The Hunger Site: Food for Thought

For the record, ZPG believes that the ‘Food vs. Population’ approach to solving problems doesn't work. We should address both hunger and the need for family planning. Where availability and access to food and family planning are not present, the quality of life is diminished. Where women are oppressed, stopping population growth, protecting the environment, and feeding people are more difficult if not impossible. Our western diet has enormous consequences, affecting everything from food use to food production.

It's a complex discussion that many try to make too simple.  We search for the ONE SOLUTION to the problem, when there are many little solutions that will result in a better future. These include education and empowerment of women, improved access to family planning, better use of agricultural resources and more equitable distribution. To succeed at any one, our goals must include them all.

Ken: I received this e-mail from a colleague the other day. I checked it out a little and it seems legit ... and the sponsors seem like the right type of sponsors. For the time of a simple click, it makes sense to me! See what you think.

Al: I don't usually forward very much stuff, but this is an amazingly simple idea that is really quite innovative. It's an Internet web site called The Hunger Site. I first heard about it on National Public Radio, then read about it in the newspaper, and finally had a friend send me a forward about it. In essence, you click a button on a web site and a corporate sponsor funds a serving of food in exchange for you seeing their advertising. But don't just take my word for it; read the letter from the United Nations World Food Programme.

Joe: I'm going to respond to your offer to click for food with a rather heartless answer. However, if I can be shown the utter waywardness of my response, I will change my ways ... so please engage.

Here it is: I simply don't give a dollar to hunger unless I can give an equivalent dollar to family planning. We can't continue to feed an ever-accumulating population. Our worldwide cropland area is now declining. I'm sure you know more than I that our irrigation water is now also under threat, and that over a billion people have no access to clean water. 17% of the planet's soils have been severely degraded. I know I needn't go on and on about the severe impacts of the Y6B problem.

Hence, it is my humble view that we can't just feed without also reducing fertility. Some of the funds used to feed can then be diverted to reducing infant mortality, improving maternal and child health, and improving access to family planning.

Thanks for listening to this small plea to save the earth for those who will inhabit it after us!

Aaron: This site seems to be going around; I have seen it too. In addition, I received Joe's response about population control, which seems very valid given one perspective. However, the American intake and standard of living is so grossly out of balance with the rest of the world. I rather would not mind sharing some of the excess I eat with those who simply don't eat. In fact, I think this should be the next new diet craze. Forget about the Adkins diet and other complex drugs and diets. How about the "Fat Ass Americans Stop Eating So Much" diet? We consume so much and waste so much. What if we bought non-meat products? Well, you could use the land and resources to feed something like 20 or 100 times more people! WOW.

Regarding our American resource depletion: well, they can jam facts down our throat all they want, but when I talk to my Russian friends or South American friends I get a real understanding of what 'living without' means. We should all have a world embracing view. As long as it is 'some damn foreigner' that is suffering, all we will do is continue to think of ourselves—but when that person is a friend or family member, we grow a new perspective on the problem.

Ken: Joe, I have no disagreements with anything you said. In fact, I agree wholeheartedly. Feeding people treats the symptom, not the illness. While I much prefer treating root causes, I also take aspirin for a headache or knee ache, cause notwithstanding. I appreciate what this web page is doing because it doesn't cost me a dollar. However, I think a letter such as yours to the advertisers of the site could raise their awareness and perhaps bring about some expansion of their thinking.

Eve: Hi Joe! I don't know how wide you want this conversation to be, but here's my two cents.

Basically, I come out pretty close to Aaron's position. Namely, I think that the "population problem" has quite an arbitrary component in that the population density in much of the third world is actually a good deal lower than it is in Europe (e.g. the Benelux countries). The real ecological threat to the planet is the western way of life—both at the individual level of consumerism (four internal combustion engines per family, etc.) and at the societal level. Our society's corporate and government/military entities deplete non-renewable resources and create hazardous wastes. There's an old edited volume called Eco-Catastrophe (copyright 1970 by Harper & Row, New York) that has a good opening essay on this point, and Mamdani's The Myth of Population Control is another good source.

Incidentally, Mamdani and others make the point that even during the worst famines, India was a food exporting nation. Thus, the power of world capital to shift economies from subsistence to trade seems to be a major source of the misuse of agricultural capacity. The same is true in West Africa, where the world cocoa and coffee markets have displaced more nutritious local forms of food production.

Also, I think what demographers call the S-shaped curve of population growth (from high birth and death rates to lowered death rates with high birth rates to low birth and death rates) suggests that the best population control policy is the growth of affluence and secure social benefits. I realize that this creates some contradictions. It implies that affluence helps bring birth rates down, but at the same time it promotes environmental depletion.

