Word: landed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once you accept this fact, and the fact that much of the globe's arable land is underutilized, the problem of hunger takes on new dimensions. If Mali produced enough peanuts to export them during the 1974 drought in the Sahel, why were peasants there starving? If it is possible to increase productivity on Bangladesh acreage by a factor of 15, why is the country so often described as a basket case whose people are doomed...
...Using a question-and-answer format that is generally successful, they argue that the real source of world hunger is the social framework in which it occurs. "Once the livelihood of millions of self-provisioning farmers," they write, "agriculture is becoming the profit base of influential commercial entrepeneurs--traditional landed elites, city-based agricultural speculators, and foreign corporations." Studies show that large landholders who use traditional labor-intensive techniques tend to be much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, who draw as much as possible out of the soil. Large landowners who mechanize their holdings force peasants off the land...
...Lappe and Collins reserve most of their venom for foreign corporations who own land in the Third World, and gear their production to high-income consumers overseas. These corporations, a spreading phenomenon, concentrate on growing luxury foodstuffs for the consumers of the western world rather than on feeding the poor peasants who live next to the plantations. Examples of the effects of such profit-maximizing morality abound, and Lappe and Collins use them unsparingly in their effort to persuade their readers. In Mexico, land that once grew corn for peasants' diets is now used for strawberries and flowers...
...GOVERNMENTS of the Third World often cooperate whole-heartedly with multinational corporations' efforts to transform their countries' agricultural production: a booming export trade, even if it forces peasants off land that has fed them for centuries, means more well-paid jobs for the educated elite, and increased foreign exchange with which to import luxury goods. Senegal provided all the initial capital for Bud Antle's operation there, and removed villagers from land the company wanted for its plantations. The Brazilian government is clearing the Amazon rain forest to make way for American-owned companies who hope to grow beef...
ONCE THE PROBLEM OF HUNGER is presented as the result of social structure rather than of simple resource shortages, it becomes possible to find solutions. Social structures, unlike land areas, are man-made and malleable. Lappe and Collins recommend that Third World countries adopt a "food first" policy, that the people of the Third World concentrate on producing food for the hungry within their borders rather than on exporting luxuries to western markets. Such a policy might not supply televisions and Paris-designed clothes to the wealthy, but it would feed people whose children now suffer permanent brain damage through...