Background: The problem of World Hunger

The agricultural-economic system in which we live in today affects all people. Not only is this system the reason farmers cannot profit from fruits of their land, but also why countless millions starve, famine reaches its tentacles across the third world, and also why a staggering amount of people are obese and overweight. The primary justice issue we are exploring in our social justice project is the agribusiness system. This system of a few, incredibly large (however not very well known) corporations distribute food around the world and base what they distribute and to whom on cold economics and profitability. Every trying to turn a dollar into a dollar ten, when they shift their business away from small farms and into large co-operations they not only fail to redistribute that locally grown food to the communities in which they buy from, but also devastate the economies of the rural areas left out from under their roof.
As demonstrated in the narrative accompanying this document, the first place that is oppressed by the abuse of this system is the farmers and producers themselves. Farmers in countries around the world who depend solely on their crops are unable to compete with large combines owned by multinational corporations (Patel 83). This has in fact caused a “soaring” increase in suicide rates in rural areas around the globe (not only in India and Thailand, but in the United States as well). For example, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (an Indian state on the eastern tip of the Indian Subcontinent, the capital being the city of Hyderabad) is a state of 75 million people, and is mostly a rural “hinterland of Mumbai [to the west]” (Patel 25). This state has a suicide rate in the thousands upon thousands per year. The mad for-profit system combined with the new interest in expensive “green” technology has resulted in a world where thousands of independent farmers are left in a no-win situation, where their families will starve and their land be seized by Government (or bought at a pittance by these large-multinational organizations) (Patel 102). This is why suicide is seen as the only means of protest or ‘way out’ these men and women see.
The next level of oppression caused by the injustice of this system is the countless hungry around the world. What has been coined as “chronic malnutrition” by UNICEF affects countries not only on their per capita income, but also on the strength of their governments. This means that some governments around the world are complicit with the abuse of this system, and make a profit from it, at the cost of their people. There were an estimated 1.02 Billion people on this planet who are undernourished in 2009—the highest number since they started recording these statistics in 1970. Of that well over half live in Asia and the Pacific, and more than 15 million live in developed, Western Nations (FAO). An example of this oversight is Guatemala. Despite emergency aid donations helping around 300,000 starving inhabitants (mostly descendants of the indigenous Maya ethnicity) there are an estimated 400,000 not receiving adequate aid or aid at all. The result?
“Rehabilitation centers have admitted dozens of children who are so malnourished that their black hair has turned blonde, their faces are chubby from fluid build-up as their organs fail, their legs become a visible black spider-web and their face muscles are too weak to smile.” (Economist 33)
The injustice here is that Guatemala has a per-capita income higher than most neighboring countries, and for all intents and purposes should be able to feed its people. The Guatemalan government has become too corrupt or weak to devise or implement any action for this. “The government fails to collect enough taxes from wealthier Guatemalans to provide…for the majority, let alone the kind of targeted [programmes] that have cut poverty in other nations in the region” (Economist 33). What this means is that not only do the select multi-national corporations have a hand in the injustice caused by this agribusiness complex, but also the governments of nations whose people starve to their deaths for the profits margins of the few.
The extent of hunger and famine around the world can be attributed to these two industrial-complexes, corrupt or weakened government and greed fueled corporations (for instance, of all the wheat grown around the world, 95% of the market is controlled by 5 companies). The name of this game is profit—“since 1984, the real price of a market basket of food has increased by 2.8 percent, while the farm value of the food has fallen by 35.7 percent” (Patel 104). And the profit is shared between both branches of this complex; we can look to the history of the United States to see how clearly this is. The United Fruit Company, now known today as Chiquita Brands International (yes it still does exist) has been the cause of wars, rebellions, and US backed coups all over South and Latin America. In 1954, Guatemalan President Arbenz Gúzman planned on divvying up unused UFC land to the landless peasantry of Guatemala at an “artificially low price, the value at which the [UFC] declared the land’s value on its tax returns” (Patel 100). In response, the U.S. Government authorized a CIA-backed invasion of Guatemala, known as the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état which destabilized the country for more than forty years. More than 200,000 Guatemalans died from the series of coups and wars in the country, but the land remained (profitably) in the United Fruit Company’s hands, and those profits flowed from the Company to the US government in the form of subsidiaries Washington power-plays, effective lawyers and “lobbying the right offices” (Patel 98).
The social systems involved in this injustice are the very staples of society that almost all Americans live by every day—the supermarket. This is the result of the actions of these corporations after all; store shelves stocked with assorted fresh produce that is not locally grown by any stretch of the imagination are the product which we are complicit in this injustice. It is not just the United States; it is burgeoning areas around the world following our example. For instance, “until recently, many African Governments also overvalued their currencies, making imported food artificially cheap, and undercutting local producers of Millett sorghum and cassava” (Lappé 12). The protests of the policies of the WTO, the effects of NAFTA and other similar agreements all go unheard of in the media; the deaths of millions of hungry around the globe and the rash string of suicides of farmers over the last decade are all written off as tired stories in the news. Yet there appears to be no way out of this system, we all have to eat don’t we? When one walks into a supermarket and buys their food, they never think of the sweat and often heartache it took to produce that quart of milk, that steak, or that sack of rice one is buying. However outrage erupts should any of those products go up in price by 25¢. All political candidates are expected to know the average price of milk to seem more down-to-earth to his or her constituents, but other than that the price is meaningless, it is an inconvenience. This is the complicity we have in this global injustice, the evil disguised as good in our stores and supermarkets.
While world hunger is often trumped around the world as an unstoppable evil that has and will plague humanity for all eternity, it is only recently that humanity has been able to turn a profit from this suffering. By and large this new age of famine and chronic malnourishment among millions is because of the actions of man, not by any act of God. This is a profound injustice that goes unnoticed by the millions and millions of consumers who collectively have the power to curtail this gross injustice and abuse of the agribusiness system. Regulations must be put in place that force organizations to compete on a fair market, and programs must be implemented that encourage local farming around the globe, and not just the bulk of combine style farms owned by large multi-national organizations. First and foremost, Food must be grown for nourishment, not for profit.