All of which puts me out of line with both hunger and population control projects as conventionally conceived.

Wes: Ken, you have unleashed a very interesting subject. Since you have already gotten comments in response from Joe and Aaron, here is my three cents.

Yes, there are portions of the world that are grossly impoverished. Yes, the more advanced countries do use proportionally more of the world resources. Yes, the less advanced portions of the world do have fast growing populations.

In the past, war, disease, and natural disasters kept the world population in check.

As our knowledge increases, we have the power to greatly affect the attrition of our world population. As we do so, we had better try to affect the other side of the equation: the rate of procreation. The advanced portions of the world seem to address the procreation side. So clearly, we need to help the less advanced portions of the world do so as well.

Sending food to feed the hungry is addressing the symptom of the problem, not the root cause of the problem.

Joe: Thanks, Eve, your comments are helpful—especially to those wishing to be population activists. It appears that whenever one calls for population control, there are people in the woodwork who will make an attribution that you are jingoistic or minimally ethnocentric, although no north-south distinction was made in the first place.

Permit me a rebuttal:

I am, of course, well aware of the wasteful consumption and development of the West; indeed, if everyone in the world today were to live like us, we would need a total of three planet Earths to provide the necessary resources and waste sinks. BUT, I am still convinced that consumption, development, and its offshoots, in particular, environmental degradation, can be directly attributed to overpopulation. Further, getting our own house in order does not mean we cannot simultaneously push for population control elsewhere. Indeed, it is possibly as ethnocentric to argue that third world cultures need to become affluent like us so that they can reduce births as to suggest that they might do a better job than we did in controlling their own consumption, development, and population.

Eve: Of course environmental issues can be a both/and. Both the west and the third world need to do/think differently. However, I still think that starting with "overpopulation" is somehow arbitrary. Starting with sustainable development (in order to be sustainable, naturally, you'd have to have some limits on the number of folks to be served) is the more positive frame—it asks what we should do rather than what we shouldn't do. And it would lead pretty directly (I think) to questions like: if you don't want gleaners denuding forests in the search of firewood for cooking fires, then what do we do?

Of course we also have to insist on non-genocidal, non-militaristic, non-authoritarian solutions. Otherwise you wind up killing the Save the Amazon activists.

By the way: you characterize people like Mamdani (and maybe me?) as crying racism/jingoism/ethnocentrism. But that only speaks to what may be their character, not the quality of their argument.

Perhaps for us whitey round-eyes, we should stick to figuring out how to create a healthier western society with more social pleasures to offset a decline in better living through mall crawls.

Joe: Thanks again for your reply. Yours are provocative thoughts, especially the perspective that starting with the environment may be more politically antiseptic. So much for the logic of causation. I have for so long seen overpopulation as being the first cause.

Please also consider that those who cry racism not only demonstrate a character flaw but an argumentation flaw IF the purpose of dialogue is NOT to win but to advance the story/analysis (i.e., to what end introduce false attributions?).

Eve: Actually I don't think Mamdani or others who argue that western use patterns are more detrimental to the environment than third world family patterns are necessarily crying racist in a personal sense. But there is a more institutionalized kind of racism: whatever the issue is, we're not the problem but others are; sort of at best "the leak isn't in my end of the boat". I do think this charge is often warranted. If one begins a conversation from the premises that one's own view is natural while others' views are socially constructed (i.e. more arbitrary, less a reflection of what's actually out there) it may well be racist, albeit not at the individual level. So the issue for me is more strategic than substantive. If using the word racism makes everyone curl up in a defensive ball, then it isn't a useful way of moving the conversation forward. On the other hand, even the most skilled inquiry (vs. assertion) is going to run into a brick wall if certain topics (such as western consumption on non-renewable resources) are simply put off limits.

Joe: All I ask is that the antagonists step back and see things from the other's perspective. Or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, and make an inquiry before slamming them with an unfounded attribution. Here is how it might sound:

"Do you, Madame X, believe that Western consumptive patterns are not as serious as the problem of multiple, unrestricted births in third-world countries at the expense of maternal and offspring health?"

Vs.

"Madame X, you are a racist in pushing for limits on third-world population since your own society is overconsuming—especially non-renewable resources."

This type of exchange was framed perhaps best by Martin Buber. Here's how he put it:

"Before all, dear opponent, if we are to converse with one another and not at and past one another, I beg you to notice that I do not demand. I have no call to that and no authority for it. I try only to say that there is something, and to indicate how it is made: I simply record. And how could the life of dialogue be demanded? There is no ordering of dialogue. It is not that you are to answer but that you are able."