Why Cant People Feed Themselves

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Why Can't People Feed Themselves? By Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins (From Lappe, Frances Moore, and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. Random House, 1977, pp. 99-111.) Question: You have said that the hunger problem is not the result of overpopulation. But you have not yet answered the most basic and simple question of all: Why can't people feed themselves? As Senator Daniel P. Moynihan put it bluntly, when addressing himself to the Third World, "Food growing is the first thing you do when you come down out of the trees. The question is, how come the United States can grow food and you can't?" Our Response: In the very first speech I, Frances, ever gave after writing Diet for a Small Planet, I tried to take my audience along the path that I had taken in attempting to understand why so many are hungry in this world. Here is the gist of that talk that was, in truth, a turning point in my life: When I started I saw a world divided into two parts: a minority of nations that had "taken off' through their agricultural and industrial revolutions to reach a level of unparalleled material abundance and a majority that remained behind in a primitive, traditional, undeveloped state. This lagging behind of the majority of the world's peoples must be due, I thought, to some internal deficiency or even to several of them. It seemed obvious that the under- developed countries must be deficient in natural resources--particularly good land and climate--and in cultural development, including modem attitudes conducive to work and progress. But when looking for the historical roots of the predicament, I learned that my picture of these two separate worlds was quite false. My two separate worlds were really just different sides of the same coin. One side was on top largely because the other side was on the bottom. Could this be true? How were these
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