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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Reuters - Organic food shopping while millions go hungry
  • Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:28:58 -0600



Organic food shopping while millions go hungry
05 Jul 2007 13:58:00 GMT
Blogged by: Mark Snelling
http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/22751/2007/06/5-135840-1.htm

Reverse culture shock can be one of the hardest adjustments for any
journalist or aid worker.

It's one thing acclimatising to the very immediate demands and deadlines of
an assignment in a strange and often hostile environment. It's quite
another then having to readjust to the alleged normality of a comfortable
life in the West when you get back. To put it bluntly, it can really do
your head in.

I was reminded of this again this week wandering around the new Whole Foods
superstore in west London. This is a branch of a U.S.-based organic produce
emporium that's finally made its way across the Atlantic. It's big, it's
brash, and it's eye-wateringly expensive.

Trailing along the cavernous aisles of organic delicacies - groaning
shelves of perfectly formed fruits, vats of smoothie drinks and home-made
soups, the thousand-yard stares of harassed dinner-party shoppers - I'm
left with that old feeling that something has gone very, very wrong.

True, there's nothing worse than a preachy aid worker silently berating
westerners for their profligate emptiness. Let's face it, some parts of the
world are very poor and some parts of the world are very rich. That's a
reality. Life in London and New York may be more affluent, but it's every
bit as present and real for the people who live there as it is for
residents of Dili, Dhaka or Gaza.

Nevertheless, my thoughts are inexorably drawn to the old, blind woman in
Niger trying to feed her grandchildren on a bit of milk powder and a lot of
empty promises. I think of the crippled, dispossessed and the mad
struggling to make sense of anything at all in Mogadishu. I wonder about
the hungry refugees I've met who will die of AIDS long, long before they
get the chance to see home again. And then, returning to the present with a
thud, I arrive at the sushi counter.

REAL COST OF FOOD

Back at the AlertNet office, a news release arrives from Save the Children
that somehow gives shape to all of this.

A report to be published by the charity on Friday reveals how it costs the
world's poorest people more than three times their income to feed their
family a basic healthy diet.

Research for the report, entitled Running on Empty, was carried out in four
countries - Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Myanmar and Tanzania. It shows that
between 15 and 79 percent of households just do not have the means to give
their children a decent diet.

To put this in context, the report calculates what the average family food
bill would be in Britain if you applied the same differential between
average weekly earnings and the actual cost of feeding a family.

Consider then that a Bangladeshi family would need to spend the equivalent
of £1,704 a week to feed itself properly. In Ethiopia, the bill is
£677, followed by Tanzania at £593 and Myanmar at £584.

"The poorest families simply do not have the money to afford to ever feed
their children enough good food for them to grow up healthy and strong,"
says Costanza de Toma, Save the Children's hunger advocacy advisor.
"Poverty has condemned them to a hand-to-mouth existence and their children
to a future of stunting or early death."

Save the Children has joined the growing consensus in favour of cash
benefit schemes for the world's poor as opposed to traditional food
handouts.

"Food aid can be a blunt tool for tackling chronic malnutrition. Putting
cash, rather than food, directly into people's hands means they can buy
what they need, not take what they are given," says de Toma.

The charity estimates that chronic malnutrition is responsible for 5.6
million child deaths a year. It's a number so vast that it threatens to
become frighteningly meaningless. But as I finally make my escape from the
Whole Foods Market, I can almost hear the bells tolling.





  • [Livingontheland] Reuters - Organic food shopping while millions go hungry, TradingPostPaul, 07/06/2007

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