An End to Hunger.

In late October, hunger made the national political agenda for the first time in many a year. While on the stump, Bill Bradley, the former Senator from New Jersey who is now a Democratic Presidential candidate, repeatedly told the story of a little girl who didn't have breakfast because it was her sister's turn that day. He has proposed a program to reduce by half the number of children below the poverty line.

Not to be outdone, Vice President Al Gore volunteered at a soup kitchen and responded with an almost identical proposal. The two Democrats would both increase the minimum wage and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. Bradley also called for an increase in funding for Head Start programs. Gore would make more meals available in public schools.

Even Texas Republican Governor George W. Bush is bringing the subject of poverty into his campaign, though, in typical fashion, he calls for government partnerships with churches and private businesses to provide aid.

While it is refreshing to hear the candidates discussing this vital issue, their proposals would hardly do enough to stop the rumbling of empty stomachs and the dozing of children so weakened from poor nutrition that they have trouble paying attention in class.

At The Progressive, we hear anecdotes about children in the Madison public schools who are so hungry that they dig through lunch room garbage cans looking for something to eat. The national statistics give an indication why children in cities across the country are forced to scrounge.

According to a 1996 report by the Tufts University Center on Hunger, Poverty, and Nutrition Policy, the number of hungry Americans grew from twenty million to thirty million between 1985 and 1990, an increase of 50 percent. And a 1997-1998 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that the number has risen to thirty-six million. Fourteen million of these are children.

The December 1998 "Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in American Cities," a thirty-city survey published by the United Conference of Mayors, showed the prevalence of the problem. During the preceding year, the report said, "requests for emergency food assistance increased by an average of 14 percent, with 78 percent of the cities registering an increase." Most of the people requesting assistance were children and their parents, and a third of the adults who asked for food were employed. But the cities are having trouble feeding their hungry citizens--on average 21 percent of the requests for food assistance went unmet during that year. "In 47 percent of the cities, emergency food assistance facilities may have to turn away people in need due to lack of resources," says the report. Ninety-six percent of the city officials said they expected the ranks of the hungry to continue to rise.

What is the reason for this drastic increase in our nation's hungry? It appears that the economic boom so lauded by pundits has failed to reach some of the poorest Americans. These include the working poor and former welfare recipients, many of whom are having a hard time surviving on minimum wage jobs while paying for child care. "The city officials report that the strong economy has had very little positive impact on hunger and homelessness," says the survey. "Low-paying jobs that cannot support a household [are] a very troublesome problem. Many cities report that welfare reform has had a negative impact on hunger and homelessness."

Even Bradley's call to reduce child poverty by half is "shameful," given this country's resources and the strength of its economy, says Anuradha Mittal, policy director for the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also called Food First, in San Francisco. "There is no way a proposal like that is acceptable. This country can definitely feed all its children."

When it comes to Gore, Mittal is even more scathing. "Mr. Gore was the guy responsible for pushing Clinton to sign welfare reform. He has already shown us what he's capable of. At least Bradley was against it."

For advocates like Mittal, the patchwork solutions offered by our current Presidential candidates fail to address the real reasons behind hunger and poverty here in the United States. "They're talking about economic efficiency, rather than talking about what resources we have and what people need," says Mittal. "Nobody is talking about the structural reasons for child poverty."

Food First has devoted more than twenty years--ever since the success of founder Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine, 1971)--to understanding the structural reasons for hunger and poverty.

"Why, in an era of growing abundance, when we have access to `miracle' technologies, synthetic foods, and genetically engineered crops and livestock, does hunger exist in a world of plenty?" asks Peter Rosset, the organization's executive director, in his essay "Now Serving Six Billion: Empty Stomachs in a Land of Plenty," which appears on the Food First web site (www.foodfirst.org).

"In America, people go hungry because they cannot afford both food and housing," he writes. "Families with children and one or more employed members are the fastest growing sector of clients at food banks and soup kitchens and are increasingly found among the homeless scattered across post-welfare-reform America. This is the case despite a booming economy, giving us a critical lesson in how hunger can grow among plenty."

For Rosset, "the answer lies in how our global food system is controlled and who has access to the abundance it produces," he writes. "The global marketplace moves food around the world not in response to human need, but rather in response to money."

And the U.N. Human Development Report seems to agree. Markets are controlling the distribution of food and wealth, it says, leading to disturbing levels of inequality. "The market alone will make global citizens only of those who can afford it," concludes the report.

This marketplace morality is exacerbated by trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, which pit the poor against each other in a competition to work longer hours for less pay, fewer safety standards, and stingier benefits.

This basic analysis holds true whether Food First is talking about U.S. hunger or the appalling number of chronically hungry people elsewhere in the world.

Currently, more than 828 million go hungry, with another two billion "estimated to have deficiencies of micronutrients, such as vitamins and minerals, because their diets consist mostly of cereals and tubers," according to a study released in January by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The ten countries with the hungriest people are Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Comoros, the Congo, Djibouti, and Chad.

