Food and Foreign Policy

As I pulled several wilted tomato plants from my sorry, soaked vegetable garden this weekend, I listened to a news report about how global warming and attendant change in weather patterns are expected to lead to famine and massive population movements.

I read two items today that remind me once again how food and foreign policy are so  profoundly linked.

One is a Washington Post story on how Michelle Obama’s celebrity in Russia is to a large degree  focused on her creating and tending an organic garden at the White House.

The other is a sentence in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs:

“Families in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia spend up to 80 percent of their incomes on food; for the average U.S. household, that would mean an annual grocery bill of $40,000.”

How would life be different if 80 percent of earnings had to go to food? I really can’t imagine it.

In 2008, Americans on average spent 9.6 percent of income after taxes for food. But I don’t believe that really cheap food is the answer to food shortages. Food that is American-cheap and processed has given us soaring obesity and diabetes, and diminishing fertility of farmland. I’m sure it will cost more to support  food grown locally in a sustainable way. We should no more be the food provider to the world than we should be the policemen to the world. Both concepts are unsustainable.

Noticing Who Gets the Good Food

For 35 years, Bates alumnus and food activist Mark Winne has been working to close the gap between the kinds of food available to rich and poor. What I really appreciate is his constant awareness that the agribusiness model we take for granted as “normal” is a chemically dependent system that only developed since World War II.

This Month in 1947 Was Tougher

Most people seem anxious about where the world financial crisis is heading, wondering how bad things might get. From that perspective, it was interesting to read this weekend how much more attuned the world was in 1947 to the relationship between meat production and world hunger.

Yesterday’s New York Times noted that on October 5, 1947, President Harry Truman used the first White House televised address to ask Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe. Government officials explained that in  the winter of 1947-48, food was the most important tool in resurrecting European productivity and, implicitly, in containing Soviet expansionism.