In hell, people don't die of hunger but
on earth they do.
Please don't let them die and
let us witness what their loving souls
are capable of.
In this era of culminating crises and pervasive confusion, the principle of sharing is increasingly being discussed as a solution to the manifold problems of humanity. There are many individuals and groups that now talk about the importance of sharing as a way forward for society in terms of reducing consumption, conserving resources, preventing wastage or addressing poverty, among other critical issues. But one notable recent development is a conversation on the importance of sharing in relation to food. This may concern the sharing of food through a charity, the salvaging of surplus produce from farms or supermarkets, the free distribution of food at some event or gathering, or even the sharing of a meal between friends or new acquaintances. There are also many other contexts within which this lively discussion is taking place, although the intention of our enquiry is not to analyse the various trends or characteristics of the newly emerging food sharing movements. Rather, let us see if we can investigate for ourselves, in simple common-sense terms, the profounder significance of sharing food with respect to the most urgent crisis of our time—which is arguably the prevalence of hunger worldwide.
To begin with, let’s enquire into the origin of this growing appeal to share food in modern societies. What has led to a situation in which people are now talking about the need to share food in a world of plenty? When we have a family meal, do we think or say to each other: ‘I am now sharing my food with you'? Of course not, no-one says that in a family because the food is for everyone to eat. A father or mother will not consciously think that they must share food with their children, and surely the children will not ask their parents to ‘share’ sufficient provisions with them for health and sustenance. We simply live and eat together as a normal part of our daily lives. The process is natural, automatic. So how did we come to a situation in which we determinedly say, ‘Let’s share food as a solution to our social problems', bearing in mind that the world produces more than enough food for everyone? Implicitly, it suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we relate to each other across society.
On the one hand, you have all of the problems that plague humanity, all the terrible things that happen every day—the widespread violence and exploitation, the extremes of poverty and luxury, all of the divisions wrought into our social order. And then, in the midst of this turmoil, the idea to share our food suddenly takes hold. But if there was not such inequality in the world, and no deprivation or hunger, we may not pay any attention to the idea of sharing food. Just as a family shares its food among everyone and doesn’t think twice about it, so would the family of nations share the world’s plentiful produce as a matter of course, and no-one would have to mention the necessity of sharing. It would also be natural, commonsensical, and a normal part of our daily lives.
So perhaps the question is not why we need to share our food with one another, but why we have organised the world in such a way that it does not allow the food to circulate freely among everyone? Is it a matter of sharing the food that we have acquired for ourselves, or allowing everyone access to the food that is so abundantly available? There is a cruel injustice at the heart of this question. Firstly, our world denies access to food for those who have no money to pay for it, so if you are poor then you have no right to feed yourself or your family. Secondly, and most appallingly, there is such a surplus of food produced in the world that corporations will waste or destroy that food rather than allow it to circulate freely.
What, then, is the root of the problem concerning food? We might say it is the commercialisation of food, and the way in which the production, distribution and consumption of food is being manipulated in the wrong way for profit. For example, the transnational agri-businesses which control vast amounts of food have no interest in making sure that their produce is grown and distributed freely, because they are only concerned with making money. So when it comes to the poor peasant farmer who is struggling to grow his own produce, he has no rights whatsoever compared to the big and powerful corporation. If he lives in a village that can feed itself, and has done for centuries, the corporation can come along and devastate his community by building whatever it is they want to build, because the government will help them to do it. Or perhaps a foreign country such as China will purchase the land encompassing that village, then claim that the food grown on that land now belongs to them, as if that could literally be true.
So how can a poor farmer feed his family, when his land has been effectively stolen from him by a large foreign corporation, or by the government with its misguided policies? And what does food sharing mean for the millions of smallholder farmers in poor countries who are forced to stop selling their surplus produce to the local market, and instead export it to more affluent countries overseas for a cheap price? Do we even know how many supermarkets exist in wealthy industrialised countries that will gladly profit from that cheap food? Or how many tonnes of food they throw away each night? Perhaps the answer doesn’t actually matter, because all of that food and produce belongs to them. The fact remains that they have no interest in sharing the earth‘s bounty that is freely provided by nature, or allowing the food that belongs to everyone to circulate freely.
