wealth in the world today, an additional $2.7 trillion added over just 90 days at the height of this pandemic, the connection between inequality and the kind of resource appropriation that you’ve been speaking of?
RICARDO SALVADOR: Yeah. I’ll add a few more statistics to that. So, for instance, globally, the value of the food system approaches $5 trillion. It is a very high value-add business proposition to take the raw products that most of us wouldn’t know what to do with — so, for instance, raw corn, raw soybean or livestock on the hoof — and turn that into the edible bites that most of us expect from the food system that we’re accustomed to. Those of us that have only known the food system of the last 70 years know only those edible bites, by and large. And so, it’s a very profitable system, and that nearly $5 trillion that I’ve described says things are going to stay this way.
And so, this means people on the planet who are displaced, who formerly owned land and produced for themselves but have been displaced for banana plantations, for cocoa plantations, for tea plantations, for bioenergy plantations and so on, these are populations of people that do not have the political power — often don’t enjoy the support of their own governments — in order to assure their food sovereignty and their own well-being.
Prime example of this is the continent of Africa. The majority of us are accustomed to grab, for a stereotypical image of somebody suffering from hunger, by going onto the internet and finding images of desperate people on the African continent. We are conditioned by those images to think of the continent as a basket case when it comes to economic development and to agricultural production. The continent of Africa not only could feed itself, it is currently producing more calories than needed to feed its own population. Just one country, Sudan, could be a breadbasket for the entire continent. But what is actually occurring is that governments are making land lease deals with foreign companies or other nations, namely China, so that the production of Africa is literally appropriated to meet the needs of other countries that have the capital to compete for that land and for the production of that land against the interests of native Africans.
And so, this is just another instance of the principle, that I keep repeating, that hunger does not just happen to people. It isn’t just that climate change has occurred. It isn’t just that there’s been a temporary catastrophe such as a typhoon, a hurricane. It is that we deliberately make decisions to deprive other folks of the factors of production that they require to take care of one of their prior needs, which is to provide for their nourishment. So it’s a matter of power. It’s a matter of whether there is actual democracy for people to be able to fight for their own rights within their own countries. And so, the abstract notion of hunger can be translated into very deliberate power plays, that we all can interact with, that we all can shift.
AMY GOODMAN: Ricardo Salvador, what can the pandemic teach us about treating hunger?
RICARDO SALVADOR: Well, the pandemic is an instance of a disruption that has been global, in this particular instance, but let’s go to one of the hot spots of hunger in the world right now that I’ve mentioned already, the country of Yemen. It is a civil war that is a proxy war being fought by Iran and Saudi Arabia. It has gone on for five years. The United States is a part of this war on the side of Saudi Arabia, backing Saudi Arabia, providing armaments, providing moral justification. It is a country that would not be able to provide for its own food. It is primarily a desert country. So, 80% of its food is imported. If you disrupt the economic system there, as the war had done prior to the pandemic, then that means that people are going to be vulnerable. There will be no actual flow of food. But the pandemic has actually exacerbated that to the point where essentially the 85% of food that has to be imported to meet the demand of the internal population has been disrupted just logistically. Just because of the war, the food cannot get in.
And so, there are two ways that you don’t have access to food. One is the one that I just described, physical access. And I’ve given you an example of a place where a decision is made by people — let’s go to war, and let’s specifically disrupt the food system of Yemen so that it can be vulnerable and we can win the war there — so, an intentional act. Or the other way that you can not have access is because you don’t have the capital, you don’t have the cash. And so, the fundamental thing to remember always in these situations is you must provide access so that people can actually meet their own needs in one of those two ways.
The pandemic itself has actually exacerbated existing vulnerabilities all over the planet. Where people were on the razor’s edge of food sovereignty and survivability, often this has tipped them over the edge. And it has occurred not only in the Global South; it is actually something that exists within the Global North. So, there are populations the size of, say, Sudan, a 50 million total population. That is the number of food-insecure people embedded within the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to look now, speaking of the United States, at how President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, could play a major role in that issue of hunger, feeding millions of Americans facing food insecurity during the pandemic, and how the incoming administration responds to the climate crisis.
Ricardo Salvador, you recently co-authored an op-ed in _The New York Times” headlined “Goodbye, U.S.D.A., Hello, Department of Food and Well-Being.” You wrote this before Biden picked former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as his secretary of agriculture instead of Ohio Congressmember Marcia Fudge, who he chose to head housing and urban development.
Environmental and civil rights groups had urged Biden to pick Fudge, who’s African American, to head the USDA, citing her dedication to preserving its anti-hunger programs, like SNAP — that’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which makes up about half the budget. As many as one in four Americans use at least one of USDA’s food aid programs. Fudge’s supporters included South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, another key backer of Biden during the primaries, who said, quote, “It’s one thing to grow food, but another to dispense it, and nobody would be better at that than Marcia Fudge.” But Biden chose Vilsack, who became CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council after he left government, a group backed by the dairy industry.
If you, Ricardo Salvador, could talk about the significance of the USDA and what has been Vilsack’s role? I mean, he ran it throughout the Obama two-term tenure.
RICARDO SALVADOR: Yeah. Well, the first note that I should make is that it’s been reported widely in the media that that will be the pick of the administration. I want to note that there’s been no official announcement of that, so that there’s still hope that that decision could be influenced.
