Correspondence
“Amid Plenty” wasn’t an interview; it was a series of softball questions lobbed at Anuradha Mittal. Derrick Jensen challenged none of her assumptions, some of which are quite breathtaking.
More seriously, there was not a single mention of overpopulation as a cause of hunger. The fact is, no matter what is done about “redistribution,” organic farming, and local control of agriculture, we will lose the hunger battle if the world’s population is not curbed. As an environmentalist, I have long been puzzled by the failure of otherwise astute thinkers to make the connection between overpopulation and environmental degradation.
The sad thing about this, of course, is that well-intentioned people like Mittal are working with only half the tools. I don’t know if her failure to address population control is one of ideology, ignorance, or postcolonial hangover, but it means she’ll never really find a long-term solution to the problem. If we don’t, then everyone on the planet is endangered, including those of us who could afford to shed a few pounds.
T. Lincoln
Medford, Massachusetts
Derrick Jensen’s interview with Anuradha Mittal [“Amid Plenty,” February 2002] left me feeling outraged. Food should not be treated as just another commodity. The policies and actions of corporate America are, in my opinion, crimes against humanity.
I experienced such policies firsthand when I worked part-time at a fast-food chain. Any food not sold within two hours was thrown away, but first the food had to be rendered inedible, to deter the hungry from digging through the dumpster in search of a free meal.
Sean T. Straney
Los Angeles, California
The title “Amid Plenty” disguises three facts about world hunger: that the earth in recent time has become vastly overpopulated; that petroleum is feeding billions of people temporarily; and that the petroleum feast is headed for a crash in the next few years.
Anuradha Mittal is beautifully articulate and has a fine rebellious spirit, but injustice cannot be solved only by redistributing the crumbs. Simple biology and animal behavior explain what is happening today: too many people are competing for too few goods.
Politically correct activists shout for social justice while continuing to overconsume energy, and comfortably funded environmental analysts keep promoting “policy options” while ignoring overpopulation and declining petroleum reserves. As right as she is about some things, Mittal is pretending that our overpopulated and overexploited ecosystem can be sustained. An honest assessment would prepare the reader for a world about to be turned upside down, with far worse suffering around the corner. I disagree with Mittal that “you do not have to change your lifestyle or quit your job.” Those of us promoting true sustainability anticipate a complete change that will affect all of us.
Jan Lundberg
Arcata, California
Anuradha Mittal responds:
Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today. Contrary to what these readers have suggested, increases in food production during the past thirty years have outstripped the world’s unprecedented population growth by more than 16 percent. Beneath the scarcity diagnosis of the Third World’s food situation lie many human-made, and therefore reversible, causes. Even high birth rates are not independent variables but are determined by social realities that shape people’s reproductive choices.
In probing the connection between hunger and scarcity, we should never overlook the lessons here at home. More than 36 million Americans, 14 million of them under the age of eighteen, cannot afford to eat a healthy diet. But who would argue that not enough food is produced in the U.S.?
Here at home, just as in the Third World, hunger is an outrage precisely because it is profoundly needless. When we look behind the headlines, the television images, and the superficial clichés, we can see that hunger is real; scarcity is not. Only when we free ourselves from the myth of scarcity can we begin to look for hunger’s real causes.
Do too many people cause hunger? If that were true, then reducing population density might alleviate the problem. But population density and hunger do not consistently occur together. Surveying the globe, we find no significant correlation between the two. For every densely populated and hungry country, like Bangladesh, we find a Nigeria, a Brazil, or a Bolivia, where sufficient food resources per capita coexist with hunger. Or we find a place like the Netherlands, where very little land area per person has not prevented the country from eliminating hunger and becoming a large net exporter of food.
There is a meaningful correlation between rapid population growth and hunger. Most hungry people live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where populations have grown the fastest in recent decades. But we need to study whether rapid population growth causes hunger, or whether they occur together because both are consequences of certain social realities. Hunger and high fertility rates persist where societies deny security and opportunity to the majority of their citizens. Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are following a rational strategy for survival.
We need to face the fact that the fate of the world hinges on the fate of today’s poor majorities. Only as their well-being improves can we challenge hunger and assure that fertility decline is sustainable. To attack high birth rates without attacking the causes of poverty and the disproportionate distribution of power is not only fruitless; it is a tragic diversion our planet cannot afford.
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