When you compare the dangerously inadequate diet of the poorest countries with that of the richest and most corpulent, you can see why the "1999 U.N. Human Development Report" says that "global inequalities in income and living standards have reached grotesque proportions."

And this is not because there is too little food to go around. "The world today produces more food per inhabitant than ever before," wrote Rosset in "Why Genetically Altered Food Won't Conquer Hunger," an op-ed published in The New York Times on September 1. "Enough is available to provide 4.3 pounds to every person every day: two and a half pounds of grain, beans, and nuts, about a pound of meat, milk, and eggs, and another of fruits and vegetables."

When it comes to hunger, the problem is the same in the United States as it is in countries like Burundi and the Congo: The poor are effectively disenfranchised, and the people and institutions that control the distribution of food are oblivious to their need.

What is the solution to hunger both in the United States and abroad? First, here are a few ideas that don't work.

Technological solutions: Though pesticides and "miracle" seeds have certainly increased the amount of food produced on this planet, these growing methods have not reduced the extreme hunger around the globe. This is because hunger is tied to economic inequality much more than it is to food supply. According to Food First, growing practices involving pesticides and genetic engineering cannot be sustained indefinitely without doing substantial harm to the Earth. Food First also says that small farms and sustainable growing are actually more efficient forms of agriculture.

Food aid: It sounds good, but food aid, at least that coming from the United States, is usually tied much more closely to what will benefit U.S. markets and U.S. foreign policy than to the hungriest people. And the chronic export of large amounts of food aid has the unfortunate effect of causing local markets to slump. The local farmers are undercut by the free food and sometimes end up losing their farms. Food aid is no long-term solution but a long-term danger.

Loans from the World Bank and the IMF: These institutions trap developing countries in debt cycles, and they demand market-based economic policies that prevent governments from ensuring the social and economic well-being of their citizens. This practice of taking economic sovereignty out of the hands of national governments drives down the living standards of the people in those countries.

Population control: In the 1970s, books like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, 1968), echoing Thomas Malthus's predictions from 1798, argued that worldwide population would soon exceed the food supply. The book had a huge influence on public opinion, but it also left most Western countries off the hook. The problem, concluded many population experts, was the overcrowded Third World countries. The solution--extensive birth control for people in these countries.

But, as Food First activists have long contended, most of the food on the planet goes to feed the animals we slaughter for meat, not human beings. "Much of our planet's crops do not go to feed people at all--they are fed to livestock," argues Douglas H. Boucher in the preface to The Paradox of Plenty: Hunger in a Bountiful World (Food First, 1999). "In the process, enormous amounts of protein, energy, water, and land are wasted. If our food system were truly directed towards feeding humanity, it would only need to redirect a small amount of the Earth's grain from animal production to the people who are hungry, to satisfy their needs more than adequately."

This is not to dismiss the danger that a population overload could have a destructive environmental effect on the planet. But the population problem is really a problem of poverty and the subjugation of women. When women have an adequate income, a decent education, and political freedom, they have fewer and fewer babies.

As Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, puts it in his book Development As Freedom (Knopf, 1999): "The solution of the problem of population growth (like the solution of so many other social and economic problems) can lie in expanding the freedom of the people whose interests are most directly affected by overfrequent child-bearing and child-rearing. The solution of the population problem calls for more freedom, not less."

Or, as Boucher argues in The Paradox of Plenty, "Human population growth tends to slow, not accelerate, as conditions improve for the majority of the population."

The problem with hunger is not access to food. It is access to democracy. Worldwide hunger is caused by an undemocratic distribution of food, one that stuffs the rich and powerful and denies the poor enough to live.

That's why social justice movements both here in the United States and around the world are so important. The landless workers movement in Brazil, for instance, has managed to bring about a measure of genuine land reform in that country. The Community Food Security movement in the United States, which is taking over unused urban spaces to create gardens, provides jobs and generates food for the local community. These movements see food, as well as economic justice, as a human right.

To bring about a more democratic--and better fed--world, Food First is calling on the United States to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The covenant was signed by President Jimmy Carter on October 5, 1977 but has not been ratified by the U.S. Congress. The United States is the only one of the major industrialized countries that has failed to ratify this covenant. It calls for:

* "fair wages and equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind"

* "a decent living" for workers and their families

* "reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, as well as remuneration for public holidays"

* the right to form trade unions; the right to strike

* "the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living ... including adequate food, clothing, and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions"

* "the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger"

* "taking into account the problems of both food-importing and food-exporting countries, to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need"

* "the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest achievable standard of physical and mental health" and the right to education.

We join Food First in calling on the U.S. government to sign the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

And we demand of our politicians a commitment to end all hunger in the United States--not simply to cut it in half.

Bill Bradley would allocate $10 billion annually to feed half the hungry children in the country. The current Pentagon budget is $270 billion. There's another inequality that has reached grotesque proportions.