American Factory Farming Will Not End World Hunger

Christina Todd

garyandchristina@gmail.com

ENG 102

Final World Essay

May 1, 2011

American Large Factory Farming Will Not End World Hunger

                This report looks at how United States backed, and many times forced, policies of large factory like farming is hurting the war on ending global hunger more than helping it.  Bad trade policies and bad farming incentives had lead to the poor in second and third world countries relying too heavily on the super powers of the world to save them from starvation.

Christina Todd

garyandchristina@msn.com

ENG 102

World Essay

April 16, 2011

American Large Factory Farming Will Not End World Hunger

                Lochoro is a mother of five young children who lives in poverty stricken Uganda. It is well past mid morning and she has yet to cook a single thing for any of her children or herself.  “I don’t even know what the kids are going to eat,” she says as she beings her never ending quest to make enough money to feed her children one good meal a day.  If she is lucky she will earn .25 from selling things like water and firewood to people in neighboring villages, to buy enough rats to feed her children and herself.    “I smoke the rats cut them into pieces, and fry the meat — or boil it if I don’t have cooking oil,” she boast of her culinary skills (WORLD VISION). Sadly Lochoro’s plight is not very different from a lot of people in the world. Every 3.6 seconds someone around the world dies of hunger.  925 million people went hungry in 2010.  Every year 15 million children die of hunger.  These are overwhelming statistics for a world that  according to the Bread for World institute produces enough food to feed every human 4.3 pounds of food everyday worldwide - “enough food to make most people fat” (WORLD HUNGER).  In 1996 leaders of 185 nations met and pledged to one another and the world to cut those suffering from hunger in half by 2015, a far cry from their 1986 pledge to eradicate world hunger completely. In a follow up meeting held five years  later, in 2001, to track their progress  those same nations met again in Rome only to realize they  had yet again aimed too high as they found they were two-thirds short of where they needed to be to reach their 2015 goal (MOORE).  With yet another  massive failure of goals on their hands it is time for those in charge of helping to feed the world, lead by the United States and Europe, to take a step back and realize their policies and plans for eradicating hunger world wide are not working.  The idea that American big farming is the answer to the world’s hunger problem has been proven more of a cause of world hunger then a solution by killing small and family farms all across the world and a big business monopoly in the world’s food system which has created trade policies that pit small local farms again large factory farms.  These policies are causing a destructive and massive food crisis across the globe.

                Governments of the world have been promising to end hunger for the last three decades with very little success to show for it.

• 1974: 500 million people were going hungry in third world countries.  The World Food Conference plans to end hunger in ten years.
• 1996: 830 million people are going hungry. The World Food Summit plans to reduce the hungry in the world by half.
• 2000 Millennium Summit.  Same pledge to reduce poverty by half is pledged.
• 2002: 850 million people are going hungry in the world. The World Food Summit commettiee has to admit that their Millennium Development goals are far behind of where they thought they would be at this point.
• 2008: 862 million people are going hungry in the world.  Hunger has increased; over three billion people live on less than $2 a day (HOLT-GIMENEEZ).

America has played a large role throughout history in the world’s fight against hunger beginning with the American Relief Administration which was created shortly after World War I their job, according to Ryan Swanson’s 2004 article for the AgExporter, was to provide and distribute food and supplies to the starving people of Europe.  Since the creation of that program United States involvement in the world’s food aid has continually increased and evolved as the need for aid has continued to change. The end of World War II brought the Marshall Plan, which gave Japan and Western Europe almost 13 billion dollars in food and aid these war torn countries to rebuild their cities and economies.  Through this program the United States government gained the knowledge and experience in how to distribute food and funds to the needy people of the world.   The Garnett Plan was the first major misstep in the United States plan to end hunger. The brain child of an army officer by the name of Gwynn Garnett, this policy would forever change the way the United States gave aid to other countries. The concept was simple; the United States would sell their surplus agricultural goods to struggling countries by accepting foreign currencies in exchange.  57 years after the Garnett Plan was approved by congress it is still the blueprint for all aid given to foreign countries (SWANSON).  Untied States Government supported polices like that of the Garnett Plan have lead most southern second and third world countries to be less self sufficient as they rely on the globalized food market which favors export of their crops, import of cheaper crops, and the idea in the United States that big farm factories to feed the world is the way accomplish the World Food Summit’s goal (SULLIVAN).  Those who back these ideas couldn’t be more wrong.  

