Question from North Carolina A&T University.  What role is the United States taking in helping the local farmers in North Africa concerning technology?

LAPPÉ:  I think that whether it is the U.S. or any aid coming in from the outside,  it’s only as good as whether or not the recipient of that aid is in a position to use it to empower themselves.  And so for example Wangari Maathai, when I was there with her, I realized that she was getting support from the European aid agency that was definitely helping there to empower these women to create, as I mentioned, the kitchen gardens and to reconnect with their more appropriate seeds and to grow the food that was draught resistant.  It was very positive because it was going through a local group that was an empowering organization.  I often make the example that how good would it be if you and I were getting foreign aid for America and it was to help poor black farmers in Mississippi but it was channeled through the White Citizens Council from the 1950s and ‘60s, a group that was really dead set against the advancement of poor black farmers.  So aid is only as good as the whether or not the recipient is really working to empower with people in their countries to empower them.  I mentioned earlier the Farmer Field School which is very much an example of what we have learned over the last 30 years of what works where this aid is actually working in very much in a group process format in the field, working with farmers to improve their productive capacity by working with nature rather than becoming dependent on a seed that is sold at a cost by say Monsanto.

ZWERDLING:  Forgive me, may I jump in for a moment and not only ask you questions but help answer this question.  A few years ago I was in Tanzania doing a story about an effort to help farmers – poor farmers in Northern Tanzania – get more cooking oil.  A lot of people don’t realize that one of the big problems facing poor people all around the world is that they don’t get enough fats – you know here in this country we are all obsessed with not eating too much fat; well in countries like Tanzania, people need more fat.  So there was this big effort – big international aid effort to give hundreds of millions of dollars to Tanzania to build a big huge seed oil factory.  Well they built the factory, they shipped them seeds from all around the region.  After a matter of months, I think or only a year or two, the equipment started breaking down at this huge multi-zillion dollar oil factory and the factory ground to a halt.  Why?  Because there were no spare parts.  So a fellow who happens to be from the United States and works in foreign aid and lives in a village turned to a friend of his who builds motorcycles and he said could you invent some simple machine that one farmer could use to turn sunflower seeds into cooking oil?  This motorcycle guy invented a machine that one man or woman can use to press cooking oil out of sunflower seeds.  And this small little aid group started going village to village selling these machines at market cost – there is no foreign aid here.  And by the time I got to Tanzania, hundreds of farmers and their families were using this simple oil press and it had changed their lives, their economics, and their health.

Now an international aid group said this is great!  We want to give you a million dollars now to spread this everywhere and the head of this local foreign aid group said no, no, no.  The minute big groups get involved and give us millions of dollars, we’re going to be finished and then they’ll want to control us.  Let’s keep it small.  

Question from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. If we’re distributing food to alleviate hunger, food aid, how do we keep people from becoming dependent on that food aid?  And from becoming dependent on corporate food distribution systems?  Can they be self-sufficient?

LAPPÉ:  I think that is an excellent question.  I think Dr. Sanchez was speaking to this when he said that first of all food aid should never be given to alleviate chronic hunger, chronic hunger, day in and day out hunger, it’s not appropriate to give food aid.  What is appropriate is to, again, support these empowerment movements that exist throughout the world today so that people can feed themselves.  Where there is a famine situation, absolutely we have to come forth with relief to feed people when they are starving, but as was pointed out earlier, that should be purchased as much as possible locally so that you’re not further Impoverishing the local farmers.  In many instances in Africa in my adult life, let’s say 30 some years, when there have been famines, there have also been surpluses in other African countries that can supply the grain to meet that famine need rather than the U.S. exporting our grain that has been undercutting local farmers and making them poorer.  So I think the principle of local supply to meet crisis situations and also remembering that famines may be triggered by a draught or some natural phenomenon, but famines in today’s world are often inimitably human-made.  The conditions are created by human beings so we have to begin to address those conditions of warfare.  Now the U.S. is a major arms vendor in the world today and small arms killed about half a million people last year, so conflict, armed conflict, is definitely associated with famine in today’s world, especially in Africa so I think that all of the things that we are talking about today that are bottom-up approaches to empower people to get at the root of the cause of the conflict which then precipitates the situation where people are vulnerable.  When there is a drought then a famine follows.  But I just want to underscore that there is no famine that is produced simply by nature’s vagaries.

ZWERDLING:  Now, in those cases you mentioned where there was famine in this part of the world and surpluses only a few hundred or a thousand miles away in other countries, what happened to those surpluses and why weren’t they shipped to the famine areas?

LAPPÉ:   I can’t claim to be an expert in each of these instances.  I recommend a book World Hunger: 12 Myths, which Food First published.   The books that I wrote – co-wrote several years ago -- do address some specific examples in that where the interest of the U.S. comes into play.  The interest of our largest, I want to underscore the largest agro-business farmers, wanting to keep open those markets and putting pressure… again, it comes back to do we have democracy here?  Is our government really responding to our desire not to cause a dependency that the questioner just asked.  Americans don’t want people in Africa to become dependent on us, but for those who are just looking at the logic, at what I call the single rule economics, and logic of highest return to shareholders, of course, they want the most markets abroad possible so of course they are going to want to shift that food wherever in a famine situation.  So there’s a real conflict.  If we don’t have democracy here in America representing our concerns then those narrow economic interests at the top will infect our political process and create outcomes that we abhor.

