Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Food Waste and Hunger Exist Side by Side
By Haider Rizvi
Viewed September 5, 2004, Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=25343

NEW YORK, Sep 3 (Tierramerica) - ''Do you want these?
They are so fresh,'' says Catherine, holding up a bunch
of grapes she just pulled out from one of the trash
bags piled up on the sidewalk. ''Take this, man. It's
good too,'' adds her friend Morlan, holding out a loaf
of bread.

Though happy to have found something for dinner, both
Catherine, 21, and Morlan, 19, wonder why some edible
food is thrown out as garbage in New York City ''They
only sell this food to the rich,'' says Catherine
pointing to the upscale grocery store that put out the
bags.

Inside the store, the manager is visibly upset with
Catherine and other young people who are stuffing their
backpacks with fruits and vegetables from the trash
bags. ''They are picking up garbage,'' says the
manager. ''I don't know why they are doing this.'' ''I
have zero cash right now, and no place to stay,''
Morlan told Tierramerica. ''What do you expect me to
do?''

Such scenes are becoming increasingly commonplace on
the streets of U.S. cities, despite the enormous
quantity of food that the world's most affluent nation
produces every year.

Official surveys indicate that every year more than 350
billion pounds (160 billion kg) of edible food is
available for human consumption in the United States.
Of that total, nearly 100 billion pounds (45 billion
kg) -- including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and
grain products -- are lost to waste by retailers,
restaurants, and consumers.

By contrast, the amount of food required to meet the
needs of the hungry is only four billion pounds,
according to Food Not Bombs, an advocacy group, which
estimates that every year more than 30 million people
in the United States are going hungry on regular basis.
''The American government has billions of dollars in
surplus money, which could go towards poverty
elimination nationally or globally,'' Samana Siddiqui
of the Sound Vision Foundation, a Chicago-based
non-profit group, told Tierramerica.

But Joyce Glenn, a novelist who lives next to the
grocery store, where Catherine looks for food in the
trash bags, has a different take on the wastage of food
and over-consumption in her country.

''Americans consume as much as they are able in order
to lull themselves into a sense of complacency as long
as the need for food, as well as even luxurious food,
gives them a sense of well being,'' says Glenn, who is
in her 60s, and often invites homeless people she sees
in the street into her home.

Noting that food production in the United States and
the world has increased more than the population, food
rights groups say they believe more people are likely
to suffer from lack of food as long the agri-business
firms continue to be driven primarily by profits. ''We
don't have a democratic say in how food is produced or
distributed,'' according to Food Not Bombs. ''In our
society, it is acceptable to profit from other people's
suffering and misery.''

The group's position is based on the assertion that
people from the more affluent and middle class sectors
of U.S. society are drawn to over-consumption as a
lifestyle -- validated by a study carried out by the
Washington-based World Watch Institute earlier this
year.

''U.S. consumption styles have not only spread to other
industrialised nations,'' says the State of the World
2004, ''they have succeeded in penetrating much of the
developing world as well.''

The study shows how millions of middle class people
across the globe have adopted the diets, transportation
systems and lifestyles pioneered in the United States.
To some degree, ''rising consumption has helped meet
basic needs,'' said World Watch president Christopher
Flavin. ''But this unprecedented consumer appetite is
undermining the natural systems we all depend on, and
making it even harder for the world poor to meet their
basic needs.''

According to the report, the U.S. and Western European
consumers, who constitute only about 12 percent of the
world population, are responsible for about 60 percent
of consumption of private consumer goods. By contrast,
the people of Latin American and the Caribbean, whose
share in the world population is just nine percent,
spend only seven percent on non-essential household
goods.

''Agriculture, free trade, and intellectual property
policies have become a leading edge of the U.S.
corporate push for global economic dominance,'' says
Kathy McAfee, executive director of the San
Francisco-based Institute for Food and Development
Policy (better known as Food First).

''But at the same time,'' she adds, ''farmers and
ecologists around the world have been achieving
impressive successes in increasing food production by
sustainable methods. We are seeing the mobilisation of
hundreds of thousands of small farmers from Mexico to
Brazil, from India to Thailand to the Philippines in
defence of their rights.''

(* Haider Rizvi is a Tierramerica contributor.
Originally published Aug. 28 by Latin American
newspapers that are part of the Tierramerica network.
Tierramerica is a specialised news service produced by
IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development
Programme and the United Nations Environment
Programme.) (END/2004)