Left Notes: "Reaping What We Sow" - commentary on politics and culture

Before I started identifying as a socialist and studying marxist theory, I read a book that challenged how I thought about economic and political issues. The book was Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity by Frances Moore-Lappe. The premise of the book is that hunger is not the result of scarcity but rather the result of the economic system. Growing up in the 1980s in America I was familiar with media images of starving people, particularly in the "third world" and particularly in Ethiopia. The common understanding — and one which I, as a liberal Democrat, had not questioned — was that people were starving because there was not enough food for everyone. The author of Food First convincingly argue that it is the colonial economic and political system imposed on them that have created the hunger crisis.

The author of the book helped form an organization, Food First — The Institute for Food and Development Policy. The organization "provides leadership to the struggle for reforming the global food system from the bottom up, offering an antidote to the myths and obfuscations that make change seem difficult to achieve." The following is excerpted from an editorial, "Reaping What We Sow" by Christine Ahn of Food First:

Last year, 23.3 million people sought emergency food, according to Second Harvest, the nation's largest emergency food provider. However, approximately 3.2 million hungry had to be turned away. Forty percent of the households seeking help had a working adult, one out of three were children under 18, and one out of ten were elderly.

With all the wealth generated in the last decade, the assumption was that increased philanthropy could compensate for cuts in government services. Despite the valiant efforts by charities, they still cannot meet the burgeoning demands for food. There will always be ups and downs in any capitalist economy, but what distinguishes this period from previous economic downturns is the denial of a social safety net to the country's most vulnerable, our children and elderly.

In the six years since welfare reform was passed, the majority who were pushed off welfare have failed to find living wage jobs. According to a landmark study by Boston University Medical Center, children in families whose welfare benefits were cut have 50 percent higher rates of hospitalization and hunger. One in five mothers pushed off welfare has had to reduce meal portions because they didn't have enough money to buy adequate food. But news of growing hunger, poverty, and unemployment in the world's richest country has been shut out from the nation's capital.

While our nation's policymakers turn a blind eye to the poor and unemployed, they have increased military spending by $34.5 billion. Military expenditures will reach $395 billion or 18 percent of the federal budget, while our social safety net constitutes just over 1 percent.

More military spending will not ensure homeland security if our legislators ignore the growing economic insecurity of the millions who don't have food or jobs in the U.S. If Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the harvest, then we would do well to heed one of the oldest farming wisdoms: you reap what you sow. This Thanksgiving should be a reminder to each and every one of us of our responsibility to decide the fate of our nation. We do have a choice between becoming a nation invested in war or a nation built on peace and prosperity.

Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity is currently out of print but I recommend to anyone interested in how a wealthy society allows so many people to go hungry to check it out from a library or look over the publications offered at the Food First Bookstore.

President Bush has a slogan for his education reform plan: "No child left behind." But how can we leave no child behind in the area of education if they and their families do not have access to food first? This Thursday is Thanksgiving in the United States — a holiday where millions of Americans "give thanks" and take time to think of those less fortunate. This Thanksgiving holiday, let's not just be thankful for our individual prosperity and sorrowful for the less prosperous — let's make a commitment to changing our unjust economic system which keeps millions hungry while producing enough food to feed everyone. Let's, as a society, make a commitment to leave no one behind. We should all demand that our governments fix their priorities and make food first!

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