                Large American farms are not the answer to the world’s hunger problems, but those representing America and its policies think different, even though they have been proven wrong time and time again.  At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome the U.S. Secretary of Agricutlure, Dan Glickerman, informed the world not to worry about growing their own food that the United States farmers would and could grow food for the entire world (BELL).  His American backed policy suggested that farmers in third world countries abandon their farms and move into busy cities to work in manufacturing plants building things to export to pay for the food American farmers would produce.   This policy is asking countries to abandon their agricultural roots and rely soley on somelse to feed them.    This a ridicules notion how can a country learn to produce food for itself and sustain self sufficient economies if it is relying on its most basic need, food, from anywhere but its own land and people.  Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian economist who wrote a very controversial book on this subject called “Dead Aid.”   In this book she looks at the relationship between aid and how is undermines growth in Africa. Moyo say the that aid doesn’t work because “the economies of those countries that are the most dependent on foreign aid have shrunk by an average of 0.2 percent per year ever since the seventies” (MAYO).   United States policies force other nations to take our surplus and give up any food self reliance of their own. 

                This idea that big farming is the cure to all that hails world hunger is not only hurting the country that it has set out to help, but is also causing major changes in the agricultural landscape of the United States and the world market.  In the last 50 years United States farms have dropped from six million to less than two million, while the amount the large farms are producing has increased at the fast pace (BELL).  The small farms and family farms are finding it harder to compete with large factory like farms.  The U.S. Farm Bill has done little to stop this trend as it encouraged farmers to grow “fence row to fence row” (HOLT-GIMENEZ).  This policy has killed local farming in poor countries they cannot compete against the large farms of the western world.

Thanks to unbalanced trade policies, that favor the few and damage the majority, the world food’s system is now controlled by an agricultural monopoly made up of a three very powerful companies: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge.  These companies continually back policies that favor their bottom line like the Structural Adjustment Program, which was responsible for the introduction of dumping (HOLT-GIMENEZ).   Dumping is when the large grain producing companies decide, because of low grain prices, to sell their surplus gain to poor countries at a price way below local value in both second and third world countries (PARKER).  Small farms in the south cannot compete with that kind of competition and soon find themselves unable to make a living on their crop, unable to pay they will find themselves landless and penniless with no way to feed or support their families, soon they too are relying on the cheap grain that made them penniless in the first place.  These companies, along with some of their partners, have seen profits rise by over 100% because of policies which that aid them in dumping.  Dumping refers to when large amounts of cheap grain at dumped into countries undercutting local farms, when they do this the take away the livelihood of many of the poor of the world (BELL).

The truth of the situation is that American backed policies will always favor America’s bottom line even when hidden behind the act of doing good.  Until the poor of the world are able to grow, produce, and save their own food they will never be free of hunger.  History has proven time and time again that the only way to make countries self sufficient is to allow them to grow their own food which in return will grow their own economies.

Works Cited

BELL: Bell, Janet. “Will the U.S. Breadbasket Last?”  Seedling. Dec. 2007. Web.  28 March. 2011

HOLLT-GIMENEZ:  Holt-Gimenez, Eric.  “The World Food Crisis: What’s behind it and What We Can Do About It.” ALAI, America Latins en Movimento. 24 Nov. 2008. Web. 10 March. 2011.

MOORE: Moore, Melissa. “The World Summit: What Went Wrong?” foodfirst.com. Institute for Food and Development, 11 Feb. 2005. Web. 5 April. 2011.

MOYO:  Moyo, Dambisa. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print.

PARKER: Parker, Elizabeth.  Letter to Warren Staley, CEO of Cargill, Inc. 21 March 2010. www.foodfirst.org.  Web. 5 April, 2011.

SULLIVAN: Sullivan, Thomas.  The Current Status of World Hunger. GEO. 15 July. 2010. Web. 13 April. 2011.

SULLIVAN: Sullivan, Thomas

SWANSON: Sawnson, Ryan. “Fighting world hunger: U.S. food aid policy and the food for peace program.” AgExporter. Oct. 2004. Web. 5 April. 2011.

WORLD HUNGER:  World Hunger. 2011 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics.  2 March. 2011. Web. 10 March 2011.

WORL VISION:  www.worldvision.org