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DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET PDF, EPUB, EBOOK F. Moore Lappe | 482 pages | 01 Feb 1992 | Random House USA Inc | 9780345321206 | English | New York, United States Small Planet Institute, Cambridge, MA LAPPE: Men and women aren't going to be motivated to practice any form of birth control until they know that most of the children they do bear will survive! As it is now, the only way poor people can provide for their old age is to have several children who will care for them. People must be sure that they can meet their own basic security needs, and that the children they bear will have a reasonable chance to survive, before birth control can be considered a realistic option. Only then, when people have freedom from famine, can conscientious efforts to teach and encourage family planning be successful. Instead of thinking of countries as homogeneous units, we have to focus on the people who control the wealth in our society, and of those who control the wealth in the Third World. In most cases, the leadership in the Third World doesn't represent the people there. Even if those politicians were granted all the high-sounding concessions they ask for from the industrialized powers, the majority of their people would still go hungry. For instance, many leaders of underdeveloped countries push for better terms of trade for their exports. Well, suppose the price of coffee, say, goes up. If nothing else changed, the small farmers-individuals who were growing food for themselves—would be forced off their land so that richer growers could plant more and more coffee to take advantage of the export income. In fact, in many Third World countries the poor do best when prices for their nation's major crops are depressed. But once again, it's essential that we not oversimplify. In Nicaragua—which is genuinely attempting to redistribute land and wealth—coffee export income is used for basic development. So when coffee prices crashed recently, after that nation's government had heavily invested in the crop, it hurt the society as a whole. As impoverishment grows in the underdeveloped countries, there's more and more export. It's no longer a case of only the traditional tropical crops— such as bananas, pineapples, and coffee—being shipped out of Third World nations. Now, America gets one-half to two-thirds of its winter vegetables from Mexico. And cassava, a basic, high-calorie root crop that poor people have survived on for decades, is now shipped from Thailand to Europe, where it's used as livestock feed. The U. And although not many people know it, much of the food we're buying from Third World nations is contaminated with dangerous pesticides like DDT. That's bad enough, but in poor countries—where people often get their drinking water from canals that contain pesticide runoff, where uneducated individuals can buy liquid insecticides in cola bottles, and where farm workers are sometimes sprayed from overhead planes by plantation owners who are breaking up union meetings—the poisons cause immeasurably more severe damage than they ever did here. And, of course, the export crops grown for sale to wealthy countries like ours tend to receive the largest doses of these pesticides, because consumers in industrial nations have come to expect blemish-free food. The biggest American food-processing firms—having reached a point at which they can't expect to keep increasing their food sales to this nation's public—are now finding a whole new market for their wares abroad. The urban elite in the Third World equate processed foods with modernization and westernization. Consequently, many of the items exported from the U. And, of course, the whole scandalous story of American firms pushing infant baby formula to poor people in the Third World—which has led to the malnourishment and death of millions of infants—is another example of our emphasis on processed food exports. What's more, our feed grain exports have gone up fourfold in the last decade. But since two-thirds of our total agricultural exports go to feed livestock, the effect is to encourage people in other countries to eat beef and other grain-fed meats. Thirty years ago, for instance, the average Japanese citizen ate almost no red meat. In countries where economic control is concentrated in the hands of a few, our aid strengthens the local and foreign elite. Thus, instead of helping the poor, our aid frequently hurts the dispossessed majority. Food shipments to Haiti, tube-well installations in Bangladesh, and programs to fund rural electrification and road building in Indonesia all get used to benefit those who already have power. At the institute, we've concluded that U. The first is the belief that it's possible to go through the powerful to reach the powerless. The second is that U. The sad truth is that we often use our aid to support repressive Third World regimes solely because they are our political allies. For instance, during the five years after President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines declared martial law in , our aid to that country increased fivefold. It's now the sixth largest recipient of U. And the Philippines are hardly alone. India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are among the ten countries that receive over one-third of all U. I learned much of what I know about the impact of our foreign aid programs during my years of study and work following the first edition of Diet for a Small Planet. For the past two years, though, I've been focusing primarily on the situation within the U. Indeed, that's one big reason why we shouldn't feel deadened by guilt about the plight of the hungry of the world. Those people aren't our enemies. LAPPE: One of the biggest parallels between our country and most underdeveloped nations is the increasing concentration of food control. Look at farming. The profit margin from crops is so thin by , real profits per acre had sunk to half what they were in that the only thing for farmers to do is, as Earl Butz put it, "get big or get out". And the key to getting big is to first own a lot of that valuable land. As agricultural economist Donald Paarlberg said, "We are developing a wealthy hereditary landowning class which is contrary to American traditions. Thus the farmers in the middle—since most of the smallest ones have managed to survive by means of off-farm income—are getting squeezed out of business. In fact, if two-thirds of America's growers tried to live solely on the sales of their crops, their income would be well below the official poverty line. Farmers are forced to compete against each other and to produce more and more, yet that same increased production depresses prices so that they have to produce more still in order to make the same income. There're always ways to get rid of the extra food, though: Half of our harvest is fed to livestock, and our agricultural exports have doubled in the last decade. But the pressures of steadily expanding production are leading to the destruction of food-linked resources. Increased monoculture planting of erosion-inducing crops has resulted in a constant loss of topsoil on more than a third of our cropland. Farmers have had to rely on irrigation to raise yields, and the added demand is draining the water from giant aquifers. And of course, more fertilizers and pesticides are needed to maintain maximum productivity under these deteriorating conditions. PLOWBOY: But if food production is increasing, surely somebody—besides the small minority of growers who are big enough to survive—must be benefiting. Here the concentration of economic control is even more extreme than it is in farming at this point. Take the largest trader, the Minneapolis-based Cargill Corporation, for example. Yet this firm, surviving on U. The company's major trading arm, Tradax, is chartered in Panama and based in Geneva. Cargill exports over a quarter of all the grain that leaves this country. And because the company has significant foreign operations as well, it actually competes with American farmers in order to keep farm prices down! Since World War II, our nation has lost half of all its food manufacturing businesses. And only 0. Consequently, in the cereal, baby food, soup, and beer product areas, four corporations control over half of the sales. They have what's called a shared monopoly. Well, the chapter presents five or six possible plans—such as making more products to grab a bigger share of the market, creating consumer loyalty with a heavy advertising blitz, processing foods into "prepared" dinners in order to charge higher prices for the same ingredients, cutting costs by replacing substantial food ingredients with less expensive ones such as salt, sugar, and artificial flavors , and so forth—and then demonstrates that each moneymaking strategy leads to the creation of more additiveladen, less healthful food. The point is that one doesn't have to be an evil cutthroat to follow these steps. Indeed, Dr. Kellogg—founder of the giant corporation that bears his name—was a strict vegetarian. And the first creation of the man who launched General Foods was Postum, a coffee substitute devised to free us from the evils of caffeine. Simple, profit-maximizing logic led these and other once well-intentioned companies to take steps that were detrimental to consumers' health. LAPPE: Let me put it this way: To eat the typical American diet is to participate in the biggest experiment in human nutrition ever conducted.