It was a year that saw oil prices rise to levels that had never before been imagined. And the world witnessed a decline in world grain production that outlined the the pitfalls of depending on the surplus of a handful of nations for a world food reserve. Nations met to discuss “the food challenge” in the context of a “world of energy shortages, rampant inflation, and a weakening trade and monetary system…”
Nope, not 2008, but 1974. The Lubin Files has links to the speech Henry Kissinger gave to the UN’s World Food Conference.
From personal experience and from those who work in the field of humanitarian endeavors, I’ve come to see that ending the world food crisis would be much more effective by thinking very small and very local than all this talk about genetic improvements, huge inputs of fertilizers, increasing the donations of grain surplus, etc. For tens of thousands of years, up to probably the last 75, the vast majority of the world survived on small plots of land. Even slaves here in America and subordinated groups abroad, after working the land for others, actually fed themselves from their own small plots or gleanings after the harvest.
In these times, when desertification, civil unrest, natural disasters and other crises, force groups or families from traditional or stationary plots of ground, they can still feed themselves IF we provide a growing structure that does not REQUIRE that plot of land. That’s the reason I initiated my website Outrageous Gardens: it was outrageous to me that nearly one billion people go to bed hungry each night on this planet and that we still depend on the tenuous system of purchasing and transporting surplus grains in order to feed them. A container garden can be created out of local organic materials for composting, native soil and refuse and placed anywhere. The cost to initiate a tire, bucket or bag garden? $2-3 or less. The ability to feed onself? Priceless.
Before a person can become a farmer, she/he must first have the energy to do the work. The more logical first step should be food at the doorstep which provides the necessary micronutrients to end malnutrition, not daily doses of carbohydrates and dependency. There are so many organizations which have proved this over and over. I would like to see our focus shift to assisting individuals and families to regain immediate control over their food supply before pushing them into “farming” this and that for a profit. And whose profit is it anyway?
Simultaneous with the feeding of someone who is hungry must also be the means for feeding themselves. It is from that defining moment of self-sufficiency that all creativity and commercial enterprise will eventually grow, logically and naturally.
@Yvonne – Amen to all that, although in many of the poorest places water will be needed too. Still, I can’t see the wisdom of sending sorghum from Texas to Sudan, or from Sudan to China. No idea how true this is; the shocking thing is that it could easily be.