Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (9 page)

•Our role is not to go into other countries to “set things right.”
Our responsibility is to remove the obstacles facing the oppressed in the third world—obstacles often created with our tax dollars, such as U.S. economic and military aid that goes selectively to some of the world’s most repressive regimes, as in Zaire, the Philippines, and El Salvador.

   The logical conclusions of what we were learning put us in conflict with positions we had previously supported, but eventually we came to an understanding that provided us with direction and energy instead of paralyzing us with guilt, fear, or despair.

We worked day and night to write
Food First
. For me the hard work and long hours were not new. What was new was working with other people. For the previous six years I had worked primarily at home or alone in the library. Now I was part of a team. With the advance from Ballantine, Joe and I were able to hire allies like Cary Fowler (now completing a book on the threat of seed patenting) and Robert Olorenshaw to help us. In the process of research and writing I communicated with hundreds more across the country and around the world, people who were willing to offer their ideas and expertise because they believed in what we were doing.

From 1975 on, learning to work as part of a team became a challenge equal to the challenge of writing
Food First
or any of the books I have worked on since. The message of this book and of
Food First
can be distilled into one theme—people can take ever greater responsibility to change the economic ground rules that determine how resources are used, once they understand these rules and can see where to begin. That means we believe in the possibility of genuine democracy. As I began to work in a team, I began to experience this democracy—so abstract and enormous in scope—as something I had to learn to live every day of my life. I discovered how little our society teaches us about how to share power.

A year and a half after we signed the contract,
Food First
was virtually completed. In all the turmoil of that intense work period, Marc and I had separated and he had taken a job with the State of California. To keep the children close to both their parents, we moved the new Institute to California.

On My Own

In January 1977, I landed with my two children, Anthony and Anna, in San Francisco. For the first time I was really on my own. Never before had I alone had to take care of finding housing and schooling for my children, buying a car, dealing with insurance and taxes. Now it was all up to me—and I was terrified. I had spent a year writing about empowerment, yet I was not sure I had inside me what it took to establish my own life. Until that point I hadn’t realized how much I had incorporated our society’s view of the single mother as social leftover.

Precisely because I had absorbed these images myself, I found my new life a surprise. Rather than experiencing my children as a burden, I discovered that I enjoyed them more than ever. While I was married, I always viewed myself as the mundane Mom—reliable but dull. But I discovered that when I was alone with my kids, I changed. I became more spontaneous. My relationship with each of them got better, closer.

Part of the change came from my decision not to have a TV anymore.
^*
To my great surprise, the children never complained. Even though I work until 5:00 every evening, I am home with them every night they are not with Marc. (We share custody.) Between 6:00 and 9:30 every school night is “our time.” We listen to the evening news on listener-supported Pacifica radio station KPFA, and often talk about what we hear. They do their homework at the kitchen table while I read the newspaper. We play games, listen to records, make up dances, do acrobatic tricks in the living room. On longer summer evenings we skate or ride bikes. Every night we have at least twenty minutes of “story time.” After story time is “lie-down time”—I lie down by each of them for five minutes or so. This is the one point in the day when we each have the other’s total attention. Feelings come out that would never come out otherwise. Sometimes we sing, or I might write messages on their backs for them to guess. Sometimes we just lie there in silence.

While others sometimes see a conflict between my work and my children, I don’t. I couldn’t accomplish what I do without them. They are my grounding force. They keep me from working so hard that I would run the risk of burning out. They pull me back from feelings of despair. They are positive. They welcome each day. With people like that around, no wonder I have energy.

But I want them to see my tears and my anger. I want them to understand the injustice in our society and others. When my daughter was three and my son was six, we lived with a Guatemalan family for four weeks while I studied Spanish. In the town of Antigua, where we lived, as in so many Latin towns, the estates of the wealthy are all behind walls, so you can’t see who owns how much. One evening we climbed the hillside behind our home. From the top we looked down on the entire valley. For the first time my children saw that just two families owned huge estates (coffee fincas) covering a large portion of the valley. My son was shocked: “But, Mommy, that isn’t fair! Those people have so much. But the people we saw this morning on the way to school were just living alongside the road. They had no houses at all.” He continued, “I wonder what would happen if we were giants and we could reach down and take all of the rich people and put them in the poor people’s houses and all of the poor people and put them in the rich people’s houses.”

I didn’t answer. I only thought how glad I was that we had come. (I still had no regrets even after they both got amoebic dysentery. I do think, however, that their most enduring memory of Guatemala is not the social injustice but that awful green-brown medicine!)

Building the “Food First” Institute

But I’ve jumped ahead of my story.

A few weeks after I landed in San Francisco, the rest of the Institute arrived—Joe Collins and David Kinley (formerly with the North American Congress on Latin America and the Corporate Data Exchange). We three—plus the cartons of books and papers, a few filing cabinets, and some typewriters—were
it
. That was four years ago. Now the Institute for Food and Development Policy has ten full-time and six part-time staff, plus at least twenty-five work-study students, interns, and volunteers. We have published fifteen books and booklets, dozens of articles, a Food First slide show, and a Food First comic book. We have given dozens of TV and radio interviews and hundreds of speeches.

