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The Politics, Power, and Potential of Food

How times have changed. Fifty years ago, few doubted that a combination of high-yielding hybrids, chemical fertilizers, powerful pesticides, extensive irrigation, and big machinery would make hunger a thing of the past. We had but to spread the “Green Revolution” around the world and modern technology would give us a cornucopian abundance of food – as long as we controlled population growth.

Now, we’re not so sure. In some places and for some people, the ability to produce enough food remains life’s central challenge. But when we look at the global food system, we see a whole new set of problems more related to overproduction than to the challenges associated with scarcity of food. For example, chronically low prices paid to farmers, inordinately high levels of food waste, and the repurposing of grains and oilseeds for feed and fuel rather than for food are all a reflection of systemic overproduction. The high indices of hunger and malnutrition among the world’s peasant farmers are also a reflection of oversupply: large, industrial farms with massive market power are producing vast surpluses and monopolizing land and resources, driving these small farmers into bankruptcy and hunger.

We’ve gone from questioning our capacity to produce enough food to questioning the way we produce it. Even though the rate of global population growth has leveled off and we are producing more food than ever before, nearly a third of the world’s people presently suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Feeding them – and the world’s projected population of 10 billion people by 2050 – has become a high-profile challenge for governments, multilateral institutions, relief and development programs, big philanthropy, and even the Fortune 500.

Fears of future famines and widespread malnutrition have unleashed a steady march of initiatives to double food production within a generation. Today, a powerful phalanx of genetic technologies, big data, big farms, and big supermarkets has partnered with governments and multilateral agencies in a global push to end world hunger.

But will producing twice as much food tax the resources of our planet beyond capacity? Our food system’s ecological footprint is already alarming. The loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services costs over 10 percent of the world’s annual gross product. More than 75 billion tons of fertile soil are lost yearly due to desertification, soil erosion, and soil degradation. Industrial agriculture uses up 75 percent of the world’s fresh water and has led to a loss of over 90 percent of the world’s agrobiodiversity. Agricultural runoff has created vast eutrophic “dead zones” from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic Sea. Are further contamination, loss of habitat, and species extinction inevitable consequences of feeding the world?

Further, as the increase in extreme weather events, the disappearing polar ice cap, and the rising of the seas all make clear, our greenhouse-gas-spewing industrial food system has entered a dangerous negative feedback loop. The way we produce and consume food is undermining our ability to produce food at all.

Food itself has gone from being something that is good for you to something that is often bad for you. In addition to hunger, obesity, pandemics, food poisoning, and diet-related disease have been added to the list of food problems. Because of the ways we produce, process, deliver, and consume it, food abundance has become as troublesome as food scarcity. We’ve become as worried about the solutions as we are about the problem. The addendum to the question “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” is “and not kill ourselves in the process?”

These questions are all grounded in longstanding frameworks of scarcity – of too many people competing for too few resources. Population expert Paul Ehrlich claims the earth’s human population must be reduced by over two-thirds, to 1.5–2 billion, if we are all to live a modern urban lifestyle. But this straight-line resource accounting does not analyze the political-economic nature of the social systems that drive resource consumption, and leads us to the irresolvable ethical dilemma of which eight out every ten people should be eliminated.

Nonetheless, hunger and the depletion of resources are real, as is the expected growth of the planet’s population by another 3 billion. But the assumption that scarcity and population growth cause hunger is riddled with contradictions, as is the notion that food production is invariably destructive.

In the 1970s, when one in seven people on the planet were going hungry, fear of planetary “overshoot” framed the international discussions at the Club of Rome, the United Nations (UN), and most of the northern agencies working in the Third World. The conventional, Malthusian wisdom held that the rising global population would eventually eat us out of house and home. Unless we curbed population growth and doubled food production with modern agricultural technologies, the planet and its human inhabitants would be destroyed by billions of empty bellies.

A half-century after these dire predictions, the world economy has generated a massive increase in food and wealth. However, at least one person in every seven is still officially going hungry (the real figure is probably twice that) and, if measured realistically, the numbers of people living in poverty are not falling significantly. But it is not the poor and the hungry who are putting pressure on our food systems and the environment; it is the growing market demand from middle-class consumers in both the Global North and the Global South – consumers whose appetites for grain and soy-fed meat and out-of-season produce are economic pillars of the global food system. While the double specter of overpopulation and scarcity is still prominent in antihunger and environmental discourse, the bane of overconsumption is quietly emerging alongside overproduction as the challenge of our times.

Today, we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people – that’s one-and-a-half times more food than is actually needed to feed every man, woman, and child of the 7.6 billion people presently walking the earth. Nonetheless, depending on the metric, between 1 billion and 3 billion people are still going hungry. This is why – we are constantly told – we have to double food production by 2050. Doubling food production within a generation has been a global imperative since the 1960s when the Green Revolution claimed to have saved a billion people from starvation. This claim, inferred from an increase in global food production (though never actually verified on the ground), held that hunger was a problem of underdevelopment to be solved by extending modern technologies offered by Western powers. These assumptions – and the highly lucrative expansion of the agribusiness sector – led people to ignore hunger when it appeared in the midst of wealth, abundance, low-population density, and high productivity, for example in the United States.

The permanent celebration of the technological effectiveness of the Green Revolution, and the constant calls to end global hunger seem contradictory. As late as 2015, the UN announced that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were being met and that we were on track to end hunger and poverty. At the same time, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), while admitting that there was 50 percent more than enough food to feed everyone, insisted that we had to increase our food supply by 70 percent over the next thirty years. What can we make of this? How is it that billions of people are hungry and malnourished even though there is too much food? If we are already overproducing food, how will producing more food end hunger? We never seem to have enough food – even when we produce too much of it. Like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, hunger seems to increase each time it is eradicated.

The perpetual calls to end hunger, on the one hand, and to maintain our faith in technological progress, on the other, is a globalized form of cognitive dissonance that avoids addressing the contradiction of hunger in a world caught in the grips of overproduction and overconsumption.

Calls to end hunger routinely avoid distinguishing between need and demand. People are going hungry not because of lack of food, but because they are too poor to buy it. That most of the people suffering from hunger are farmers is a contradiction that is easily missed in the narratives of scarcity, hunger, and technological solutions.

The uneasy question posed in the title of this book, “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” appeals to our emotions and our ethics at the irreducible level of food, humanity, and nature. To answer “no” is to succumb to extinction, or to a cynical future of haves and have-nots, in which a privileged minority eats well and thrives in a lush, green world, while the majority is condemned to bad food and misery in a polluted, climate-ravaged global desert. To say “yes” is to reaffirm our faith in the technological approaches that have helped bring us to the brink of environmental collapse. “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” is a question that – unless interrogated – leads us, quite literally, to a dead end. The critical response of this book is both “No, not...