We've got the food but just can't get it there

Genetically modified crops won't end world hunger. Our problem isn't abundance but distribution, say food activists NICK SAUL and DEBBIE FIELD

Globe & Mail - Friday, June 14, 2002 – Page A19

This week, world leaders gathered in Rome for the United Nations World Food Summit to talk about food and hunger and to vote to "reduce the 800 million hungry by half" by 2015. And just as they did after the last United Nations World Food Summit, held in Rome in 1996, they will go back home and implement policies that make hunger worse.

While these are obviously not people who are immune to the suffering of starving children or oblivious to the pressure on parents in both the North and South to make sacrifices so their children can eat, their past actions show that they are utterly misguided about the roots of and solution to hunger. Working on the principle that hunger will be eliminated through economic growth driven by a high-tech, bioengineered agriculture, they are destined to fail.

The reality is that the increased use of genetically modified foods is actually increasing hunger in the South, and doing nothing to alleviate the growing number of poor in the North who use food banks or actually go hungry because any available money goes toward paying the rent instead of feeding their kids.

The argument behind genetic engineering, of course, is that crops will survive because of their imperviousness to disease and drought and therefore there will be an increase in the food supply. Fewer people will go hungry and the world will be a better place.

But the problem with this contention is that lack of food is not the issue in Canada. It's not even the problem globally. Hunger is created by an inequitable food-distribution system that makes food access similar to the game of Monopoly: When you run out of money, you are out of the game.

For countries dependent on export dollars and saddled with massive amounts of foreign debt, it is their citizens who are out of luck when drought or war hits. And even when natural disaster or war is not the issue, it's only big, sometimes multinational agribusinesses that are able to afford to plant genetically modified crops. Few small farmers can afford to buy genetically modified seeds or pesticides. The big agribusinesses end up selling their product to the export market and the people who live and work on these farms don't see the benefits. Rather than helping, the new technologies often end up increasing peasant hunger in the South and farm bankruptcies in the North.

So, what could the world leaders who met in Rome at the summit that ended yesterday actually do to work toward alleviating hunger? First, they could acknowledge that food is a basic human right -- just like the right to housing -- and genuinely commit to ensuring that every citizen has sufficient access to healthy food. Second, they could make sure that their countries have adequate domestic food production capacity to feed their own citizens. Just as mothers around the world start their day by planning what their family will eat, each country should, as Brewster Kneen, the agricultural economist and author of Trading Up, suggests: "Feed the family first, and trade the leftovers." The current emphasis on food production for export above all makes every country potentially food insecure.

And what can we in Canada do? Let's start with the principle that in a society as wealthy as ours, everyone should eat every day. Let's also add quality, choice and safety. Is this too much to ask? Hardly. Is it too hard to achieve? Certainly not.

Here are four policy steps that would point us in the right direction.

First: Raise minimum wage and social assistance rates so that they reflect what it actually costs to live and bring back the Canadian Assistance Plan (CAP), the federal legislation dropped in 1990s that guarantees that social assistance and health care are universally accessible and meet minimum national standards. Mike Harris could have never cut welfare rates in Ontario (sending the number of people who go to food banks into the stratosphere) if the federal government hadn't scrapped CAP.

Second: Reallocate federal and provincial agricultural dollars from export subsidies to support small family farmers who grow for the local market.

Third: Invest a portion of the billions spent on health care to preventative initiatives that promote consumption of, and better access to, vegetables and fruit and other healthy foods.

Fourth: Address the growing obesity crisis among children and youth by implementing a national student nutrition policy to promote healthy eating and to get good food into schools.

Of course, this kind of progressive-policy thinking could only come about if governments decided to put food first rather than last on their list of priorities. When the international community decided to eradicate polio, it was accomplished not by vague government commitments to "trickle-down" economics or trade policies, but by a massive public-health mobilization and inoculation campaign.

Today, it is time to stop pretending that the marketplace will take care of hunger. We need a movement of citizens to speak their minds and convince policy-makers that we want change. Most of all, we need new and creative policies that commit our governments to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that everyone gets the healthy food that they need every day.

Nick Saul is executive director of The Stop Community Food Centre, a neighbourhood-based agency that operates a range of food-security initiatives. Debbie Field is executive director of FoodShare Toronto.