Thread: Poverty and Food Insecurity in the Developing World

Poverty and Food Insecurity in the Developing World: For Us, Tolls the Bell


by Arun Shrivastava
Global Research, May 7, 2009


Senator Lugar and others [Senators John Kerry, Susan Collins, Robert Casey, Richard Durbin and Thomas Harkin] of the US Senate have introduced ‘Global Food Security Act’ [GFSA, No. S384] to be administered by the USAID. [1] ‘The bill was read twice and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations.’ Although it seems to have a humanitarian purpose, GFSA is as sinister as the two pending bills HR875 and S425. I say this because not one US regulatory authority has successfully regulated industries in the interest of the people at least in the last ninety-odd years. Monopolies have been protected and cartels continue to kill in the US and across the world. And the second reason is that USAID is actually an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest which has little to do with humanitarianism.


There are reasons to suspect that this triad of bills when they become Acts will be misused against the weak and the poor, hence the need to evaluate the purpose of the bill.


Blaming food insecurity and hunger on poverty [essentially, inability to earn sufficient cash to buy food] has been the official position of most governments and of international institutions like UN-FAO, World Bank, IMF, and CGIAR. Unfortunately such notions serve powerful economic and political interests that perpetuate hunger, malnutrition, diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, urban slums and filth and rural poverty globally.


Those who influence the developmental agenda of governments seldom pause to think that farmers and gardeners can always grow enough food to stave off hunger and malnutrition from less than 200 square meters of land; with about 2000 square meters they can feed themselves quite well with some surplus.


For rural Asians, Africans and South American farmers growing food has been a way of life. Yet the irony is that they are facing food shortage, hunger, under-nutrition, and poor health.


Sir Albert Howard, sent by the British Government to diagnose the causes of famine, hunger and deaths in India, after three decades of research, said this: “The agricultural practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test--they are almost as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie or of the ocean. The small-holdings of China, for example, are still maintaining a steady output and there is no loss of fertility after forty centuries of management.â€

If this comes to pass, I guess Mr Celente's warnings/predictions about food riots are not too far off. It was predicted by 2012 along with tax revolts.

This is disgusting and immoral. Americans must fight to keep their gardens and farms.

I heard a woman on C-Span today talking about Childhood Obesity in our country and how our government must have programs to ensure that our children eat healthy foods and exercise. She wanted prevention measures in regard to Childhood Obesity to be part of the health care reform system. There is a bit of a contradiction, the government is trying to take away our right to grow our own fresh healthy foods. Yet, they are promoting Monsanto and other large companies that put all sorts of dangerous chemicals and preservatives in our food and make us eat it?