April’s issue of The Noise just hit the streets. View full schedule here.
It is safe to say that the majority of people reading this article know little about what it means to be really hungry, this writer included. I recall a few weeks during the fall semester of my first year in graduate school when I misjudged how my loans should be spent. I gave it all to my landlord and left little to myself to buy food. During the time between then and my first paycheck, I subsisted on nothing but apples I stole from my neighbor’s trees in the neighborhood on the north side of town. After a while I got creative: apples with peanut butter, fried apples, and apples and cinnamon, among others. This only lasted a couple weeks and soon enough I was back on my feet.
I do remember one homeowner who yelled at me because he enjoyed the apples as “ornaments,” to make his property look nice. I lashed back with something snippy, wishing him luck in explaining this to all the birds, squirrels, mice, bugs, and worms in his yard who will see the apples as a meal, just as surely as I did. “If I can’t eat them and you won’t eat them. Somebody will.” And for the record, I came back that night with a canvas bag and a ski mask.
Still, while I couldn’t run down to Safeway and buy food, I was never really hungry, and I knew my situation wouldn’t last long. Of course, I hear the statistics, but it’s hard to react to faceless numbers. Over a billion people in the world are undernourished. Over two million people die of starvation ever year. Ninety percent of the hungriest nations on earth are net exporters of food to rich nations. Meanwhile, 80 percent of harvested corn and soybeans in the US and Europe go to feed livestock. And the New York Times reported last May that in the US, over 30 tons of food goes to waste every year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the global food system is seriously and fundamentally broken.
It is no easy task to make these statistics real to those that will probably never experience true hunger. There is no way I can relate to a coffee farmer in Guatemala who has sold his coffee at a loss for the last 5 years and will never climb out of debt. I don’t live in a village where I have to constantly fight off oil and mining companies who threaten my ability to be self-sufficient. I wouldn’t know what to say to a cotton farmer in Mali whose yields this year just might make it possible to get married, or a single mother in Mozambique whose corn crops were devastated by floods, crying as anticipated income is literally washed away. I will never know what it is like to destroy my own local environment, working my fingers to the bone, trying to get higher yields per acre in service of the corporation that bought my land years ago because my country took out a loan and the IMF says the best way to make a profit is by allowing foreign investors to set up shop.
Still there are organizations that are trying to make hunger more realistic to those who will probably never experience it. In 2004, Tony Hall, US Ambassador to the United Nation’s anti-hunger agencies in Rome, invited colleagues to his house under the pretense that a lavish Thanksgiving dinner would be served. If guests weren’t immediately suspicious of a large meal given by a man who works on global hunger issues, they soon became uncomfortable when asked to draw a card from a basket that assigned them to one of three categories of wealth based on the most current statistics from the World Development Report.
Fifteen percent of the guests were lucky enough to draw a card placing them in a high-income status. They enjoyed gourmet meals with a set table lit with candles and lined with fine silverware. Thirty-five percent were given rice and beans, while the remaining majority were given a handful of rice and were told to eat outside in a tent.
The meal, based on Oxfam’s famous “Hunger Banquet,” is a social experiment of sorts, where guests are forced to look beyond the statistics and experience the numbers first hand. It is a dramatization of the inequitable distribution of food and resources in today’s world.
And anything can happen. Maybe the rich will create a system of police to keep the poor away from their table. Perhaps the poor will work together to take food from the rich, or the corruptible rich will help to facilitate a black market, where food is exchanged under the table. Each of Oxfam’s “Hunger Banquets” turns out a little different depending on the level of participation and enthusiasm for the experiment.
After dinner, guests are invited to speak about their experiences. Did the rich feel guilty for eating so well knowing there were hungry people outside? Did the poor become spiteful? What about the middle class–can they eat their meal avoiding both guilt and spite? According to Oxfam, “few participants leave with full stomachs after the dinner, but all possess a greater understanding of the problems of hunger and poverty and will hopefully be motivated to do something about them.”
For more than three decades, this event has brought together students, teachers, community groups, faith congregations, and others to learn about world hunger, increase their awareness of global poverty, and raise money for Oxfam. The Oxfam Hunger Banquet will take place in Flagstaff on the last day of “Hunger Awareness Week” from April 6th to the 10th.
