What a beautifully written article from Eric Holt Gimenez, Executive Director at Food First, Institute for Food and Development Policy, on the Huffington Post, about the, dare I say, “Feeding the 9 billion” myth.
Feeding Nine Billion: Five Steps to the Wrong Solution
Just last week I heard once again about the need to feed 9 billion people, produce more, blah blah blah…
That always makes me wonder how is it possible that people do not realise that half the planet is overeating (and dying of it) while the other half is dying of hunger, or anyway, not eating enough and properly. Why, oh WHY, do we need to produce more when we already overeat and waste a lot of what we produce (30-40% of food produced goes to waste and/or doesn’t even reach the shelves to be sold). This “feed the 9 billion people” is a scam… it’s like those fad diets that everyone is so excited about but have poor scientific grounds (or none).
I liked this article on the Huffington Post because it does make you think: is that really the right solution… producing more?
We are constantly facing the problems related to this “more and more” / “endless growth” business model that humans seem to have such a huge issue abandoning. And yet, we keep advocating producing more and more food because otherwise… people will starve? People will starve anyway, until we change business models, we reduce inequality, we reduce household waste, we find a better balance in global trades, we improve the supply chain and infrastructure in order to reduce waste and we educate people about healthy diets.
Some of these problems are easier to tackle than others. The bottom line is: addressing these problems does not bring massive returns in terms of profits. Call me cynical, but educating people so that they eat better, are healthier and waste less could mean, in economic terms, that some food companies will probably sell less (or will have to invest in changing their production lines), that waste companies will probably collect less, that tech companies will have less tech to sell around, that pharmaceutical companies will probably also sell less because people might be less likely to have long-term illnesses like diabetes and so on.
Basically, over-simplifying the matter, that would be a bit like saying that people would have better lives overall, but a bunch of companies would make less money and some people will be less rich. One counter-argument could be that the economy would shrink, there would be massive unemployment and so on… Well, wouldn’t the economy shrink anyway if the buying power of the masses keeps being reduced? “The poor getting poorer”, so-to-say. If we produce more, but people still cannot buy it (i.e. have no access to it or cannot afford it), what good is it for the economy anyway???
Maybe I should take a course in macro- and micro-economics. Although, such course(s) might make me even more cynical about human beings ;-)
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