The Nation  [Printer-friendly version]
January 23, 2006

HUNGER IS NOT A PLACE

[Rachel's introduction: "Sadly, the biggest story of our time gets
hidden by this dominant frame. It is a revolution in human dignity in
which citizens are moving beyond protest to problem solving, risking
their lives to remove the power of wealth from the political system
and to infuse the power of democratic values into the economic
system. The new frame they are creating I call living democracy."]

By Frances Moore Lappe

"Within a decade no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry,"
declared Henry Kissinger.

That was three decades ago.

Since then hunger fighters have periodically reminded us of our
failure -- most recently Time magazine Person of the Year Bono,
Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty) and the Make Poverty History
campaign. Such impassioned calls again and again rally us to believe
that, yes, we can end hunger. Yet sadly, they fail to challenge the
very frame blinding us to solutions.

In that frame we in the industrial countries have the answer -- what
Sachs celebrates as the "dynamism of self-sustaining economic growth"
-- and our job is to help the poor get their "foot on the ladder." But
hunger is not a residual problem to fix "over there" -- a place,
mainly in Africa, left off this hunger-ending ladder. Rather, hunger
is a global system that we're all part of. This hunger-making system
is alive in Africa, where one in three people goes hungry, but it is
also alive in the United States, where hunger has grown by 43 percent
over the past five years, and close to one young child in five lives
in a family so poor he or she can't count on getting needed
nourishment. The system is very much alive in Asia and Latin America,
too.

Yet our frame determines which pieces of this picture we can see. We
applaud, for example, India's high-tech boom and its poverty
reduction. But we can't register that nearly half of India's children
younger than 4 are still underweight, or that more hungry people live
in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. We're also blind to what
is happening in Kerala, the state that has been India's hunger-
fighting champion -- long before anyone heard of call centers or
outsourcing. Kerala is invisible because it doesn't fit the frame:
With per-capita wealth only average for India, Kerala has reduced
infant deaths to one-quarter the national rate. The frame also blinds
us to progress in Bangladesh. With a per-capita GDP less than two-
thirds of India's, Bangladesh has a child death rate nearly one-fifth
lower than India's.

Clearly, we need a different frame to understand and solve the problem
of hunger. Hunger is not about being left outside the dominant
economic system. Hunger is actively created by that system -- economic
life divorced from democratic values and driven by a single rule:
highest return to existing wealth. Because of it, 80 percent of the
world's people live in countries where inequality is worsening, and
691 billionaires have come to control as much wealth as half the
world's people earn in a year. While a decade ago poor coffee-
producing countries, to pick just one example, retained 30 percent of
coffee revenue, their share has shrunk to less than 10 percent today.
The winners aren't consumers but the Nestles and Philip Morrises of
the world, a narrowing group of global giants able to drain wealth
from the poorest countries, kill the open market and consolidate power
in so few hands that it inevitably corrupts political governance --
whether it's in the US Congress, the Kenyan Parliament or the WTO.

Sadly, the biggest story of our time gets hidden by this dominant
frame. It is a revolution in human dignity in which citizens are
moving beyond protest to problem solving, risking their lives to
remove the power of wealth from the political system and to infuse the
power of democratic values into the economic system. The new frame
they are creating I call living democracy.

With a living democracy frame for understanding hunger, it's possible
to grasp at least some of the reasons Bangladesh is making faster
progress in saving lives than is India, despite its greater hunger and
deeper income poverty: Citizen action networks have spread to almost
80 percent of Bangladesh's villages, providing basic health training,
schools and capital. Through the two biggest, the largely self-
financing Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee,
peer-backed micro-loans have gone to about 9 million poor people,
mainly women, enabling many to birth their own village-level
enterprises. Grameen reports that more than half of the families of
its borrowers -- the vast majority of the bank's owners -- have
"crossed the poverty line." Assuming BRAC's comparable impact, these
rural Bangladeshis' self-directed enterprises have freed more than
twice as many from poverty as the number employed in export garment
factories. There, insecure jobs offer wages of 8 to 18 cents an hour.
Yet the dominant frame doesn't differentiate these two paths; to
Sachs, both place Bangladeshis on the economic "ladder."

In India hunger is being uprooted as well, but the real story isn't
high-tech progress, so far creating only a million jobs in a country
of a billion. The most meaningful breakthroughs are less flashy. In
Kerala hunger is being conquered by participatory approaches that have
achieved fairer access to land and education. And the People's
Campaign of Decentralized Planning has trained hundreds of thousands
of Kerala's citizens in budgeting and planning to create rural
improvements. Throughout India women have built a network of
cooperative dairies that in only three decades has lifted the incomes
of more than 11 million households and benefited more than 100
million.

Similarly, Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has secured legal
title to more than 20 million acres for a quarter of a million
formerly landless families, creating self-governing communities whose
enterprises and farms serve community-sustaining values. Infant
mortality has fallen, and wages for members are many times higher than
their former day-labor pay.

Hunger is caused by scarcity, that part of the dominant frame is true,
but it is the scarcity of living democracy -- the active engagement of
citizens creating accountable institutions. Within this frame, the
question becomes not Sachs's -- "Will the rich world act to help save
the poor" by assisting them onto the economic growth "ladder"? -- but
rather, How do we empower those movements here and abroad that are
removing the power of private wealth from public governance and
infusing the power of democratic values into economic life?