This past May I undertook what many people considered an unusual project: I starved myself for seven days. Inspired by the actions of Kenda Swartz Pepper, I did a World Hunger Souljourn of my own; mimicking the diet of the world’s 1.02 billion chronically hungry people while researching and exploring the causes of, and the potential solutions to, this manmade crisis. For seven days I immersed myself into the political policies, trade agreements, and financial wrangling that have created such an unfair and unbalanced global food system in a world that produces more than enough to feed everyone. I ate only 1,000 calories a day focused in one evening meal, a practice common to the 1 out of 6 human beings who do not have access to enough food.
By Natasha Burge
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2010 CONDUCIVE
While I began the journey feeling overwhelmed and nervous, discouraged in the face of this catastrophically huge problem, by the end of the seven days, while I felt sick and weak from the starvation, I also felt a buoyed sense of hope and optimism. In my short journey I had discovered so many amazing women and men fighting for global food justice, organizations dedicated to ending this crisis, and people the world over committed to doing whatever they could to help. Today I am honored to share with you another way that we can all pitch in to do our part – by purchasing a World Hunger shirt created by Conducive Media, the proceeds of which will go to the International Fund for Africa and Vandana Shiva’s food justice organization Navdanya.
When I first began my World Hunger Souljourn last May, the fact that I could not fully wrap my head around, was that the world already produces more than enough food for everyone. When we think of chronic hunger and starvation, we think of babies wasting away in their mother’s arms, listless eyes bereft of hope, and endless lines trailing behind food aid trucks. But what we do not always realize is that just behind those endless lines of people there are often huge storage silos filled with food produced right there in that country, waiting to be shipped halfway across the world to be sold to people who can afford it. The cause of chronic hunger is not parched fields and an unlucky roll of the weather dice, in fact, emergencies like drought or armed conflict account for only 8% of all the people suffering from hunger. The vast majority of hunger in our world is caused by an evil much more mundane and banal that anything that dramatic. 1 out of 6 people on our planet are starving to death simply because they are too poor to afford food. As I explored previously, because we do not see food as a basic human right that should be afforded to all human beings, we allow 18,000 children to starve to death every single day because in our current system poor people simply are not considered worthy of living.
In our world, huge transnational corporations are given more importance than the lives of individuals and the well-being of ecosystems, as everything is sacrificed in the quest for profit. People have decided that they know better than Mother Nature and have taken it upon themselves to alter the most basic components of our lives. We fill acres of farmland with toxic pesticides that kill, on contact, all living creatures, but are supposed to be rendered harmless by a quick rinse in the sink when we later want to eat the produce. Food scientists now clone and genetically alter plants and animals in an attempt to grow more, faster and better, ignoring the evidence that this meddling damages the long term health of the plants, the environment, and the food system. In a grotesque display of profit over people, companies are now patenting ancient grains and seeds, food stuffs that have been the foundation of societies for millennia. In our modern food system it has already become nearly impossible for a small farmer to support her family, but now it is becoming illegal for that small farmer to save her crop’s seeds and replant them next year. Our most basic requirement for survival, food, is being stolen away from us, with every patent that robs us of an indigenous grain, with every genetically altered Franken-food, and with every poison and chemical that is introduced into our bodies and our planet.
Fighting against this perversion of our planet’s natural food supply is one of the most vital struggles in the food justice movement. Protecting our basic right to healthy food requires that we view food as a human right, and not just a commodity to be owned and controlled by the wealthy. In India, the Navdanya organization is doing exactly that. Founded in 1984 by physicist, environmentalist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, Navdanya is providing an alternative to the modern global food system by promoting biodiversity conservation, farmer’s rights, and organic farming methods, with an emphasis on seed saving. Navdanya means nine crops, in reference to the nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security, and it is this self-sufficient food security that it hopes to preserve.
