Eat your peas.

Perhaps like many American kids, my first concept of starvation "out there" in the world came from my grandmother.  She grew up during the Depression and was one of those "Eat your peas because there are starving kids in China" types.  I would eat them, but only to get her to leave me alone - not necessarily because I could conceptualize and become emotionally distraught by the hungry children somewhere else.  I would mutter to myself that the starving kids in China could have my peas.  Norman Rockwell moment, right?  Now of course it's less of a classic funny story and more of a simplified and outdated anecdote to a global conundrum or even a systemic act of violence.  I can feel guilty about my place in the world all I want, but when it comes down to it I still believe the overarching reason that people still starve is that I have extra food that I don't need and a third of humanity doesn't have enough.  Pretty much every level of our food system is broken in some way.

I hate to frame it in that passive way; of course it's more complicated, especially when you're supposed to be writing these ideas in grad school.  It's not about finding a way to ship unwanted peas overseas so they aren't wasted, and I don't want to think of the global (and domestic) food system as something broken that needs to be fixed.  Edkins makes the point that famine or mass starvation is not something that just happens.  There are perpetrators, beneficiaries, and functions of starvation that give the issue a political rather than technical lens.  I agree with her assertion that famine is a product of a system, not its failure.  It is not that "an otherwise benign system has collapsed and needs putting right" (13) but rather that it is a malignant system with malignant or unequal results.  This is what I mean by a broken system.  We throw food away here, or our suppliers do it for us so that we needn't look upon imperfect foods in our stores.  I want (and can buy) avocados year round, sniff when they get more expensive than a dollar in the middle of winter, and when I make my purchases I don't actually have to be viscerally reminded of the lack of any sort of substantial food elsewhere.  As Manning notes of the billions of malnourished people, "we may forget about them, as most Americans do."  Constant awareness of our bad system and own reinforcement isn't the complete answer, but it would help to have to think more about it.  Who is still texting their $10 to Haiti, or auctioning off Maybachs to send money to the children of Somalia?  These responses have their own questions as far as effectiveness goes, but apparently only well-publicized disasters and crises can garner our attention then after a few weeks it's on to the next.  Maybe every avocado or banana or processed snack we buy here should come with a distribution tax.

The "I have food, you need food" idea is simple.  I like to lament over food waste and maldistribution.  But as the readings this week have shown, the problems are broken down into much more.  We have more mouths to feed, people are moving up the food chain, we want to give grain to cars and cattle, we're running out of untapped technologies, and women are disempowered.  Each root problem has different perspectives on the answers.  I would lean more toward the agroecology policies and solutions than the modernist up the ante on industrial agriculture view.  I hope Paarlberg doesn't actually envision an agricultural system for Africa modeled after the one we have in the United States.  Investing in roads and access to markets is one thing, but let's not get carried away dreaming of Monsanto monocultures and shipping glyphosate to small landholders of Africa.  Are we brainstorming how to spread the wealth of factory farming, too?  We don't have to juxtapose the extremes here, of big industrial agribusiness versus 100% slow, local and organic.  I do find the latter romantic but I think in the short term there is a strategy to scaling back our industrial scale where it has overstepped, and modernizing some elements of agriculture in the developing world where it makes sense culturally.  Paarlberg's arguments have many caveats, such as skimming over the inequality of the green revolution and noting "Wherever small farmers had sufficient access to credit, they took up the new technology just as quickly as big farmers, which led to dramatic income gains and no increase in inequality or social friction."  But the ultra poor rarely have access to credit, and buying agricultural technology on credit still begs the question of unsustainable debt and cycles of dependence on everything from patented seeds to branded pesticides.

I know that any policy or solution has trouble reaching those it is meant for, but I still think the realm of agroecology has more potential than other solutions brought forth in the readings.  Hunger, malnourishment, famine, and starvation are not just technical problems with technical solutions.  Like any issue we sustainability academics like to pore over, the problem reaches into political, social, environmental, and economic spheres.  As Sen and Patel have urged, we can look at these interactions and examine the problem at the personal and household level.  Starvation is a global problem suffered by individuals.  We don't need just tech transfer, just fertilizer, or just better distribution methods.  We need awareness, strong training and social programs like any question in development, and the strategies highlighted by Lappe et al. promoting equity, access to food as a rights issue, fairness in markets and production returns, and diversified practices rather than a stubborn and increasingly expensive reliance on the industrial "solution" wherein we chemically feed then beat the land we have left into submission.  I would say eventually this tactic will fail, but clearly there are two problems with this claim.  First, it reinforces the idea of failure rather than responsibility for perpetrating an action.  And secondly, there is no eventual about it.  Apparently it just isn't that hard to ignore a third of humanity.  Change will come when the rest of us can't get our avocados.