Hunger Awareness Week is being organized by both graduate and undergraduate students from the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, under the guidance of Dr. Geeta Chowdhry, who is teaching courses on Hunger and Food Security this semester. Hunger Awareness week will also feature many events throughout the week: a panel discussion, a talk by Bill Aal from the Community Alliance for Global Justice, a film, and a benefit show. The goal of the week-long events is to introduce the Flagstaff community to hunger and homelessness issues from around the world, and inspire individuals toward active participation in ending these injustices.
“We’ve been studying the way U.S. corporations have huge influence in developing nations,” says Katie Sullivan, an undergraduate student helping to organize the Oxfam Hunger Banquet and the keynote speaker. Because a country might be in debt or need money to build infrastructure, corporations are invited and contracts are signed. “They have the power to tell people what to make. It’s a sad story that happens all over the world.”
When I asked Ms. Sullivan if she thinks the majority of Americans are familiar with these issues, she said that from her experiences, most people keep a self-imposed distance between the source of food and how it arrives on your dinner plate. “I’ve become more aware of where my food comes from. Once you start digging, it becomes more personal.”
I spoke with Bill Aal, one of the founders of the Community Alliance for Global Justice in Seattle, who will be speaking on Tuesday night during Hunger Awareness Week. CAGJ took off on the coattails of the famous 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which successfully shut the meeting down. “Before the WTO protests in ’99, we organized across different issues like fair trade and NAFTA. Afterwards we realized there is real power in the interconnectedness of all the different groups and we knew we needed to create a vision to move toward.”
While many groups organize around a particular issue, they often fail because of a lack of clear and specific goals. The mission statement for CAGJ is: We aim to transform the global economy by identifying local and global impacts of trade and monetary institutions, by using education, grassroots mobilization, media and legislative strategies, and by building solidarity across diverse movements. “Our goal is to work together to strengthen local economies every where. Strong local economies provide food security, justice for farmers, and strong connections between small farmers across borders,” he said.
There is another group that works on global hunger issues that are also headquartered in Seattle: Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mr. Gates, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, privately fund the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. Because Mr. Aal and CAGJ were interested in what the Bill Gates Foundation is doing to address the same issues, they decided to attend a meeting. “We were horrified by the contrast of their stated goals and their practices. While we were looking at ‘biodynamic agriculture,’ which develops markets within the context of a particular region and has been shown that it allows communities to be resilient, AGRA pushes industrial farming techniques and genetically modified seeds.”
You mean Monsanto? I ask. “Yes, I mean there are others, but Monsanto has been at the table throughout all their planning. And of course they have a huge history of trying to control the seed people use,” he said.
And it’s all done in the spirit of philanthropy, which is an efficient way to, as Mr. Aal explains, “use private money to push public policy.” So CAGJ started “AGRA Watch,” which was formed to “challenge AGRA to be as transparent as it says it is and be more accountable to it’s stated goals.”
CAGJ attempts further to frame the discussion around the reality of the issue. There are, after all, more overweight people in the world than there are undernourished people. One of the major problems with AGRA is that it frames the issue as “an African production problem rather than a food distribution problem.” The ‘Third World’ tag originally signified a third way of doing things, an alternative to the Cold War division of Western capitalism (the First World) and East Bloc communism (the Second World). But recently the term took on a negative connotation, as in third class.
Now we also use the term, “developing world,” but one could easily argue that many “third world” countries have become much worse off when they began to “develop.” So what does “development” mean anyway? And, perhaps more importantly, given the state of the world today, when is a country “over developed?” Ultimately these terms are misleading at best. These labels suggest that everyone on their respective side—first world/ developed and third world/ undeveloped—must be equal and we know that is not true. There are poor people in “first world” countries, just as surely as there is a rich elite in “third world” countries.
Community Alliance for Global Justice looks at hunger as a world problem, a food system problem, rather than an “African problem,” as the issue is often framed. “What we need is a diversity of farming systems, farming techniques, and food distribution system. Farmers, people everywhere, need to be able to choose how they will live without the corporations and banks telling them.”
Hunger Awareness Week will kick off with a panel discussion regarding homelessness and food scarcity in Flagstaff. Among panel members will be Mayor Sara Presler, City Council representative Coral Evans, a representative from Food Not Bombs, Eric Wolverton from St. Mary’s Food Bank, Brett Ramey from Urban Lifeways, Stephanie Boardman from Hope Cottage, and Mik Jordahl, a local human rights lawyer. Bring your questions.
