Letter from the Executive Director of Food First, Kathy McAfee
July 26, 2004
Dear friends and supporters of Food First,
The message put forward by Food First’s founders — that hunger is caused neither by scarcity nor by “overpopulation” — was prescient for its time and life-changing for many readers. Some of you became long-term Food First members and donors. Many of you have carried our message forward to challenge the policies and ideas that create and reinforce hunger and its root cause, inequality. Together, our influence has been tremendous.
Meanwhile, since Food First was founded in 1975, world food production has risen more than the population. Today, there is more food per person on earth, yet more people are hungry than ever before. Advocates of profit-driven, global “free” trade promised that this form of globalization would ease food insecurity. Instead, it has led to even more malnutrition.
And, the notion that ignorance and excess population are the causes of hunger persists, encouraged by those who stand to gain from them. Agribusiness firms and public officials insist that subsidized U.S. food exports (even though they put third world farmers out of work) and genetically engineered crops (even though they are not more productive) are the solutions. For this reason alone, it is vital that Food First continue to grow.
But even more is at stake, and much more is possible. The world has entered a period of crisis, marked by extreme danger but also unprecedented possibility for positive change. Food, always a deeply felt personal and cultural issue, is increasingly a political issue and a pivotal geopolitical issue.
In the past decade, agriculture, free trade, and intellectual property (patenting) policies have become a leading edge of the U.S.-corporate push for global economic dominance. Vast political and financial resources are being spent to promote subsidized food and agro-chemical exports; crop genetic engineering; privatization of water, land, seeds, genes, and knowledge; and the purported rights of private firms to invest anywhere and plunder resources from anywhere.
Corporate-industrial farming is driving family farmers off the land. It is exploitative and dehumanizing to agricultural workers, environmentally destructive, and cruel to animals. It produces poor-tasting food that is often unsafe. Nevertheless, it is the model that the U.S. government actively promotes as the future of food and farming worldwide.
But there are positive signs. Increasingly, countries, citizens’ organizations, and farming communities are resisting this model because they see it for what it is: an attempt to control the rules and resources most basic to their livelihoods, in the interests of an economic elite.
Hence, the rejection of the U.S. agenda at the World Trade Organization conference at Canc�n and right now in Geneva. Hence, the refusal of Latin American negotiators to accept the extreme U.S. proposals for expansion of patent rights. Hence, the resistance to imports of transgenic crops, seen as a Trojan horse for the dumping of subsidized, factory-farm surpluses abroad.
For this reason, too, we are seeing the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers and fishers — from Mexico to Brazil, from India to Thailand to the Philippines, and in some Northern countries, too — in defense of their rights to land, water, and seeds, and, the right to remain food producers.
At the same time, farmers and agroecologists around the world have been achieving impressive successes in increasing food production by sustainable methods. We can now say with confidence — and we can illustrate with living examples — that there are viable alternatives to this hunger-producing, ecologically irrational model of agriculture.
A real struggle is being waged now, in fields and countrysides around the world, in treaty negotiations and in legislatures, in editorial meetings and classrooms, and the streets, over whether the corporate industrial model or a more just and sustainable food system will prevail.
This is the challenge that Food First has taken on.
We enter this period with some staff changes. After ten years at Food First, Peter Rosset is moving to Mexico, where he will continue to work on land reform and agroecology. Anuradha Mittal has left to start her own organization. Raj Patel landed a coveted postdoctoral fellowship in South Africa, and Paulina Novo has taken a job with a sister Bay-Area NGO. We look forward to continuing to work with all of them.
I began my work as Executive Director this summer, with the capable support of the other members our talented staff: Martha Katigbak, Marilyn Borchardt, Nick Parker, Rowena Garcia, Michael Manoochehri, Dean Royer, and Christine Ahn. Melissa Moore has joined us as Development Associate, and we are hiring a new Policy Analyst. Clancy Drake is back from maternity leave, with the cooperation (usually) of her new son, Elijah.
Food First’s core programs continue, including our Cuba research exchanges, our work for equitable trade and economic and social human rights, and our critical analysis of biotechnology and corporate concentration in the food system. We are increasing our work on alternative principles, policies, and practices, and putting new emphasis on the positive synergies between sustainable farming and biodiversity. (Our Program Themes are described in more detail at foodfirst.org/progs.)
With your help, and in coalition with many thousands of like-minded people around the world, we can build — even in the midst of crisis — the beginnings of a better world.
Yours, for the right of all to be free from hunger,
Kathy McAfee
Executive Director
Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
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