Surely it is therefore morally and principally correct to say that food should not be commercialised, but rather put in its right place for the benefit of all humanity—not only profitmaking corporations. When food is grown purely for commercial purposes, we might say there is less food for all in a world of plenty. For there is plenty of food available in the global marketplace, but it is so expensive that there is less access to staple provisions for the majority, and too much access to a cornucopia of food for the few. So when the consumption of food is tied to a complex system of market-driven processes, it makes no sense to say that we should all share our food with one another. Who is sharing their food with whom, and to whom did that food belong in the first place? We clearly need to understand food’s essential purpose for human beings before we even begin to talk about how it should be shared. We need to understand the role of food in relationship to the whole of humanity, and consequently direct the God-given essentials of life to their rightful place.
Indeed, we should fundamentally question why it is that our world is producing such a surplus of food per capita, with such spurious methods of industrial farming. Is it to feed the people? If so, then the world’s food belongs to everyone—it doesn’t belong to the immense grain silos where it is stored in thousands of tonnes, ready to be shipped overseas for profit. To commercialise food in this way is extremely dangerous, in the same way that it is dangerous to commercialise water. By definition, the food of the world belongs to all those who need to eat it for their daily sustenance, which has nothing to do with sharing—it has to do with common sense!
Hopefully, the people who are beginning to talk about sharing in relation to food will also consider the issue in terms of justice. Remember, if we lived in a world that was equal and without poverty or deprivation, then the idea of sharing food would hold no meaning, and may never have arisen. The only reason that it makes sense to talk about sharing food is because the world is so divided, unequal and in conflict. And even then, it is only a truly principled idea if we are talking about sharing food between countries to end hunger.
The nature of the food problem in its essence could not be simpler: there’s a huge surplus of food in the world. There are mountains of grains and other staples produced, and that produce has to be distributed to where it is needed for sustaining life. In a global sense, when there are millions of people who are desperately hungry in the poorest regions, we must therefore redirect food as a matter of urgency to prevent anyone dying from starvation or malnutrition.
Surely this stands to reason. Before the parents in a family feed and clothe themselves, they first make sure that their children have everything they need. This also applies by analogy to the family of nations. Before we talk about sharing food in the context of the richest countries, we must first make sure that the children in the poorest regions of the world are well fed and looked after too. We would never dream of sharing our food with friends or neighbours while our children are all alone at home, without anything to eat. So the word ‘emergency’ is much nearer to the problem of food than the word ‘sharing’. A global food emergency infers the need for international cooperation, for effective global governance, for the food and resources of the world to be navigated by whatever means necessary—even the military services—to ensure that hunger is completely eradicated as a leading priority for all nations.
*
Let’s try to be clearer about what we mean when we talk about sharing in relation to food. The art of sharing in economic terms is to direct the world’s resources to where they are needed in order to end separation and deprivation in all its forms. If we are talking about sharing food, that means we cannot restrict our thinking to the level of our own country or community. We also have to think in global terms and in relation, first and foremost, to the politics of ending hunger. Otherwise the concept of sharing food is just a lofty idea that has no substance in the end. Anyway, it has happened many times before that people have come together within a community and shared food among themselves, secluded from the rest of humanity. Their experiments and sharing activities may make a difference to themselves within a collective, but mean little for anyone else.
Similarly, in Greece and Portugal and other countries that are stricken by the economic crisis, many people are now donating food to charities or to other families that don’t have enough money.[1] Sharing food within communities is undoubtedly the right thing to do considering that there is an increasing problem of hunger in affluent countries too. But when is that awareness going to become planetary—not only ‘I feed my neighbour’, but ‘I feed the world’? Now that many eurozone countries are in social turmoil we may begin to share food among ourselves, yet millions of people are dying from hunger in other parts of the world, and have done for many decades. Would we think of them, and not only our neighbours, if the economic crisis in our own countries was resolved?
