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Food
Security Myths
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Food
First Fundamentals
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| People are hungry because of scarcity,
both of food and land. |
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| Every country in the world has the resources
necessary for its people to free themselves from hunger. |
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| We are
faced with a tragic tradeoff. A needed increase in food production
can only come at the expense of the ecological integrity of
our food base. Farming must be pushed onto marginal lands at
the risk of irreparable erosion. The use of pesticides will
have to be increased even if the risks are great. |
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| People freeing themselves from hunger
and safeguarding the world's agricultural environment are complementary
goals. |
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| Hunger can be overcome by redistributing
food from areas where there is a surplus to areas where there
is a shortage. |
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| Whoever controls the land controls who
eats. If food grown in the North is to be exported to the South,
the North will control who eats what, how much and how often
in the South. It is land that must be redistributed, not food.
Land reform is a necessary path to successful rural development. |
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| The world's population is growing rapidly.
An exploding population means there is less food for everyone. |
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| To balance a country's population and
resources, it is urgent to address the root cause of both hunger
and high birth rates: the insecurity and poverty that result
from the control over basic food resources by too few people. |
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| Landless
rural workers are so oppressed, malnourished and conditioned
into a state of dependence that they themselves are beyond the
point of being able to mobilise themselves. |
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| Our role is not to go in and 'set things
right', for wherever people are hungry there are already many
ordinary, brave men and women working to democratise the control
of food-producing resources. |
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| To achieve
food security the hungry world must rely on large landholders. |
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| Justice and production are complementary
goals. The most wasteful and inefficient food system is one
controlled by a few in the interests of a few. |
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To solve the problem of hunger we must
increase our foreign aid.
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| The appropriate response of people in
the North to hunger in the South is not more or even improved
government foreign 'aid'. We must work instead to help remove
the obstacles in the way of people's efforts for self-determination,
especially those obstacles being built by the penetration of
agribusiness corporations. |
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| Hunger will be overcome by concentrating
on producing more food. |
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| Hunger is only made worse when approached
as a technical problem. Hunger can only be overcome by transforming
social structures so that the majority directly participate
in building a democratic economic system. |
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| A developing country's best hope for development
is to export crops in which it has a natural advantage and use
the earning to import food and industrial goods. |
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| Export
agriculture is not the enemy. But in a society where only a
powerful minority control the productive resources, export-oriented
agriculture strengthens their grip. To ensure food security,
agriculture must become, first and foremost, a way for people
to produce their food and livelihood and only secondarily a
possible source of foreign exchange. |
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| Hunger is a contest with the South on
one side and the North on the other. Our standard of living
would suffer if we devoted too many of our resources to feed
the South. |
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| The hungry
are our allies, not our enemies, nor a perpetual burden. Our
food security is not threatened by hungry people but by a system
that concentrates economic power in the hands of a powerful
minority which profits by the generation of scarcity and the
internationalisation of food control. |
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