The Truth is So Undeniable

Today is World Food Day. Did you know? If not, I am not surprised.
According to Sustainable Table Blog, US coverage of the United Nations-sponsored event has been virtually nil. However, this is an event that is being celebrated today in over 150 countries. The theme: Right to Food.
Something most Americans don't have to think about, I suppose. We're lucky here...most of us have access to cheap food. But what we might want to think about is--why?
Our nation glorifies free market policies and exports this value around the world. Yet we are guilty of meddling in the market. Why is our food so cheap? Farm subsidies. Why is nearly all this cheap food infused with corn? Corn subsidies. We deliberately interfere with the free market, insuring that farmers (mostly big agribusiness, actually) receive inflated prices for their commodities.
But when other nations attempt to protect their farmers and/or citizens, the US and the WTO (where the US exerts enormous influence) rally around the cry for Free Markets and insist that nations dismantle trade barriers and cease subsidies. For instance, Mexico, under NAFTA regulations, cannot protect its farmers from the flood of cheap corn from US growers, who are paid subsidies. Mexican farmers cannot compete and so must find other ways of making a living (and we wonder why we have such a flood of immigration). Some might argue that these policies enable poor Mexicans to have their "right to food," but I argue that we are taking away the right of Mexican farmers to provide food to their families and their people.
An interesting instance of a nation asserting its right to food despite the efforts of developed nations is the case of Malawi, which I found on my new favorite site, Grist. Malawi in the 1990s had a program in which it gave the poorest farmers packets of seeds and fertilizer. In 1999, the government gave all farmers these packets, and the end result was a large national surplus. In 2000, amid the wisdom of the developed nations upon which Malawi depends for much of its national budget, the government was forced to dismantle this program. The donor nations insisted that this policy distorted the freedom of the market and refused aid if the program continued.
What happened? Smaller harvests, and two years of famine. What about the people's right to food? Last year, the government of Malawi acknowledged the right of its people to food. They distributed coupons to the poorest farmers, allowing them to purchase fertilizer at a large discount. The results? Food production is up 150%, and the cost of the program is half of what Malawi spent importing food from other nations. Oh, and the famine has ended.

Sometimes we forget, as we sit in the land of plenty, that there are 854 million people who are hungry throughout the world...and that, more often than not, it is our foreign policy that allows for such widespread hunger.

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