It’s not even a question of sharing ‘our’ food with the world’s hungry, but of stopping the crime of starvation in a world of plenty and the ongoing theft of resources from the world’s poor. It is really a question of theft, and of illegality; it should be illegal for governments to allow anyone to die for want of food that is so copiously produced. Sharing food in this respect doesn’t mean that we, the people, have to personally share food with the hungry in distant regions. If somebody near to us is suffering from hunger and we share food with them, then clearly the result would be good—that person could be saved from needlessly dying. But there is more than enough food, enough boats, enough planes, enough technology in the world to ensure that food is distributed to everyone who needs it. So how does a person come to a point when they do not have enough to eat, and are incapable of providing for their family? This is the line of enquiry we need to pursue if we want to think for ourselves on this matter in terms of justice, and it can never be answered by sending food parcels from affluent households to remote countries overseas.
Broadly speaking, it appears that the emerging conversation on sharing food can go in one of two ways. We can either invent a new concept around the idea of sharing food that is limited to our own society or community. Or we can focus our attention on the understanding that food belongs to everyone, and expand our awareness to the planetary level in order to uphold a vision of the one humanity. The first way is essentially conservative and self-centred if we think only in terms of what is good for ourselves and our own country. But if we think about the necessity of sharing food globally, and if we re-educate ourselves to think in terms of what is good for the world as a whole, then the idea of sharing to end hunger holds within itself the true meaning of revolution. It will be a revolutionary explosion within our collective consciousness the day we intuit the potential of sharing on the basis of justice, on the basis of compassion, on the basis of common sense, and especially on the basis of maturity and responsibility. If we are clear on what sharing means in global terms, and if our actions are based on a revolution led by the common sense of the heart, perhaps then we can talk about the meaning of sharing in relation to food.
If we only think about sharing food on the basis of charity, however, then we will never reach the economic understandings needed to ensure freedom from want for all the world’s inhabitants. When we are truly interested in making sure that every person in the world is fed, sheltered and cared for, charity is an outmoded form of thinking in our societies that has to be dissipated and eventually relegated to the past. Unless we think about sharing food in relation to justice and ending hunger, we are stripping the principle of sharing of its nobility and greater spiritual meaning. This principle also has a certain inherent dignity, so let us not degrade it with sentimentality or notions of charity. Clearly it’s necessary and indeed crucial to share food on the basis of charity within a divided society that fails to guarantee everyone access to the essentials of life, but that is a very different matter from sharing the world’s resources.
*
Now let us see if we can be any clearer about the meaning of justice in relation to food. When a person in our society commits a crime by killing other people, that person is sent to prison. But even that prisoner is provided with basic amenities and given enough food to eat, and is not permitted by the government to starve. That is what we call justice. And yet we have millions of people around the world who subsist from day to day in a life-threatening state of poverty, and their government does nothing for them. What social crime are these people guilty of? What kind of justice is there for them? Obviously, there can be no justice in a world ridden with inequity and impoverishment unless the government fulfils its duty to help all its citizens. The role of the government is to serve, and not only the people who elected it to power; its duty is to serve and protect everyone, no matter who they are and wherever they live in the world.[2]
But what does that mean for the millions of people who are blamelessly destitute or hungry? As a bare minimum, it means that even if you are poor, even if you do not have many possessions, even if you do not have enough money to fly around the world in a plane, at least you will have enough food to make sure that you are not at risk of dying from starvation or malnutrition. It means that Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must become the guiding principle and law of every nation, which is almost the opposite of the current situation.[3] Even in India, the country with the highest number of undernourished people in the world, the government spends some $40bn on its military budget each year despite the fact that it isn’t at war. Who is the government fighting to protect, when several thousand of the nation’s children die each day due to illnesses related to poor diets? There is more than enough food produced in that country alone to feed all of its people. What’s to stop the government from putting a bill through parliament that says: ‘Redirect our nation’s food surpluses to the hungry millions!’
Perhaps this illustrates why we will never succeed in changing the world’s distorted priorities if we limit our activity to sharing food between ourselves. What we should also do is come together, unite and demonstrate in front of every government to say: ‘Stop what you’re doing!’ But instead of collectively demanding that our governments immediately distribute food to the hungry, many of those involved in food sharing initiatives are behaving as if there’s a war going on. Food is being donated, collected, salvaged and redistributed to help ensure that those who have no money at least have access to the nation’s food surplus. That is a venerable thing to do, but there are no bombs being dropped on our streets or any restrictions being placed on the availability of food.