Like much of the world’s chronic hunger problem, India’s troubles can be traced back to the misguided theories of the Green Revolution and the exploitative neoliberal policies imposed on developing nations by the global north. In 1998, India was forced to open up its seed and farming sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta, by the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies. Seed saving by small farmers is made impossible when corporations like these patent seeds and genetically engineer seeds with non-renewable traits. A traditionally renewable and free resource, seeds become something that poor peasants must purchase anew each planting season. These new seeds also require massive amounts of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, that destroy the land base, sicken the farmers, and pollute the nation’s waterways, but are conveniently sold by the same companies that own the patents to the seeds the farmers must buy. What this new farming system has unequivocally done is wreck the delicate ecosystem of India’s farmlands; create a monoculture of crops that has destroyed native biodiversity; sent millions of small farmers into debt as they are forced to keep up with the new chemicals, equipment, and patented seeds they must repurchase every year; and given rise to a generation of unemployed, homeless farming families that are forced from their land to live in the sprawling slums around India’s largest cities.
One of the most tragic consequences of this reshaping of a centuries old order is the epidemic of farmer suicides throughout the farmlands of India. Since 1997 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves, many by drinking the toxic pesticides that were supposed to improve their farms and their lives. Forced into skyrocketing debt to pesticide and seed companies in order to compete in India’s new farming landscape, the farmers fall into an ever increasing spiral of loss; mortgaging their house, sending their children away to find work, and losing everything they own as they struggle to compete in a game that was rigged against them from the start. The suicide economy is at a peak in the Vidharbha region of Maharashtra, where there are 4,000 suicides per year, 10 every day. This region also contains the highest acreage of Monsanto’s GMO Bt cotton. Centuries old sustainable farming traditions are being destroyed in the blink of an eye as the whole farming economy is transformed. The pursuit of profit takes precedence over the health and well being of people and farmland, and leads to a dangerously unstable food system, that paradoxically produces marginally more food while feeding a substantially smaller amount of people.
The suicide economy of industrialized, globalised agriculture is suicidal at 3 levels – it is suicidal for farmers, it is suicidal for the poor who are deprived food, and it is suicidal at the level of the human species as we destroy the natural capital of seed, biodiversity, soil and water on which our biological survival depends. ~ Vandana Shiva
Over the past 26 years, Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya has created an ever expanding alternative to the culture of death and debt pushed by the transnational corporations. Dedicated to the preservation of nature and the people’s right to knowledge, water, and food, Navdanya promotes global peace and justice through the conservation, renewal, and rejuvenation of the gifts of biodiversity. Navdanya has helped to create 54 community seed banks throughout India with the intent to rescue and conserve crops that are being pushed to extinction by monoculture farming practices. 3,000 varieties of native rice, 12 genera of cereals and millets, 16 genera of legumes, and 50 genera of vegetables have so far been saved due to their efforts. More than 500,000 farmers have been trained in organic and sustainable farming methods and more than 50 international courses have been offered on biodiversity, food, biopiracy, water, globalization, business ethics and more. Navdanya focuses on empowering local farmers to resist patents on seeds, and struggles to keep India free from GMO crops by recognizing humanity’s inherent right to food, water, and seed sovereignty.
When you purchase a World Hunger shirt from Conducive Tees, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Navdanya in India to help fund the very important work they are doing on the front lines of the global food justice struggle. When faced with a crisis as large as global chronic hunger it can sometimes be difficult to know what to do, how to make an impact. When I first began exploring the topic I struggled to find a way to make my voice heard, wondering if one lone person could make a difference at all. It didn’t take long for me to realize that none of us are really ‘one lone person’, together we can make our voice heard and our actions reverberate around the world. It doesn’t take much, we just have to act. We must strive to make changes in our own communities, while standing in solidarity with those struggling around the world. Donating money to Navdanya, or buying a shirt whose proceeds will be donated to them, is one way we can all reach out right now to take a stand against food injustice. It’s nice to know that sometimes supporting a good cause can also mean looking great.
It is necessary to stop this war against small farmers. It is necessary to re-write the rules of trade in agriculture. It is necessary to change our paradigms of food production. Feeding humanity should not depend on the extinction of farmers and extinction of species. Another agriculture is possible and necessary – an agriculture that protects farmers livelihoods, the earth and its biodiversity and public health. ~ Vandana Shiva
In October, I will be joining other Conducive Chronicle writers Kenda Swartz Pepper and Jessica Hullinger for another World Hunger series. A few guest writers may join us so stay tuned.
Purchase Your World Hunger Tee by clicking here to go to the Conducive Humanitarian & Human Rights Tees store.
