David R. Montgomery
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 Per capita food production since the 1960s has increased faster than the world's population. world hunger persists because of unequal access to food, a social problem of distriburion and economics rather than inadequate agricultural capacity.
One reason for the extent of world hunger is that industfialized agriculture displaced rural farmers, forcing them to join the urban poor who cannot afford an adequate diet. In many countries, much of the traditional farmland was converted from subsistence farms ro planrarions growing high-value export crops. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Experts and organizations worldwide have condemned biotech companies for claiming that GM crops will solve world hunger. A report by ActionAid concluded that rather than alleviating world hunger, GM crop technology "is likely to exacerbate food insecurity, leading to more hungry people not less."28 Similarly, "Oxfam and Christian Aid have both warned that GM crops could intensify poverty in the developing world. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Meeting this challenge would also help address the problem of world hunger because if we are to feed the developing world, we must abandon the intuitive, but naive, idea that producing cheap food will eliminate hunger. We've already made food cheap and there are still plenty of hungry people on the planet. A different approach—one that might actually work—is to promote the prosperity of small farms in developing countries. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| A report by ActionAid concluded that rather than alleviating world hunger, GM crop technology "is likely to exacerbate food insecurity, leading to more hungry people not less."28 Similarly, "Oxfam and Christian Aid have both warned that GM crops could intensify poverty in the developing world."29 The danger that this technology poses for developing nations has, nonetheless, not stopped biotech companies and their supporters from continuing to promote the myth that GMOs are the solution.
Golden rice is the wrong way to supplement vitamin A
Proponents claim that GM crops will boost nutrition. |
| Be better than competing options;
5. world hunger must be solvable by increasing food productivity. All five are false.
Food from GM crops is not safe
Perhaps sometime in the future scientists will be able to reliably and predictably manipulate genes for the betterment of health and the environment, but as this book demonstrates, that is not the case thus far.
GM crop acreage produces lower average yields
According to plant physiologist E. |
| Finally, promoting genetic engineering as a solution to world hunger diverts much needed research dollars into expensive GMO development and away from more appropriate technologies. Hans Herren, director of the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, says, "What Africa most needs is investment in 'soft' biotechnologies such as alternative natural pesticides."22
Miguel A. Altieri "Agricultural biotechnology innovations (i.e., Bt crops and herbicide resistant crops) are profit-driven rather than need-driven. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Downplaying notions of population control and land reform, industry advocates push the idea that genetic engineering will solve world hunger. Despite altruistic thetoric, genetic engineering companies design sterile crops to ensute that farmers— large agribusinesses and subsistence farmers alike—must keep on buying their proprietary seeds. There was a time when ptudent farmers kept theit best seed stock for next year's crop. Now they get sued for doing so. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Vuksan and his colleagues concluded that chia "could be considered the world's most nutritious food crop and thus can be used as a global remedy for world hunger. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Another key reason why the green revolution did not end world hunger is that increased crop yields depended on intensive fertilizer applications that the poorest farmers could not afford. Higher yields can be more profitable to farmers who can afford the new methods, but only if crop prices cover increased costs for fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery. In third world countries the price of outlays for fertilizers and pesticides increased faster than green revolution crop yields. If the poor can't afford to buy food, increased harvests won't feed them. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| According to the 1998 book, World Hunger: Twelve Myths, "The world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being on the planet with 3,500 calories a day. That's enough to make most people fat! And this estimate does not even count many other commonly eaten foods—vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. In fact, if all foods are considered together, enough is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds per person per day. That includes 2. |
David R. Montgomery
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| One reason for the extent of world hunger is that industfialized agriculture displaced rural farmers, forcing them to join the urban poor who cannot afford an adequate diet. In many countries, much of the traditional farmland was converted from subsistence farms ro planrarions growing high-value export crops. Without access to land to grow their own food, the urban poor all too often lack the money to buy enough food even if it is available.