So why isn’t the world’s food reaching the people who need it most, despite there being more than enough to go around? The reasons are well discussed, as we alluded to above: because the price of food is being dictated by the vagaries of market forces. Because the wholesale commercialisation of food allows it to be hoarded, wasted, speculated upon for profit and sold as animal fodder to industrial feedlots. In response to the monstrous injustices that ensue from this state of affairs, are we going to feed somebody in our neighbourhood and then go home and be happy? The overwhelming extent of avoidable deaths due to hunger demands an emergency response from the world’s governments. So the very first step towards changing this situation is to understand that we are not at war, that there is plenty of food available in the world, and it is our governments that are to blame for causing food deprivation through their reckless policies. How else can food crises of biblical proportions keep repeating themselves, again and again? The time has come when we must say: enough is enough!
It is the world’s governments that have the power to change the laws, to regulate the corporations and redirect food to where it is most critically needed. Even the largest transnational agribusinesses, despite all their profit-seeking deviousness, are no match compared to a united voice of the world’s people. From whichever way you look at it, the key to change is the collective power of ordinary people. If enough people unite and tell a corrupt government leader that they have to leave office, then that politician will be forced to leave, as we have seen in Egypt. And if enough people boycotted the products of giant food corporations, then those corporations would be forced to change their destructive practices that are causing poverty and perpetuating hunger. It is up to us, the everyday men and women of goodwill, to make a stand for the kind of world we want to live in. We are born to serve, we are born with compassion, we are born to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and the governments are taking that away from us with their divisive laws and policies; for how much longer are we going to conform while our brothers and sisters are dying of starvation and disease?
We have to become activists and unite no matter where we live in the world, and together we can stop this injustice. It is time for a huge demonstration that doesn’t cease until the crisis of hunger is adequately addressed by our governments. It cannot be like the protests against the Iraq war in 2003 when millions of people amassed internationally for one weekend and then went home, permitting the politicians to carry on with their resource-grabbing stratagems. We have to carry on and on and on, in every country and capital city, until an emergency programme of food redistribution is coordinated by governments at an international level.
It will never be enough if we target our efforts at sharing food within our own localities. The critical magnitude of the situation behoves us to come together with awareness of what is happening around the world, to organise ourselves and demand from our governments that everyone is immediately fed. Even the people who are sharing food locally and those who are receiving that food should join forces, go outside and demonstrate for an irrevocable end to hunger! Without the rise of an indignant public we will never witness a re-ordering of global priorities, a massive redirection of funds to the poorest areas of the world, and a concerted restructuring of the global economy to ensure that hunger is completely abolished and never allowed to happen again.
However, let’s not be tempted to believe that our existing government leaders will automatically accede to an overwhelming call from the public to end hunger. We know that the world’s governments have the means to rapidly end the suffering of millions of people, but that doesn’t mean it is in their best interests to do so. For instance, it is taken for granted that only strategic or economic interests will incentivise a foreign intervention in the forgotten conflict zones of Africa, let alone the prospect of enacting an intergovernmental emergency programme to rebuild those devastated regions and care for the dispossessed. And even if the political will was there for such extensive relief and support, the current methods used to help the poor in less developed nations will always remain insufficient, such as Official Development Assistance. This is the remnant of a very old and malefic system, and it’s high time that institutionalised charity was replaced by an international programme of cooperative action to forever end hunger and needless deprivation.
Will our existing government leaders therefore understand what has to be done to solve poverty and social injustice, even if they are compelled to do so by world public opinion? Maybe they will respond with sufficient urgency, but it is more likely that they will not. So perhaps the first step is for the public to drive out all the old politicians that uphold the status quo, and put more ordinary people with common sense into positions of influence and authority. The trained ordinary person sees the world very differently from the wealthy politician who was educated in private schools and elite universities. Common sense belongs to the ordinary people in every country because they are the ones who see the need for justice, who don’t want to become a ‘somebody’ in the eyes of others, and who only want to serve the common good of all. They are not like the government bureaucrats who work without vision in accordance with an ideology that serves only the rich, the establishment and powerful corporations.
