Ending Africa's Hunger | Stuffed and Starved

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Ending Africa's Hunger

One of the things I've been up to recently is this piece, written with my co-authors of Food Rebellions . It's a look at the rise of philanthropy capitalism, and some worrying attempts to 'fix' Africa. You can read it all at The Nation , but there's a less elegantly formatted version below the fold.

Ending Africa's Hunger

Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck

September 2, 2009

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It's a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama's vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you've got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."

In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world's largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to ...

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