The USDA estimates that about half the fertilizer used each year in the United States simply replaces soil nutrients lost by topsoil erosion. |
David W. Grotto, RD, LDN
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 It has become a popular grain worldwide as it is inexpensive and easy to grow in many areas of the world, making it an ideal tool in fighting world hunger! Like corn, sorghum can be used to produce ethanol to fuel cars. Currently, twelve percent of sorghum produced in the United States is used to make ethanol and that amount is expected to increase in light of the energy crisis.
A Serving of Food Lore...
Sorghum may have originated in northeast Africa some 2,000 years ago. Some believe that wild sorghum has been growing in the Middle East as far back as 8,000 years ago. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 Many scientists and politicians believe that making plants resistant to insects and infections will greatly increase crop yield and help prevent world hunger. In fact, in 2006 a total of 252 million acres of transgenic (or GM) crops were planted in twenty-two countries by 10.3 million farmers. The United States led the way with 53 percent of its crops produced from GM organisms, followed by Argentina (17 percent), Brazil (11 percent), Canada (6 percent), India (4 percent), and China (3 percent). |
David R. Montgomery
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| Ironically, solving the nitrogen problem did not eliminate world hunger. Instead the human population swelled to the point where there are more hungry people alive today than ever before.
In addition to being natural fertilizers, nitrates are essential for making explosives. By the early twentieth century, industrial nations were becoming increasingly dependent on nitrates to feed their people and weapons. Britain and Germany in particular were aggressively seeking reliable sources of nitrates. |
Carlo Petrini
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 Technological interventions sold by global corporations as panaceas for solving global problems of "inefficiency in small-scale production" and to supposedly solve world hunger have had exactly the opposite effect. From the Green Revolution, to the Biotech Revolution, to the current push for food irradiation, technological intrusions into the historic and natural means of local production have increased the vulnerability of ecosystems. They have brought pollution of air, water, and soil, and a new and spreading genetic pollution, from genetically modified organisms. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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 Government Food for Peace Program, major universities and countless other organizations and universities were taking up the battle cry to eradicate world hunger with high-quality protein. I knew most of the projects firsthand, as well as the individuals who organized and directed them.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations exerts considerable influence in developing countries through their agriculture development programs. Two of its staffers6 declared in 1970 that ".. . |
Henry Hobhouse
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 Significantly, the possibility of preventing world hunger has only existed since 1950.33
It was the combination of mathematical logic and high moral tone that gave the works of Malthus their ethical power. It was the same combination that enlightened the arguments of the opposition to Malthus's pessimism. This was the early Victorian (Albertine) faith in the efficacy of free trade. It was not wholly convincing. There were two reasons, both connected with the Corn Laws and the Anti-Corn Law League. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 It is a wholeness approach to diet that explores the larger planetary implications of what we eat, including the effects on the ecology, conserving natural resources, world hunger, and world peace, as well as the ethical, moral, and spiritual issues related to diet. The author feels that not only is the vegan, live-food diet the diet of choice for spiritual evolution, but it is the dietary part of the blueprint for enhancing our Communion with the Divine, and for ushering in the age of spiritual Enlightenment. |
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
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 Yet the soybean is promoted as the salvation to world hunger and a "green," environmentally sound alternative to meat production.
The soy industry even claims that its modern processed soyfoods are the natural heritage of people of Asia. In fact, the myth that soy is eaten in great quantity in Asia is an invention of the soy industry itself, determined to take advantage of a huge, untapped market.
The average consumption per year of dry soybeans in China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and Taiwan comes to 3.4, 6.3, 10.9 and 13 kilograms, respectively.7 That boils down to only 9. |
| For decades, the soy industry pressed for fortification of flour with soy protein as the solution to world hunger. Breads, after all, are the number one convenience food eaten by the masses. This idea might have taken off had there not been one major obstacle: soy-fortified flours didn't just taste bad, they tasted terrible. Although the United States has donated billions of dollars of food commodities containing soy protein to feeding programs in Third World countries, there have been many occasions when they couldn't even give it away. |
| By the 1960s, vegetarians, hippies, environmentalists and other idealists joined the cry, recommending soy foods as the solution to world hunger, the path to good health, the key to healthy aging and the way to preserve our environment.