Indeed, one reason why common sense has never prevailed in our societies is because it has long been abducted by domineering governments and their ill-advised political leaders. Conservative heads of state are not equipped for the transformations that lie ahead, and for obvious reasons. First of all, it’s not their fault, for they have not been trained to implement the policies that can feed the world’s people and reverse decades of destructive commercialisation. Secondly, they would be shocked if you asked them to do so. They would say: ‘Excuse me, but I have billions of dollars of contracts with foreign countries, and now you're asking me to jeopardise all those years of working for our national self-interest?!’ To ask such a politician of the old order to transform his policy priorities could be a dangerous mistake, because if you carry on asking the wrong person to heed the public’s demands then you will end up violently asking them. And violence has no part to play whatsoever in sharing the world’s resources. That is why the old governments have to go. We should not waste our time voting for them any longer. And there is no point in protesting for those old-school politicians to completely change their worldviews, because they will never do it. So they have to leave office! We need them out!
We have to replace the doctrinaire authorities with fresh blood, with ordinary people who are here to serve humanity with gratitude, humility and wisdom. The wise ordinary person will be aware of what they are elected for, which the commercially-minded politician was never in office to do. There are many experienced people who work in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), for example, who work with an attitude of selfless service and know precisely the changes that are needed in different fields. These are the kind of people that we need to set out the policies that governments should implement. And together, those policies should be taken to the United Nations and formulated into an international program of economic restructuring and resource redistribution. The multitude of NGOs around the world are doing the work that should always have been done by our governments, such as healing the environment, feeding the hungry, tending to the poor and working out the policies that will pave the road to a better world. What the progressive and humanitarian NGOs stand for, in effect, represents the best that our governments should be aspiring to do.
So we have to get the orthodox politicians out, the trained ordinary people in, and the wisdom of the NGOs must be the guiding light of our new government administrations. Once we stop the mess being created by governments who follow the divisive rules of commercialisation, then the hungry can finally eat, the damage can slowly be undone, and the rest will follow naturally. Every nation already knows what it needs. And if we only listen to the respected thinkers in the many people’s movements and activist NGOs, they will give us the needed answers.
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In response to these assertions, many people may contest that it is too idealistic to expect a united people’s voice to focus on the suffering of the abject poor. Why, for example, have we yet to see any demonstrations in our city squares for an end to poverty-induced hunger wherever it exists? This is an important question to ponder, although perhaps we already know the answer: because it’s normal for there to be people dying from starvation in other parts of the world. We’re used to it; it’s been going on for decades.
It’s easy to say what we should do, which is to go in unison before our governments and, with the power of millions of voices, hit hard with our simple demand, day after day in peaceful protest until something is done. But it seems the nearest thing we have right now is people swapping food, donating to charities or sharing meals in community festivities. Of the many organisations springing up around the idea of sharing food, most don’t even mention the fact that people are starving in distant countries. And why not? Because it’s much safer to limit the idea of sharing to the level of our own country or community. We are far less inclined to take the view that sharing has to be applied globally, because then we may have to reflect on our own lifestyles in relation to the poorest people in the world, or take a stand against our government and its destructive policies.
Even if we do know the true scale of food insecurity in poorer countries, we would rather respond to the idea of sharing in a limited and self-centred way, without stepping out of our comfort zone. We would rather have a party in the name of sharing food while millions of people are dying from hunger. We may feel good about participating in such food sharing activities, but in fact we are reducing the idea of sharing into an ‘ism’ or a sheer fantasy. It is really an extension of our complacency which means nothing with respect to the critical world situation, and will achieve nothing for the survival of humanity. Complacency is like water; it goes everywhere possible when disturbed, but always looks for its balance and seeks to return to the same place as before. Our complacency is the same because we are always looking for our own security, and we are all seeking a place to hide from our fear. Complacency and fear are one and the same thing, because one cannot exist without the other. We are all very scared, acting as if we will live for a thousand years even though the tensions in the world are so extreme that without drastic changes we’ll soon be finished. And we are all implicated in the crisis of our civilisation. No-one is absolved from the world problems that we've together inherited and recreated, from lifetime to lifetime.
