I’m not a poetry connoisseur by any means, but this one resonated with me and I thought I would share…

Perhaps the World Ends Here

By Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

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For copyright reasons I guess I should mention that I read this poem here

Recently I was watching a discussion between a plant pathologist, an agriculture geneticist and current professor and former high-level FAO official at a science fair back in 2010 (see the link at the bottom of the post).  As the presentation framed it, the topic was on how to feed the additional 2 billion people on the planet in the coming years plus the 1 billion already under-fed, and the answer was genetically modified food.  As I read it, the topic was actually on how GM food can be used to feed more people and reduce global hunger.  Importantly, I think they started out on what I believe is a false premise that the only (or most important) way to reduce hunger is to “double production” with inadequate arable land available for such an expansion (yes, it was said many times that we need to double production).

At one point they were discussing how the use of GM seeds can reduce the amount of chemical inputs used and still maintain very high yields.  Maybe this could be considered an alternative alternative, a concept suggested by Leah last month.  They also spoke about increasing the nutritional value (e.g. the golden rice), which leads to some of the points brought out in Cheron’s post, trying to go beyond the biotech anti/pro debate.

I’m a big Amartya Sen champion and so for me addressing inequalities of access as a result of social injustice and disempowering structures is far more important than increasing production.  At the same time, the idea of more nutritionally dense food which treads more lightly on the planet sounds pretty attractive, but I have to ask what the underlying motivation is.  And if it’s a company which is accountable to shareholders, their bottom line is profitability.  Maybe I’m far too cynical, but I don’t see how the best interests of a publicly traded company whose shareholders are scattered around the world can co-habitate with the best interests of the poor and disenfranchised who have little voice in policy development and little access to justice processes.

More importantly for me, though, is that in their very own presentation starting off the discussion, they point to the fact that apparently we throw away half of the food we produce.  Yet this aspect was brought up only in the last 20 minutes of the talk almost as an afterthought.  Sure some of this waste is due to spoilage and inedible parts of the food produced, but if even half of the half could be saved or recovered then we would go a long way towards increasing the availability of food without actually increasing production.

It seems that I’m in good company with my concern about food waste: see Jess’ and Leo’s recent posts for more.

http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/food_20_feeding_a_hungry_world

I was just reading a totally unrelated news article online (unrelated to food, that is) and this paragraph got me thinking:

“Neoliberalism, with its audit culture and fetish for short term quantitative indicators, is a mass production facility for self-licking cones. Everywhere bottom line measures of “efficiency” shape the activities of organisations and determine career advancement, selecting the kind of people and personalities who prosper in the system.”

Is the Western audit culture in the name of accountability and fetishism for quantitative indicators showing just how efficient we are part of the cause of the emerging food system pathologies? I’ve been wondering lately about the obscured costs of the drive for efficiency – the social, environmental, cultural costs that are not included in a linear accounting of efficient production/consumption.

NB: if, like me until today, you’ve never heard the term “self-licking ice cream cone” I’d encourage you to look it up. You’ll be amazed at how many examples of it you can come up with…

Last week I wrote about food systems and the famine in East Africa and I have just come across an excellent set of images that really shows the extent of the human tragedy.  For those who can’t imagine how a famine writes itself on the bodies of its victims, take a look here.

In the 13 months I worked in these camps, I rarely saw children who looked like this and never saw such malnourished adults.  I am shocked to see the terrible outcomes unfolding for these people.

For anybody moved to contribute in some way, I encourage you to donate to medium-sized NGOs who do good work but face budgetary difficulties – just do a little research on the internet and consider less well-known organizations.  In my view, through supporting such smaller organizations you can contribute towards making a more valuable and dignified impact for people in desperate conditions (not just providing the most calories – as discussed in my previous post).

Image: Fresh food voucher distribution at the Dadaab refugee camps – Kenya.

I’ve been monitoring the developing famine situation in the Horn of Africa for the last few weeks, in part out of concern for friends and colleagues in the region.  Recently WFP and other un-named organizations have come under fire for what appears to be large amounts of food aid being a) looted and b) “redirected” by corrupt employees, food which is being found on the open market for sale.

I won’t go into all the issues aid workers face working in one of the most insecure areas of the world or how food aid always plays some role in conflict economies or how households often find ways to secure extra rations for the purpose of selling in order to buy other necessary supplies for survival and dignity or even how it is an unbelievably massive undertaking to provide food to hundreds of thousands of people spread over an area about the size of Italy every.single.day.

Whatever objections one may have with the kind of projects WFP implements or the way they implement them, it is commonly thought that they have one of the best logistics management systems in the aid sector. However, donor governments place significant pressure on WFP and others to be as cost efficient as possible (let’s leave inflated UN salaries out of the discussion at this point), in the case of food distribution, this means to give the most kilocalories per person as possible.

A focus on cost efficiency in delivering food means carrying out the distribution at a very large scale, it means necessary homogeneity, it means face-less name-less recipients/consumers, and it means minimal interaction with communities.  Now what we are seeing is that people are not getting the food they need due to the system pathologies inherent in cost efficient systems.

What struck me today was the parallel that can be drawn between the emergency food aid system and the conventional and globalized food system, which is also doggedly focused on cost efficiency and “cheap” food.  In both cases I see the specter of negative externalities and system weaknesses already bearing down on the structurally vulnerable, and when we talk of food the repercussions of system failure are catastrophic.