Sadly, big business and big government have usurped their impossible dream. Old-fashioned whole soy foods that contribute to health if eaten in moderation have given way to ersatz products that lead inevitably to malnutrition and disease. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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| The protein gap stipulated that world hunger and malnutrition among children in the third world was a result of not having enough protein to consume, especially high-quality (i.e. animal) protein.1'4,3 According to this view, those in the third world were especially deficient in "high-quality" protein, or animal protein. Projects were springing up all over the place to address this "protein gap" problem. A prominent MIT professor and his younger colleague concluded in 1976 that "an adequate supply of protein is a central aspect of the world food problem"5 and further that "unless... |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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| We are almost ready to give up our individual and planetary dysfunctional patterns of wasting food and of world hunger, of hoarding resources and world poverty, of individual violence and world terrorism, and of individual alienation and nations fighting nations. The historical phase that emphasized personal salvation and planetary Enlightenment is merging into a new historical period of mass salvation and Enlightenment, in which we have the potential to realize as a unified planetary group our individual and collective God nature (which we have been all along). |
Peter Pringle
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 The organizers began to target power rather than science, taking on patents, corporate power, globalization, world hunger, poverty in the Third World, the issue of sustainable agriculture, and the legacy of the Green Revolution. Protests against the activities of greedy capitalists would make more headlines than the sticky scientific details of transgenic plants. The World Trade Organization became as much a target as Monsanto. Protesters shouting "No, no, to GMO" rioted in Seattle in December 1999. Food companies took fright. Heinz and Gerber removed GM ingredients from baby food. |
Jeremy P. Tarcher
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 Frances Moore Lappe, Joe Collins, and Peter Rosset, World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Second Edition
(New York: Grove Press, 1998). Marc Lappe, Breakout: The Evolving Threat of Drug-Resistant Disease (San Francisco, California: Sierra
Club Books, 1995).
-, Germs that Wont Die: Medical Consequences of the Misuse of Antibiotics (Garden City, New Jersey: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982).
Marc Lappe and Britt Bailey, Against the Grain: The Genetic Transformation of Global Agriculture (London: Earthscan, 1999).
James B. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 A flesh-centered diet creates a hoarding of resources in a way that greatiy contributes to world hunger. world hunger, however, reflects a social and political disharmony as much as it does a resource problem. But it does help to have ample resources. Vegetarianism is a major step in reorganizing how our world food resources are used.
The implication of the above statistics is that one who is a vegetarian is indirectly helping to feed the hungry of this planet. |
Peter Pringle
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| The biotech industry seized the moment, launching a TV advertising blitz that trumpeted the possibilities to end world hunger and disease. Smiling Asian children were pictured being nurtured by caring doctors against a backdrop of rice paddies under the headline, "Save a Million Children from Going Blind." Time magazine ran a front cover declaring, "This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year," over a picture of Potrykus in his greenhouse peering out from behind his wondrous golden grains.1 Even President Bill Clinton joined in the celebrations. "If we could have more of this golden rice ... |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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| A flesh-centered diet creates a hoarding of resources in a way that greatiy contributes to world hunger. world hunger, however, reflects a social and political disharmony as much as it does a resource problem. But it does help to have ample resources. Vegetarianism is a major step in reorganizing how our world food resources are used.
The implication of the above statistics is that one who is a vegetarian is indirectly helping to feed the hungry of this planet. |
Peter Pringle
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| In a dual strategy the United States would simultaneously fight world hunger and halt the spread of communism. Population explosions in the undeveloped nations of Latin America and Asia meant there was not enough to eat. Hunger led to social upheaval that could leave nations vulnerable to communist takeover. The Roosevelt administration was especially concerned about political stability on America's southern border. Mexican agriculture was in crisis, and the United States feared a peasant uprising. |
| The Green Revolution had not brought world hunger under control. Even the doubling of food production would still leave an estimated 800 million "food insecure" in 2025. And while the successes had averted famine for millions and India's granaries might have been overflowing, five thousand children died in India each day from malnutrition. |
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