Most satisfying is the range of people who are using our work—peasant organizers in the Philippines and Bangladesh, teachers here at home (from classes in political science, economics, and ethics to classes in nutrition), members of church study groups of all denominations, food coop people, and journalists. In one recent week our work was used as the basis for a front-page
Wall Street Journal
article critical of food aid in Bangladesh, we were quoted in
Newsweek
, and one of our new books was favorably reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review
. Yet we feel certain we have just scratched the surface.

Over the four years since
Food First
was originally published, we have seen a dramatic change in the analysis of hunger by groups that we have been trying to reach. The simplistic overpopulation theories of hunger, for instance, are no longer accepted uncritically. The questions and attitudes of the audiences who hear me speak are also very different. We believe that our work is contributing to that change.

While many discard the overpopulation explanation of hunger, often they still fall back on the idea that greater production alone is the solution; they ignore the most critical issue of control—power. So we have tried to make our message ever clearer: unless we address the issue of power—who is making the decisions—we can never get at the roots of needless hunger.

The official diagnosis is that the poor are poor because they lack certain things—irrigation, credit, improved seeds, good roads, etc. But we ask,
why
are they lacking these things? In studying country after country, it becomes clear that what the poor really lack is power—the power to secure what they need. Government aid agencies focus on the lack of materials; we focus on the lack of power.

Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Commission on World Hunger, for example, identified “poverty” instead of overpopulation as the cause of hunger. We disagree. Poverty is a symptom, not a cause. Poverty is a symptom of people’s powerlessness.

Nor is this mere semantic nitpicking. From these very different analyses flow very different “solutions”—and very different roles for us as outsiders.

If, as the official diagnosis would have it, the problem is poverty, then the solution is more government foreign aid to provide the goods to increase production. Billions of dollars of foreign aid is justified this way. But the bulk of this aid goes to governments which the United States sees as its military and political allies, including some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For fiscal year 1981, just ten countries received over one-third of all U.S. aid.
²
Among them were India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines, with governments internationally notorious for their neglect of the needs of the poor and their repression of those wanting change. In countries where economic control is concentrated in the hands of a few, foreign aid strengthens the local and foreign elites whose stranglehold over land and other productive resources generates poverty and hunger in the first place. Instead of helping, our aid frequently hurts the dispossessed majority.

In a Bangladesh village, tube wells designed to benefit the poorest farmers become the property of the village’s richest landlord; in Haiti, food-for-work projects intended to help the landless poor end up as a boon to the village elite; and in Indonesia, rural electrification which was supposed to create jobs in rural industries actually eliminates the jobs of thousands of poor rural women.

We’ve had to conclude that U.S. foreign assistance fails to help the poor because it is based on two fundamental fallacies: first, that aid can reach the powerless even though channeled through the powerful; second, that U.S. government aid can be separated from the narrow military and economic strategies of U.S. policymakers. In the 1975 edition of
Diet for a Small Planet
I scolded the U.S. government for being so stingy, and called for an increase in U.S. foreign aid. In researching
Food First
and
Aid as Obstacle
,
^*
however, I learned that as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, this aid goes overwhelmingly to the world’s most repressive governments, helping to shore up the power of those who are blocking the changes necessary to alleviate hanger and poverty.

Banana Hunger

Six months after we moved to California, I decided that I had to begin traveling in the third world. Since his teenage years Joe had spent a great deal of time in the third world, especially Latin America. I had been only to Mexico and Guatemala, and then only briefly. I wanted to experience firsthand what I had been studying for so many years.

I chose the Philippines because the United States has particular responsibility for the underdevelopment of that country. The Philippines was once a colony of the United States and has been heavily influenced by U.S. political, military, and corporate ties. During the five years after President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, U.S. military and economic aid to the Philippines leaped fivefold. In the fiscal year 1982 budget, this aid was scheduled to top $110 million—not including rent for military bases, a disguised form of aid.
³

For years I had read and written about U.S. corporate invasion of third world economies. I wanted to see, hear, and touch the impact of that economic force. For years I had read about grassroots resistance to brutal domination by landed elites. I wanted to meet people who were part of that resistance. What did they want? Were they full of hate and anger? Could they accept people like me as allies, or did they see all North Americans as enemies?

I traveled to the Philippines with my buddy Eleanor McCallie, a founder of Earthwork/Center for Rural Studies, also based in San Francisco. Together we learned about underdevelopment in a way that no statistics could ever convey.

Multinational corporations such as Del Monte and Castle and Cook (Dole) tell us that their investments create the wealth and foreign exchange which the Philippines needs to import essential goods; they’re the “engines of development,” according to the multinational corporations. We visited the products of their interventions—giant banana plantations they have developed in the southern Philippines over the last ten years.

We met workers paid less than $1.50 a day for back-breaking work, sometimes 12 to 14 hours a day. We went inside their living quarters and tried to imagine what it would be like to live with 24 other women in a room not much bigger than my living room back home, with a small curtain over each woman’s bunk providing her only privacy. The bunks were simply hard wooden platforms.

A pregnant woman showed us a large, raw wound on her leg. This, she said, was where another worker had accidentally sprayed her with the fungicide used on the bananas. For the first time we became aware of the terrible danger of pesticides everywhere. Besides the pesticides sprayed regularly on each banana tree and the fungicide sprayed on each bunch as it is packed, planes spray the entire plantation from the air twice a month. Water supplies are left uncovered. The workers are not protected, or even given any warning. In fact, we were told pesticide planes have been used to break up the meetings of workers attempting to organize an effective union.