its people first are feeding themselves. This applies to the United States as much as to any other country. As we studied, read and interviewed, we found that the media-repeated themes of scarcity, guilt and fear are all based on myths. In fact, we had to learn that: 1. Every country in the world has the capacity to feed itself. 2. The hungry are not our enemies nor our competitors. 3. The malnourished abroad are not hungry because of individual greed of the average American. Rather, the hungry are victims of a scarcity-creating system. Hunger, in fact, is not the "problem" at all. Hunger is the symptom of a disease, and we are its victims in much the same way as are the nomads in Mali or peasants in India. We have come to see that no society setting out to put food first can maintain the concentration of wealth and power that characterizes most nations today. The heaviest constraint on people-oriented food production and distribution turns out to be the inequality generated by our type of economic systemironically, the very system now being exported to underdeveloped countries as the "answer" to their food problem. We are not saying that the solution to hunger lies in better distribution of food while keeping intact the present distribution of power. We are saying something else: that hunger will only be addressed when we confront the more fundamental issue of who controls and who participates in the production process. Thus, to accept the challenge of Food First is to confront the basic assumptions of our present economic system. The greatest reward for our work has been the discovery of realistic and liberating answers to a most urgent question: What can Americans do? Although the answers are not simple, we know at least that Americans alone can't solve the world food problem. Hungry people do, can, and will feed themselves if they are allowed to. ff people are not feeding themselves you can be sure there are powerful obstacles in·the way. Now, instead of asking, "How can we feed the world?" we ask an entirely different question: "What are we doing-and what is being done in our name and with our tax money-to erect those obstacles? And how should we work to remove them?" The task of Americans now becomes clear. More important October 1977 RAIN Page 11 than sending food aid or designing rural development projects for the Third World is building a movement in this countrya movement that lays bare the truth that it is a single system, supported by governments, corporations and landed elites, that is undermining food security both here and abroad. We are discovering that in underdeveloped countries, the forces cutting people out of the production process, and, therefore, out of consumption, are the same forces that have turned our food system into one of the most tightly controlled sectors of our own economy. Fewer and fewer farms account for a larger and larger portion of our food. We get increased and needless processing and less nutrition for higher prices.·· Thus, as we fight to democratize our food economy in this country, we are fighting directly against the very forces that promote hunger in other countries. There is no other road to food security-for others or for us. We have been misled to believe that, if justice becomes a priority, production will be sacrificed. We have found the opposite to be true. It is the land monopolizers, both traditional landed elites and corporate agribusiness, who have proven themselves to be the most inefficient, unreliable and destructive users of food resources. The only guarantee of long-term productivity and food security is for people to have control over their own food resources here and in other countries as well. The first step, however, is to demystify the problem of hunger. This is where we would like to help. We did not start out as experts. We began just as you might. We became interested. Food loomed as the greatest problem of our lifetime. What could be more compelling? As we learned more, read what the "experts" were reading, traveled through our own country and abroad, we learned that the solution to world hunger is no mystery. It is not locked inside the germ plasm of a seed, waiting for a brilliant young agricultural scientist to discover it. It is not spelled out in econometric studies of development planners. No, the only block to a solution to world hunger is the sense of powerlessness we are made to feel; that the enormity of the problem puts the solution outside our control; that it should be entrusted to others. The solution to world hunger is firmly in our hands.
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