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	The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Go Hungry by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton Utne Reader USA   Starvation is often the result of inequity and politics, not a shortage of food argue Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton.   What is the most common cause of hunger in the world? Is it drought? Flood? Locusts? Crop diseases? Nope. Most hunger in the world has absolutely nothing to do with food shortages. Most people who go to bed hungry, both in rich and in poor countries, do so in places where markets are filled with food that they cannot have.   Despite this fact, much of the discourse about reforming our food system has focused on the necessity of raising yields. Though it is true that we might need more food in coming years, it is also true that the world produces more food calories than are needed to sustain its entire population. The problem is unequal access to food, land, and wealth, and any discussion must begin not from fantasies of massive yield increases, but from the truth that the hunger of the poor is in part a choice of the rich.   Inequity and politics, not food shortages, were at the root of almost all famines in the 20th century. Brazil, for example, exported $20 billion worth of food in 2002, while millions of its people went hungry. During Ethiopian famines in the 1980s, the country also exported food. Many of even the poorest nations can feed themselves—or could in a society with fairer allocation of resources.   It can be hard to grasp the degree to which the Western lifestyle is implicated. We don’t realize that when we buy imported shrimp or coffee we are often literally taking food from poor people. We don’t realize that our economic system is doing harm; in fact, the system conspires to make it nearly impossible to figure out whether what we’re doing is destructive or regenerative.   We have been assured that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” that it is necessary for us to make rich people richer, because that will, in turn, enrich the poor. The consequences have been disastrous—for the planet and for the people whose food systems have been disrupted, who never had a chance to be lifted by any tide.   Journalist Jeremy Seabrook, in his book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty, describes First World efforts to eliminate poverty and hunger this way:   “It is now taken for granted that relief of poverty is the chief objective of all politicians, international institutions, donors and charities. This dedication is revealed most clearly in a determination to preserve [the poor]. Like all great historical monuments, there should be a Society for the Preservation of the Poor; only, since it is written into the very structures of the global economy, no special arrangements are required. There is not the remotest chance that poverty will be abolished, but every chance that the poor themselves might perish.”   It is hard for many of us to recognize that the society we live in helps create poverty and insecurity, but it is true. Our economy is based on endless growth. We’re told that if the rich get richer, it makes other people less poor. Think about it for a moment—about how crazy that is. Wouldn’t it make much more sense to enrich the poor directly, to help them get land and access to resources?   Historically, rural people have been quite poor, but often, despite their poverty, could grow enough food to feed themselves. Over recent decades, however, industrial agriculture and widespread industrialization have moved large chunks of the human population into cities, promising more wealth. But rising food and energy prices (rising because of this move and this urban population’s new demands for energy and meat) have left people unable to feed their families.   Multinational food companies have also worked their way into the food budgets of the poor. Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel are the authors of Hungry Planet. “Few of the families we met [in the developing world] could afford a week’s worth of a processed food item at one time,” they report in the Washington Post, “so the global food companies make their wares more affordable by offering them in single-serving packets.”   Around the world, industrial agriculture has consolidated land ownership into the hands of smaller and smaller populations. Rich nations dumped cheap subsidized grain on poor nations. Local self-sufficiency was destroyed. Now, as the price of food has risen dramatically, those created dependencies on cheap grain, which doesn’t exist anymore, mean that millions are in danger of starvation.   Real alleviation of poverty and hunger means reallocating the resources of our world into the hands of people who need them most. This is not only ethically the right thing to do, it is necessary. There is no hope that newly industrializing nations will help us fight climate change if it means a great inequity between their people and those of the United States. Russia, India, and China have all said so explicitly. The only alternative to the death of millions in a game of global chicken is for everyone to accept that the world cannot afford rich people—in any nation.   What is the best strategy of reallocation? One—that is, for those of us who live in nations where there is plenty of land and food so that we don’t have to rely on the exports of poor nations—would be to enable the world’s farmers to eat what they grow and to have sufficient land to feed themselves and their neighbors.   Most of the world’s poorest people are urban slum dwellers (often displaced farmers) or land-poor farmers, agroecologist Peter Rosset notes. Both groups are increasing, in large degree because of economic policies that favor food for export and allow large quantities of land to be held in the hands of the richest.   “The expansion of agricultural production for export, controlled by wealthy elites who own the best lands, continually displaces the poor to ever more marginal areas for farming,” Rosset writes in Food Is Different. “They are forced to try to eke out a living on desert margins and in rainforests. As they fall deeper into poverty they are often accused of contributing to environmental degradation.”   In this system, poor people who depend on the land, and who best understand the urgency of preserving it, are forced by necessity to degrade and destroy it—and they, rather than we, are held responsible. But a large part of the responsibility rests on the way we eat. This is an important point, because it acknowledges that there are things that we in wealthy nations can do to enable poorer people to eat better—or even to eat at all.   One way to do this is simply to grow our own food, to rely not on foods grown thousands of miles away but on foods grown at local farms and gardens. We also can concentrate on creating food sovereignty in poor nations. We can cut back on global food trade, importing primarily high-value, fair-traded dry goods that take little energy to transport, and place limits on food speculation, which drives up prices so that multinational corporations can get richer at the expense of the poor.   Most of all, we can recognize that self-sufficiency is as urgent in the rich world as in the poor. Globalization’s demise is coming. The rising costs of transportation and the trade deficit in the United States make it inevitable that we will increasingly be looking to meet our basic needs locally.   When we grow our own food, or buy it directly from local farmers, we take power away from multinationals. We make it harder for them to extract wealth and the best land of other nations—and if they don’t need that land, local farmers may be able to use it for their own needs.   We also put power in the hands of our neighbors, many of whom are also victims of globalization. There are 49 million people in the United States who can’t consistently afford a basic nutritious diet. It turns out that the things that make us poor—lack of education, lack of access to land and home, and the industrial economy—are precisely the things that make other people poor. By creating local food systems, we can enrich our immediate neighbors as we stop impoverishing our distant ones.   (Excerpted from the book A Nation of Farmers, by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton. Published in 2009 by New Society: www.newsociety.com) Visit the related web page
	Anger fuels May Day Protests by NYT / The Nation   May 2009   Rising unemployment, static wages and anger at national governments over the depth of the financial crisis brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of Europe on Friday to mark the traditional workers’ May Day holiday.   But though there were tense confrontations and sporadic episodes of violence reported in Germany, Greece and Turkey, the protests were generally peaceful.   May Day this year came at a delicate moment. The economic crisis is dragging on and a palpable sense of outrage is growing among those who have lost their jobs, savings or pension funds. Worker solidarity was on display most visibly in France, where the eight main unions marched together for the first time.   In Paris, members of the two largest unions — the General Confederation of Labor and the French Democratic Confederation of Labor — were joined by the other principal unions, as well as an array of left-wing parties, civil liberty and human rights campaigners.   The General Confederation said that it had registered more than 283 events, protests and marches across France, double the number of events last year. It estimated the national turnout at around 1.2 million.   “For some, the mood is hardening,” said John Monks, the general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 82 trade union organizations in 36 European countries. “It’s switching from worry to frustration and anger. This is the most important May the 1st in a long time.”   Mr. Monks said workers were “paying to rescue the financial sector” and they now wanted “something back” from the state.   The rise in unemployment is being particularly felt in the blue-collar sector as plants are shuttered to compensate for slumping external demand.   The jobless rate in the European bloc using the euro was 8.5 percent in February, up from 7.2 percent a year earlier, according to the European Union’s statistics agency.   France in particular has been the scene of mounting anger. After a strike in France on Jan. 29, when more than one million people marched,   Mar 2009   Global Labor"s G-20 Agenda,by Max Fraser. (The Nation)   The international trade union movement has laid out a set of principles for addressing the worst global downturn since the Great Depression. On March 23 a coalition of labor organizations from more than a hundred countries issued a statement calling on the G-20 to avoid settling for "half-measures" and instead move quickly to tackle the recession and "establish a new model for economic development that is economically efficient, socially just and environmentally sustainable."   "Workers around the world, who are losing their jobs and their homes, are the innocent victims of this crisis," reads the unions fourteen-page London Declaration, "a crisis precipitated by greed and incompetence in the financial sector, but which is underpinned by the policies of privatisation, liberalisation and labour market deregulation."   "This is a historic pivot," says John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. "The first objective of the summit needs to be to get other countries to do their share in fighting the global recession. But in the longer term, we also need to be focused on the fundamental imbalances that led to the crisis, and on building a stronger, more stable economy with results that are more fairly distributed."   