Food Justice

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it...and God said ’It will be yours for food’. Gen 2:15 and 1:29.

I find it interesting that the first picture God gives us of His created world is a model for sustainable food production, of Adam as a farmer. The fact that there is widespread hunger in the world can only mean that we are not stewarding the earth as God intended it. Surely providing sufficient food for all is one of the foundational principles of justice.
So where have we gone wrong? What do we do to make it right? Where should we as Christians be investing our time, efforts and money in changing this?
When I started looking at this issue I needed to change the way I referred to poorer countries. I grew up learning to use the phrase ‘Developed World’ for our richer western countries and ‘Developing World’ for countries in poverty. This somehow implies that they need to catch us up, to take on our way of thinking. I prefer now to use ‘Minority World’ and ‘Majority World’ which alters my perspective to what the majority in the world experience.
I think it would be fair to say that today we in the Minority World see food as a commodity. ‘Corn futures’, wheat crops, coffee, beef etc are all part of the stock exchange with their associated profits and losses fuelling multi-national commercial interests. The Majority of the world see food as a basic requirement for life.
50 years or so ago the Majority World was dominated by small-scale farming where people provided their own food and traded the surplus for additional income. In more recent years they have been encouraged to enter world markets and produce large-scale single crops such as coffee, wheat, rice etc that can be sold for a profit to the Minority world. Whilst this profit does benefit the local farmers and they are able to buy food for their family with their income from the crop, it nevertheless benefits Western companies too.
This is a significant change and has significant implications. One of the results of this change is that crops produced by the Majority become subject to the vagaries of world trade. When prices in the world stock fluctuate, or are affected by the present credit crisis, the price of the crop drops dramatically. This leaves the Majority farmers with an abundance of, for example, coffee, which has little financial value to them and more crucially will not feed them. Or as a cruel contrast, in Peru, the birthplace of the potato, the price is such that a man’s yearly crop of potatoes is only worth around $40. World Vision recently had a campaign focussed on Peru to widen children’s diets to combat malnutrition, the result of a reliance on eating the surplus potato crop. They could grow the potatoes but not sell them. We all remember the Ethiopian famine in the 1980’s but do we remember that the Minority world continued to buy food from them throughout the crisis?
Another key issue is that the world’s population has increased substantially and so the last century has seen a vast increase in the need for land on which to grow crops. Thousands of years ago a hunter-gatherer needed approximately 20 hectares per person to support a life. The population of our world measured against available land now results in only 0.25 hectares per person and it is predicted that by 2050 this will drop to 0.1 hectares. This has fuelled a change in food production in two ways.
Firstly, we needed to improve the yield of each crop. The Industrial Revolution started the much needed improvements in farming technique and more recently scientists developed the genetic modification of crops and better chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These technologies surely started off with good intentions but they have become entangled with serious political and moral issues. Morally and ecologically do we want to genetically modify food and potentially pollute the land with chemicals? Politically do we want to invest in the multi-national companies that develop and produce genetically modified seeds and chemicals at the expense of the farmers?
In Senegal, where World Vision have a large supportive presence, the Government’s response to a recent widespread food crisis has been to give two thirds of the allocated $792 million budget to subsidizing the development and production of fertilizers, seeds and pesticides. The money, and therefore profit, is in the main therefore directed to foreign owned, international corporations whilst the people continue to go hungry. Farmers in Britain are giving up their farms not because their land is unproductive, or because they no longer love farming, or because there isn’t a market for food. They are giving up because it is unprofitable. Our farmers are also at the mercy of big business interests.
The second development resulting from the need to increase food production has been to increase the amount of land available for crops. Again, this sounds like a good strategy but is currently resulting in huge areas of precious rain forest being cut down, cultivated for a few years but then abandoned, as the soil is not appropriate for agriculture. The 1930’s saw Roosevelt’s New Deal encouraging farmers to cultivate the vast plains of America’s heartland. The result was the dessication of the light soils which went on to create a devastating wind blown dust cloud which killed hundreds and blighted the land.
So what can we do?
Firstly, I am uncomfortable with a generic ‘condemning of the corporations’ and an attitude of suspicion towards science and technology. The issues are complex and evidence often contradictory. I prefer to pray for wisdom for those leaders responsible for food production and discernment for scientists in their developments. We need to expand our food production efficiency but in ways that do not abuse the land or leave the farmers unsupported. We are all part of the solution and it is unhelpful to see it as ‘them and us’.
Secondly, I think that a clear moral principle should be to provide food first with profit being a secondary priority. I think that God wants us to allow the Majority to provide their own food before providing for the Minority. We should get their surplus and not their first fruits. This can only be done with a change in the attitude of western investors. We can encourage this by supporting lobbying groups such as the World Development Movement and by buying food from the Majority World at a reasonable price that allows them to live full lives, that is fairly traded products.
Thirdly, we should be fighting for smaller scale, organic, sustainable, good quality food production across the world. We should be speaking out against the craving for cheap food as this is driven by profit rather than provision. In addition the evidence is that cheap, fast food is of poorer nutritional quality and rarely respects the earth it’s grown in. I believe we should be buying more locally produced, organic food to support our farmers. This would also serve to reduce our reliance on transporting food long distances, therefore reducing our individual carbon footprints.
I think we need to return to the principles of Genesis where Adam was a good steward of the earth whilst also being a farmer and provider of food. Our faith in God should convince us that we can produce enough food for our survival without abusing the stewardship of the earth. We need to move away from the slavery of profit to patterns of sustainable farming. We need to restore the close relationship between our food and our land, between justice and provision.


Helen Fairmaner