But to your point, there would be implications of this. We are living in a historical moment. It isn’t just that the pandemic that we’ve been discussing has disrupted the food system, as well as other systems across the planet. It’s that we’re also in the middle of an attack on democracy around the planet. It is also that we are living at a time when the public at large is beginning to doubt the foundations of modernity, which is the scientific approach to things. And also we are at a time where there is a massive racial reckoning, which is connecting the history, the foundations of today’s modern economies to exploitation. And at this historical moment, any change in administration is an opportunity to strike in a new direction. So, obviously, going back to a secretary of the past is not the way to strike in a new direction. That is status quo.
And I need to be clear that while I acknowledge that is a very difficult job, and Secretary Vilsack did as good a job as one could expect during the time that he was in, the blemishes in his administration have to do with the issues that have to change about the department. There was manipulation of data in reports that his administration issued purporting that African American farmers had been better served during his administration. We now know that is not true. And by the way, the significance of this is that this is a department that has actually had to settle legal lawsuits for billions of dollars, acknowledging that they have actively discriminated against African American, Native American, Latinx and women farmers and ranchers. Who does that leave, that they’ve been preferentially serving since being established in 1862? The farming population in the United States is dominantly white. It’s unnaturally white. It’s 96% white.
And so, in the 21st century, we can’t have an institution with the profile of serving preferentially a very small sliver of the entire population. Its original remit was to be a people’s department. And this was at a time, 1862, the date of its founding, when the majority of the population were rural and when there was a significant number of people that derived their livelihood from farming itself. So it did make sense that at that time your primary stakeholders would be farmers. But it’s 2021. In the United States, nominally 2 million farmers still ply that trade. We all depend on them. But the country is 320 million people, and we all have a stake in the food system. It determines whether we’re healthy or not. It determines whether we’re susceptible to diseases like the COVID pandemic and so on.
So the stakeholders in USDA are all of us. That “A” doesn’t stand for agribusiness, which is the way that secretaries of agriculture normally behave. And this is a secretary, Mr. Vilsack, whom I respect, but who has come from four years of working for agribusiness, as you just noted. And so, that’s not the profile of somebody that is going to be able to be independent of agribusiness and serve a much broader set of public interests, which you’ve listed. We all have a stake in having physical and economic access to a nourishing system that is equitable not only in terms of who gets to eat, but also in terms of who gets to farm, who gets to participate in the business of food and agriculture.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ricardo, before we conclude, you point out in that New York Times piece the question of food insecurity in the U.S. Ten percent of households were already food insecure before the pandemic. That number has now doubled. You also say that nearly 75% of Americans are clinically overweight or obese, making them, of course, more vulnerable to COVID-19, in addition to other health problems. So, could you explain the difference between food insecurity and hunger, and what this phenomenon in America, which is, of course, in the U.S., the richest country in the world — what it reveals about the food system here and the failures of the USDA as it’s been constituted?
RICARDO SALVADOR: Yeah. Clinically, you’re suffering from hunger when you have caloric deficiency or some other nutrient deficiency that is affecting your ability to thrive. It will stunt the growth of children, for instance. And this is one of the ways in which we actually measure that hunger is occurring.
However, food insecurity is rampant and has just as profound an effect. We define that as basically the percentage of your time that you spend worrying about where your next meal is going to come from. And if you’re in that population, then, obviously, this is going to take major mind share, and you will not be able to flourish, because the primary concern is how you’re going to be able to meet your nutritional needs, your food needs.
And so, the fact that in a wealthy country like the United States we should have, prior to the pandemic, about 10% of the population, and now about 20% of the population, that are dealing with food insecurity should be a national shame. This situation just should not occur.
Now, what it reveals, in answer to your question, has to do with who these people are. When you look at who they are, one of the things that you discover is that they are disproportionately what in the United States we call the people of color. This means other than the descendants of northern Europeans that settled the country a few hundred years ago. Just to summarize, almost glibly, a lot of history, what this population distribution represents is that the modern structure of the nation — its laws, its government, its business models — were essentially set up for those settlers and their descendants, and everybody else here has a history of either having been here and being displaced or else having been brought here in order to perform brutal menial labor. And so, some set of the population, over generations, has been having access to land, access to government programs, access to credit, access to the best education and building their wealth and well-being, and another set of the population has experienced exactly the opposite of that, being driven off of land, their ancestors experiencing genocide, people not having access to government programs, to loans, credit, to real estate. They only get access to second-grade education — or, second-rate education. And so, therefore, what that means is they are losing wealth across the generations.
So, if you go back to the formula for hunger that I described earlier, this tracks poverty. And so, the poorer people in the United States are disproportionately people of color. The white poverty rate in the United States, again, prior to the pandemic, runs about 9%. The poverty rate among people of color in the United States is double of that, at least double of that. And so, this is where you find primarily the majority of the hungry people in the United States. It has to do with the history of the nation. And as I mentioned earlier, we’re living at a moment in racial reckoning, and we need to overcome that history by directly addressing the inequities that make some of us poor, and therefore make some of us especially susceptible to food insecurity and to hunger.
I’ll just repeat, these are the results of actual human decisions, decisions to appropriate somebody else’s land, to kill people, to drive them into reservations, to enslave people, to make some people who are essential for the food system to work undocumented so that we can exploit them and abuse them. And these are things that we can change and that we must change.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is an ongoing conversation. Ricardo Salvador, thanks so much for being with us, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, recently co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times, which we will link to, headlined “Goodbye, U.S.D.A., Hello, Department of Food and Well-Being.”
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