ZWERDLING: I am just wondering how does that symbolize one of the problems that a lot of people have in countries like the United States and other rich countries in understanding what the chronic effects of hunger are in the sense that we are looking for people who are undernourished, who look to us like they are starving, not in our popular image of the emaciated bodies.
LAPPÉ: I think that may be part of it, but I think the bigger issue here is that people do not understand. They think of hunger as a lack of calories, as a lack of food rather than as a lack of power in people’s lives. And I’m saying as long as we look at the problem through the lens of a scarcity lens, we’re going to think “oh, we have to send more aid or supply more food” whereas the real issue is, are people gaining in power. What is it? More important right now, what is it that’s creating hunger, moment to moment? What is it that’s robbing people of this power over their lives? I agree that maybe part of it is that because people don’t see people actually die they don’t believe it’s happening. I’m not sure. I think a lot of people are aware of the terrible reality of hunger, even in our own country. One in four American children live in families so poor that they have a difficult time getting a healthy diet, but I think hunger is definitely invisible to most Americans.
ZWERDLING: They only look overseas.
LAPPÉ: They look overseas and hunger is not a place over there. Hunger is a system that is robbing more and more people of power over this most basic need of all: eating and feeding our children.
ZWERDLING: In just a moment we are going to go to Dr. Pedro Sanchez at the World Food Symposium, but first let me ask you sort of a callous-sounding question, which is why should everybody tuning in with us today, why should we care about the fact that there are so many undernourished people in the world? And what I mean is this, on the purely human level of course we feel terrible, we feel troubled to see anybody else suffering and we don’t want them to suffer, but you have often argued that fighting hunger is one of the top, maybe the top priority, of the world right now. Why is that?
LAPPÉ: As I say, it’s a symptom of this deeper mechanism that is robbing people of power and that includes us. So hunger isn’t a place over there in Africa. Hunger is a system, not a place. And we are caught up in that system. You and I . . . maybe we’re not suffering as much yet, but certainly our ecological base is being undercut, our power is being removed from us as well so it’s one system that we’re perpetuating and I think that we’re perpetuating it not because we want it. Dan, we couldn’t go out on the street anywhere, any of the people watching us couldn’t go out in their hometowns and find one person, one person who would want more hungry people in the world or would want 14,000 to die today of hunger. Nobody would say that so we have to ask why does this go on. I believe it’s because of the power of ideas, of belief systems. One of my favorite social analysts is Erich Fromm who said it is man’s humanity that makes him so inhumane. And what he means by that it’s human beings’ unique capacity – their frames of orientation -- what I call mental maps. We can’t see what’s outside of our mental maps so we’re not able to see the elephant in the living room . . . what it is that’s robbing people of power. This notion’s only been around a short time in human history, that economics is outside of democracy, that economics is driven by a single rule, that is the highest return to existing wealth and that ends up concentrating, concentrating, concentrating until we have almost a billion people going hungry.
ZWERDLING: But the profit motive has always been there, I mean since the beginning of time people have wanted to profit, and what I think puzzles me and a lot of people is why are there still so many hungry people. World leaders have been talking about fighting hunger for umpteen years. It was 1943, as we heard in the introduction, that President Roosevelt, in the middle of World War II, brought together all the Allies, 40-some world leaders and they committed themselves to fighting world hunger. Let me just quote something. In 1948 the United Nations, the new United Nations, which had just recently been formed, declared “Everyone has the right to food.” The right to food. So here we are now 2005, what’s going wrong?
LAPPÉ: You said that the profit motive has always been around. Actually, markets, market exchange, have been around for as long as we’ve been in societies, right? But it was imbedded with other values, within family life, culture and religion and it was part of other human relationships. It wasn’t a separate arena driven by its one-rule edict and that is the highest return to existing wealth. So if you base your entire economic system outside of human values, democratic values of fairness, accountability, inclusion and you just say our whole economy is going to run on the highest return to people who already have wealth, then you end up where we are today where you have 491 billionaires who have more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population earn in an entire year. This is the elephant in the living room that we have to look at. Then what are the solutions? What is it that begins to imbed these economic transactions in a value system and that’s where the right to food comes in. That is a human value.
ZWERDLING: Before we get to the solution, though, let’s talk about the problems a little bit more. So you see one of the big problems in the world as being people driven by the desire to accumulate more wealth.
LAPPÉ: No, I don’t think it’s about human greed. You see I don’t think most people want there to be hunger. It’s just that we have acquiesced to this idea because we don’t think there’s any alternative, that our economics has to be run by one rule. So you don’t have to say you know the Walton family, that they’re all greedy because they are five of the top 10 billionaires in the world. You don’t have to say that, it’s just that it’s a logical consequence of a system that we go along with because we don’t believe there’s an alternative.
ZWERDLING: Well, let me tick off a few big institutions, big forces that I think most of the students tuning in today and others know about and are wondering what is their role in fighting or exacerbating world hunger.
The multinationals. When you look at the statistics it’s quite incredible. Four or five companies control a majority of the pesticides sold in the world. I think it’s five companies control 65% or more of the grain sold in the world, right? Ten companies control a majority of the seeds sold in the world. Now, some people argue, people like Thomas Friedman, the best–selling author and columnist with the New York Times. He argues that it’s that very global economy which is going to solve world hunger because these corporations have the long reach to sell their seeds and grains and pesticides to poor people who need to eat more all around the world.
LAPPÉ: Let’s remember that 80% of the world’s hunger are rural people themselves, many of them small farmers who are producing for a market to make their income and to grow the food they need and to buy what they need, right? Well, because of precisely this single rule -- “the elephant-in-the-living room mechanism” -- that I’m talking about where concentration increases that we end up exactly where you say. So let’s just take one commodity. Let’s take coffee. There are millions of small coffee producers in the world. Half of our coffee is produced by these small, poor farmers. Well, then you have a situation when those in the middle, these big corporations, are the processors and the roasters. Ten years ago the producing countries overall kept about one-third of what you and I might spend when we buy our cup of coffee. About one-third of that remained with those poor countries with the small producers. Today it is one-twelfth.
ZWERDLING: So these are countries like Guatemala, Kenya, Ethiopia.
LAPPÉ: Yes! Yes. In one decade the proportion that remained with the poor countries and a lot of that in the hands of the poor farmer has shrunk from one-third to one-twelfth because those in the middle, the Nestle’s of the world and the supermarket chains, they are keeping more and more. So when you and I buy a banana, 40% goes to the supermarket, less than 2% to the person who actually harvested that banana.
ZWERDLING: And is that because as these corporations -- the Starbucks, the Nestle’s, the Wal-Marts -- as they gain more power, are you saying that they are grabbing more of the money in the system for themselves?
LAPPÉ: In a very dramatic way, in a very dramatic way. More and more in a few years, and therefore, the prices that small producers can get. In about a 3-year period recently the prices overall of raw commodities that these poor farmers are producing in the third world dropped by 50%. Can you imagine being in business and your prices fall by 50%?
ZWERDLING: So you’re saying if I’m one of those farmers, I’m actually making less money today than I did just a few years ago.
LAPPÉ: Yes, so you have to make more products, more and more and more, just to stay where you are and you’re already poor.