My Food Ethic

Living in, arguably, the culinary capital of America, I feel obligated as a writer and as a New Orleans resident to explore deep into the often-derided realm of the normative and applied ethics of food. With the ideas of Plato and John Stuart Mill deeply seated in my ethical conscience, I quickly sat at my cherry wood-finished desk to jot down a working list of tips for my food ethic. The list read, in my somewhat legible handwriting, "buy local," "eat seasonally," "cook at home," "pay attention to food label rhetoric" "avoid food from industrial farms," "eat healthy," "eat less meat," "think about the origins of your food." The list was short, sweet and to the point. Those short, hard-hitting phrases covered a lot of territory from the billion dollars in medical costs from American unhealthy eating habits to limiting carbon emissions by buying locally, instead of relying on food internationally transported. But, for some reason, my ethical conscience was not satisfied; it craved and begged for me to search for certain actions that have destructive consequences hidden to the general, unexamining human eye. I feverishly searched peer-reviewed sites for an answer, but to no avail. However, soon thereafter I began considering the connections between hunger, poverty, and the economics and politics of agriculture, specifically on the global level. And voila, I discovered the missing link to my food ethic: striving to end food practices that contribute to world hunger.

(1)Diversion of land use to non-productive use e.g., tobacco industry, tea and coffee plantations, floriculture, beef and fast food industries, and sugarcane growing for sugar exports.
a. Tobacco production: The tobacco industry diverts huge amounts of rich farmland from producing food to producing tobacco. According to Dr. Judith Mackay, Director of the Asian consultancy on Tobacco control in Hong Kong, tobacco's "minor" use of land denies 10 to 20 million people food. Tobacco uses up more water, and has more pesticides applied to it, further affecting water supplies. These water supplies are further depleted by the tobacco industry recommending the planting of quick-growing, but water-thirsty eucalyptus trees. Also, child labor is often needed for tobacco farms. The net economic costs of tobacco are profoundly negative--the cost of treatment, disability and death exceeds the economic benefits to producers by at least U.S. $200 billion annually "with one third of this loss being incurred by developing countries." The indebted, small farmers are the ones most affected by the impacts of the tobacco companies. The hard cash earned from this "foreign investment" is offset by the costs in social and public health.
b. Coffee production: "25 million coffee growers worldwide are paid a mere pittance in the corporate marketplace while bearing the full brunt of global price fluctuations. When prices crash, farmers go hungry and their children are forced to drop out of school. Families are separated, communities disintegrate, and the land is cleared for other crops or other means of livelihood. That clearing of the land disrupts the ecosystem in ways that have deadly consequences for migratory birds in particular and for global ecological balance in general." Coffee production provides a livelihood for 25 million people in developing countries and globally, 10.6 million hectares of land are used for growing coffee beans. Coffee is one of the most legally-traded agricultural commodities in the world and one of the most important income crops for small farmers in developing countries. However, growing coffee is not always a relaible source of income. While coffee production incresed 61% between 1960 and 2000, prices fell by 57 % during the same period. Growing coffee has significant environmental impacts: establishing coffee plantations results in the clearance of natural forest areas. This trend is made worse by the increasing demand for high-grade speciality coffee, which requires more land. Chemical use contributes to soil degradation. A shift to new production methods has increased pesticide use enormously, resulting in lower insect populations and reduced nutrient recycling by soil. As coffee production has moved away from the farms and fields, waste pulp is dumped in rivers, thus reducing levels of oxygen in the water and degrading freshwater ecosystems. It could instead be used as a soil amendment for coffee crops.
c. Floriculture: It diverts land use away from growing needed food. Very low wages, child labor, and pesticide poisoning. Haryana, traditionally a fertile agricultural state, is today one of the world leaders in growing tulips for export. Increasingly, countries like India are pollutiong their air, earth, and water to grow products for the Western market instead of growing food to feed their own people. Prime agricultural lands are being poisoned to meet the needs of the consumers in the West, and the money consumers spend does not reach the majority of the working poor in the Third World.
d. Beef: More than one third of the world's grain harvest is used to feed livestock. While corn is a staple food in many Latin American and Sub-Saharan countries, "worldwide, it is used as feed." Some 70 to 80% of grain produced in the U.S. is fed to livestock. Half the water consumer in the U.S. is used to grow grain for cattle feed. Hundreds of thousands of acres of tropical forests in Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras, to name just a few countries, have been leveled to create pasture for cattle. Further aggravating the problem is the pervasive use of prime agricultural lands for pasture and portion of idle land among among the country's largest land holdings (of 1,000 hectares or more) 88.7 percent of arable land is left permanently idle. Beef is terribly insufficient as a source of food. By the time a feedlot steer in the U.S. is ready for slaughter, it has consumed 2,700 pounds pounds of grain and weights approximately 1,050 pounds; 157 metric tons of cereal and vegetable protein is used to produce 28 metic tons of animal protein.
e. Sugar: Forests must be cleared to plant sugar, wood or fossil fuels are needed in processing steps, waste products from processing affect the environment, parallel consumptions of other items related to sugar, including coffee, tea, chocolate, etc all collectively put additional resource requirements on the environment. Hidden or external costs: to create, maintain, and support the office buildings and factories where people work in these industries, to support effots in creating demands as well as meeting real and resulting demands, to deal with waste disposal, to deal with resulting health problems and the resources to deal with them, to pay and support lobbyists to help governments and regulation agencies see their perspectives. Dire health effects from children drinking soda.
(2) Increasing emphasis on liberalized, export-oriented and industrial agriculture.
(3)Food treated as a commodity.
(4) Structural adjustment policies. (One should advocate better policies from the IMF and World Bank). If one is in favor of globalization, one should support better global agricultural business methods that do not harm poorer countries.
(5) Inefficient agricultural practices.
(6) Wasted wealth, by wasted capital, wasted labor and resources.


Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/7/causes-of-hunger-are-related-to-poverty#Sugarcanegrowingforsugarexports