Who, then, shall we point our finger at when it comes to the atrocity of hunger? We know that governments are not interested in redistributing food to where it is most critically needed, and major corporations are causing hunger by commercialising food and marginalising the poor. But maybe we are more culpable than the governments or corporations because, due to our indifference, we do little to prevent this situation from continuing year after year.
Unfortunately, no single person or group can bring about massive demonstrations for governments to prevent food deprivation as a leading priority. Only our combined awareness can lead to a worldwide understanding that ending hunger is a moral imperative, and that it is inexcusable that anyone should die for want of food that is abundantly available. Which means that needless deaths due to hunger in a world of plenty is the final consequence of our collective complacency, and there is no escaping this brutal fact. It is not our governments, it is not the corporations, it is not a conspiracy by a secret cabal, but it is WE who are most to blame.
What can we say the principle of sharing finally means, then, in relation to food? As we have already ascertained, it means immediate action to end hunger through an international emergency programme. It means ensuring that every man, woman and child has access to the food that is available everywhere. It really is as simple as that. It is not a complicated situation, despite what the exponents of commercialisation would have us believe. What we call the system has created such division in our societies through its complex laws and policies that in the end nobody really understands what the system is anymore. But that doesn’t mean we have to think about the problem of food in a complicated way, because we are all the same in our common needs as human beings. The principle of sharing when applied to food distribution will mean, at the very least, that no-one in this world dies from starvation ever again. It will mean that everyone has access to safe and nutritious food, until eventually the word ‘sharing’ is no longer associated with the word ‘food’ in our vocabulary.
The true significance of implementing the principle of sharing into world affairs is to bring balance within humanity and nature so that every person and every living thing on this earth is granted the God-given right to evolve. Therefore sharing the world’s food will mean much more than eradicating hunger, because it will lead to a new global awareness about our relationship with each other and the natural world. Of course, that awareness must be reflected in deep-seated changes to governmental policies, such as unjust trade rules and perverse agricultural subsidies. Countless laws may eventually have to disappear if we are to untangle food from the complex processes of commercialisation. In the long run, we will have to learn to live more simply so that we do not produce more food than we need, or waste food unnecessarily. As long as we continually produce more and more food for the endless pursuit of profit, we are wrecking the earth for no effective purpose while failing to ensure that everyone is fed and nourished.
So the first stage of sharing food on a worldwide basis will involve the emergency redistribution of grains and other essential foodstuffs. And out of that redistributive process, a second stage will necessitate a new simplicity in our relationship to food, so that we only produce what we need and no longer harm the earth’s natural processes. This in turn will clearly implicate the role of giant agri-corporations; they must also be impelled, through the unified strength of world public opinion, to pay their ‘fair shares’ in redistributing food while dramatically reforming their current approach to industrial farming.
All of this ultimately depends on our collective willingness to gather together and demonstrate in the streets, on and on like never before, until intergovernmental bodies and new economic arrangements ensure that everyone is guaranteed access to sufficient food. We know that we have the finances to do it, if only by redirecting our taxes that are wrongfully spent on military expenditures. We know that we have the food produce, the expertise, the capacity and all other necessary resources. So what are we waiting for? Let’s unite and go before our governments to demand unprecedented action to end world hunger!
Endnotes
[1] These observations were made in the wake of the European soverign debt crisis, which peaked between 2010 and 2012.
[2] Such a statement may sound controversial, but it is in fact the basis of international human rights law. All governments have recognised their duty to respect, protect and fulfil human rights obligations not only within their own borders, but also extraterritorially. This commitment is captured in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other international treaties. For more information, see the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
[3] Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly resolution 217 A): (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, windowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childholld are entitled to special care and sassistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
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Mohammed Sofiane Mesbahi is STWR's founder.
Editorial assistance: Adam Parsons.
Photo credit: Shutterstock