Along with an internationally coordinated commitment to government spending and public employment, the London Declaration calls for taking public control of insolvent banks; establishing a new global framework for financial regulation, "with full stakeholder engagement"; reforming international institutions like the World Bank and IMF; bolstering core workers rights and wage standards; and extending social safety nets to cushion the ranks of the unemployed, which are anticipated to grow by more than 50 million worldwide by the end of this year.   "The reaction to the London Declaration on the union side has been a very strong agreement on principles," remarks John Evans, general secretary of the Paris-based Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD, which helped prepare the document. "I"ve never known the global union movement to be quite so united as we are on what we"re calling for at the moment."   The unions paramount concern is to get the global economy working again. "The first priority for G-20 leaders," according to the declaration, must be "halting the freefall in world growth and reversing the decline in employment." Industrial production has dropped off dramatically in many G-20 nations during the recession--12 percent in Europe, 15 percent in Brazil and as much as 31 percent in Japan over the past year. Large economies like China and Germany have seen exports fall by 20 percent or more in that time, and the decline in output is fueling a growing employment crisis in rich and poor countries alike.   British trade unionists message to the G-20 leaders is the need for an "economy based on fair distribution of wealth, decent jobs for all and a low carbon future."   To jump-start production, the London Declaration urges the G-20 nations to make substantial commitments to "public expenditure targeted on employment," including "large-scale investment in green infrastructure, such as energy efficiency and renewable energies--thereby stimulating the creation of high quality employment across a range of sectors." The push for a "Green New Deal" would be part of a coordinated global recovery plan equal to at least 2 percent of world GDP--roughly equivalent to the amount the Obama administration has allotted to its stimulus package, but significantly more than many EU countries have pledged thus far.   To help struggling countries in Eastern Europe and the global South, where "ten years of progress in poverty reduction has been undone in just a few months," the unions are calling for policies to boost domestic demand, guarantee food security and increase financial assistance.   The London Declaration urges G-20 leaders to "support expansionary recovery programmes in developing countries" and pushes for an "end to the harmful economic policy conditionality attached to assistance," which often forces poorer countries to curtail public spending on employment and social welfare programs when it is most needed.   On the crisis in the financial markets, the unions argue that nationalizing insolvent banks "is the only way to restore confidence, provide fair risk-sharing and ensure that taxpayers benefit from any gains once solvency is restored."   Governments should intervene quickly to protect workers pension funds from further losses, promote alternatives to the "too big to fail" banking model and exert broad new regulatory authority in the shadowy world of hedge funds and private equity.   The London Declaration calls for continued "public control and oversight of all financial institutions, products and transactions." It criticizes G-20 leaders for their failure to engage with "trade union, civil society or other stakeholders" in discussions about financial market regulation, and for their willingness to defer to the "same experts who created the current system that has now collapsed so disastrously."   "The G-20 remains tied to a very financial sector-driven agenda". "At the moment, stakeholder voices are not included in key places. The Financial Stability Forum"--which brings together central bankers, national Treasury Department officials and international financial authorities to provide guidance to G-20 leaders on market issues--"is a very closed, technocratic group. One message that we"ll be bringing to the summit is that you need to open up the process of financial market regulation."   More effective oversight and greater democratic control of the financial sector should help prevent a repeat of the meltdown. But as Andrew Jackson, chief economist of the Canadian Labour Congress notes, "the crisis we"re in now is not just the product of the collapse of the housing bubble. Working families were going further and further into debt because of stagnating wages, which kept the system going," even as jobs were disappearing and earnings were flat or declining. At its most ambitious, the union program is a first step toward a broader effort to dismantle the ascendant neoliberal policy regime, and "bring to an end the financialisation that has devastated the real economy" and led to runaway inequality at home and abroad.   "The stagnation of wages in recent decades, if not a direct cause, has been one of the principle reasons why the effects of the crisis have been so dire for working people in all countries," says Ron Blackwell, who as chief economist of the AFL-CIO played a key role in drafting the London Declaration.   In two-thirds of OECD countries, including the United States, wages had fallen behind productivity well before the economic collapse; and lax labor regulations in developing countries, often reinforced by structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank, had only exacerbated global income inequality.   "Even if we get out of this crisis," Blackwell argues, "we"re going to be back into it if we don"t address the fundamental imbalances between finance and the real economy, and between workers and capital."
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