Question from Arizona State University West.  What can we do as students here on campus to help eliminate hunger?

LAPPÉ:   Well I think that you need to tell the world that you have part of the answer there in Arizona because you’re one of the few states that is actually getting money out of politics so that we can reclaim our democracy, so that our aid and our foreign policy in general, reflect our values and not the narrow interests of those at the top of the economic ladder.  I just want to tell you a story about a student I know who’s doing something that is having immediate effect on alleviating hunger.  A young woman named Lina Musayef at George Washington.  A few years ago at an OXFAM gathering she met a Guatemalan coffee farmer and decided that what she wanted to do was to go back to her college and have fair trade-only coffee on her campus.  Because fair-trade coffee means that that small farmers in Central America or Indonesia are part of a global network where the farmers are guaranteed a fair market price, currently about more than double –much more than double the current market price.  And so Lina said I want to be part of this and she actually then created the first Students for Fair Trade on one campus and that was just a few years ago, and now it’s on 300 campuses.

So I think that’s something immediate that we can all do is say wait a minute, I can do power shopping.  When I purchase anything, I can think what are the power implications of this?  How do I empower myself and somebody else by choosing what will bring them a fair return?  And yesterday in USA Today, I don’t know if you see USA Today there are these little snap charts and it said that they’d asked 550 college students from across the country would you pay more for a product that brought a fair return and fair conditions of work to the people, to the workers?  Would you pay a little bit more?  And 89% of these students said they would.  So I think the fair trade movement is something very immediate, very concrete and it sends this larger message that we can re-imbed economic life with democratic values. 

Everybody needs a buddy so if you don’t have a buddy system right now, send out e-mails to who you know and say if you don’t have fair-trade coffee on your campus, you’d like to hold a meeting tomorrow night and talk about it and go to Students for Fair Trade website and they have a tremendous number of resources there.  I’m sure they will be willing to talk to you about how to get started on your campus.  Already this movement has increased the livelihood of 800,000 farmers.  This movement for fair trade has only been in the U.S. only seven years.  In Europe they got a head start on this.  But it’s just thrilling to think that when you’re doing this, you are directly allowing people to stay on their land, feed their kids, help their kids go to school.  It’s an immediate return.

ZWERDLING:  A few years ago I went to Guatemala and spent a week traveling around the countryside, mostly in the mountains, visiting coffee farmers with one of the fair trade inspectors who travels on these little grueling dirt roads, helping farmers organize fair trade organizations and helping them sell their coffee to the fair trade market.  And it was just a little pocket of the fair trade movement, just one week’s worth in Guatemala, but I was astonished and you can hear my story at NPR.org  -- it was astonishing what a big difference joining the fair trade movement had made in these farmers’ lives.  

Question from Stockton College in New Jersey.  How do you get the general public to realize the moral implications of their everyday decisions so as to make food choices that address world hunger?

LAPPÉ: I don’t think it’s by guilt.  I think guilt does not work.  That finger-wagging doesn’t work.  It doesn’t work, Danny.  I think what works is sending the message both in visual in imagery, is through storytelling,  It is through the words that you use to enable people to see that there is another way of being in the world that gives us a greater sense of power, a greater sense of self-respect, a greater sense of possibility and connection with other people in the world and how great is that?  I mean who wouldn’t want to be part of something like that, so it’s communicating to the people that we are all part of a system that is robbing us of choice and there are a lot of young people listening to us today.  Where is their future?  Where are your futures -- all of you listening to me -- when your job may be the wages that you could get are being undercut by people who are not allowed to organize real unions in China.  You’re not immune!  None of us is immune. 

So I think the message is that we are all part of one global system today that is either going to be fair and viable and sustain the planet or it’s going to be gross inequalities growing and our life support systems undercut by global warming and pollution and so it’s really encouraging people to see that there is this critical choice point but not with guilt but with excitement to choose the path of life.  I feel so strongly that people will gravitate to this if they see the possibility that we can get beyond this downward spiral.

ZWERDLING:  So when you go to a dinner party, when you hang out with friends tomorrow, do you have a sense of how you’re going to talk to them about these issues in a different way than you might have talked before?  Or do you need Frankie to give you a more specific example?

STUDENT:  No.  On our campus we are actually trying to get a fair trade policy on our campus and things of that nature.  So I mean what you’re saying makes a lot of sense to try and promote that there are all these different ways to buy to make your decision.  So that makes a great possibility to try and change.

LAPPÉ:   And if you assume the best of people.  I mean I think even the World Bank’s recent report that in a big study they did, 80% of the people said that the inequalities in their own countries are unfair.  So there is a common sense of fairness that is innate, not just in human beings it seems now, but the research is showing even in other primates, so we can trust that basic sense of fairness so we don’t have to say oh, you nasty person, you’re unfair, but you can trust that most of us have this instinct that it’s either going to work for all of us or it’s going to work for none of us.  And so I think that another piece of this that brings the fair trade movement right home and wherever we are now we can relate to a movement called The Living Wage Campaign that has now succeeded in a 100 cities around the United States because our federal government has backed away from its commitment to ending poverty and has let the minimum wage buying power sink by one-quarter in 25 years.  And so wherever you are and whatever campus you’re on, there is somewhere near you a Living Wage Campaign that you can connect to and a group called Acorn is very much involved in this nationally, but there are many faith-based organizations that are supporting these movements for a living wage, and you can find it, I’m sure, if you Google Living Wage Campaign.