A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food.

• Author: Lappe, Frances Moore
• Position: Essay

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Forty years ago, squirreled away in the basement "Ag" library at U.C. Berkeley, I wanted answers to one question: Why were 960 million people going hungry?

At the time, newspaper headlines and experts from academia to the United Nations had their straightforward answer: Human numbers had hit the Earth's limits. But using my dad's slide rule, I put two and two together: Our "modern" farm economy was actively creating scarcity from abundance, in part by feeding a third of the world's grain to livestock.

I could hardly believe it. Could this Ph.D-less twenty-something be right and the experts wrong? Stuffing my self-doubt, I composed a one-page handout. I assumed that if people just understood that hunger was needless, of course they'd get busy changing the economic rules creating it. The handout became Diet for a Small Planet .

I was right that hunger would worsen unless we dug to its roots. I was wrong, though, about what would happen next.

Four decades on, the World Food Program predicts the number of hungry people in the world will rise this year to what it was at that first Berkeley "a-ha!" moment.

Over these decades, the forces generating hunger from plenty have intensified. Food production has kept ahead of population growth, but now not only do we feed a third of grain and most of soy to livestock, but we've turned more than a third of the global fish catch into feed as well. Of course, I couldn't have guessed we'd also be "feeding" crops to cars via ethanol.

I'd hoped readers of Diet for a Small Planet would see this waste built into the post-World War II food system as only the surface layer explaining hunger. Beneath lies the deeper cause: the scarcity not of food but of democracy . Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs. And, since a say in one's future is the very essence of democracy, the existence of hunger belies democracy.

And what is killing democracy, while generating hunger? It is a belief system.

The belief is two-fold: first, that an effective market works only by one rule, highest return to shareholder--that is, highest return to existing wealth; and second, that government is anathema to a market's effectiveness. From this stance, control over resources inexorably tightens to the point that it warps public decision-making to benefit narrow, private ends. We end up with a frightening oxymoron: "privately held...