The Importance of Social and Political Causes of Hunger in the community

When food is treated as just another product to be bought and sold instead of something all people need and have a right to, profit from selling food becomes more important than feeding people, and community health suffers. Many people now shop for food in stores owned by large corporations. They buy foods made by large corporations, grown on land owned by large corporations, using seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides produced by large corporations.

Corporate control of all parts of food security forces farmers out of business and off their land. When corporations use land to grow food to sell outside the region, people living and working in those communities must eat food brought in from elsewhere, if they can afford to buy it. Corporations profit from this food “insecurity” as communities, and whole countries, become dependent on the global market for food. When the market fails to meet people’s food needs, people go hungry and corporations profit further by selling food to governments to be distributed as food aid. Until people have control of their food security, hunger will be the biggest product of the corporations that control the production and distribution of food. In Zimbabwe, farmers once planted many kinds of grains. During the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the government and international agencies brought a new kind of maize for farmers to plant. Farmers liked the hybrid maize because it had large grains, grew quickly, and was easy to sell. The government bought much of their crop, and then resold it to other countries and to cities in Zimbabwe where food was scarce. Over time, maize became the most common food to eat in Zimbabwe, and most farmers grew it in large quantities. Then came years of drought. Very little rain fell over the fields of Zimbabwe and other countries in southern Africa. The maize grew poorly, and there was little else to eat. Many families had stored grains for times of hunger, but much of their stores of maize had rotted. This was a surprise, because the millet and sorghum they used to grow had lasted many seasons in storage.

When the rains finally started, they came in huge storms that uprooted crops and washed away precious soil from the dry fields. Hunger grew so severe in Zimbabwe that the government was forced to ask for food aid from the United Nations. Large shipments of maize came in by airplane and were handed out to hungry people across the country. But food aid and the new hybrid seeds could not solve the long term problem of hunger and food security. The farmers realized they could not bring more rain, but they could change how they farmed to make better use of the rain. Farmers began to collect and plant seeds from small grain crops such as sorghum and millet that had always grown well in Zimbabwe. Farmers planted every kind of seed they could get. If drought destroyed one crop, others would surely survive. Some farmers left their crop stubble to rot in the field after harvest, protecting their soil from washing away during the hard rains. The next season, their soil was still soft and good for planting. Some farmers planted lab beans after the grain harvest so something was always growing. They could feed these beans to livestock, and the bean plants also helped to hold and enrich the soil. It still rains less in Zimbabwe than it once did. But some farmers there no longer rely on non-native seeds or international food aid, and have become better able to prevent hunger, by growing crops that can survive the drought.

Ever since the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s, corporations and international agencies have claimed they can “feed the world” with “improved seeds,” chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. While they have succeeded in gaining control of farm land, seed supplies, marketing and distribution systems, and so on, they have failed to stop world hunger, and have often made hunger worse.