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HUNGER AND PLENTY 329

dairy cows per farm more than tripled while situation as cheap food destroyed attempts
the average number of pigs per farm for local self-reliance.
increased more than ten times (Agriculture Treating food as a commodity rather than
and Agri-Food Canada, 2006: 66). Fewer as an essential of life leads to externalizing
farms controlling larger operations, such as the health-related costs of hunger, malnutri-
mega farms and factory farms, dominate the tion and diet-related diseases. While the
food scene (Buttel, 2003). They use large modern food system has reduced some of the
amounts of agro-industrial inputs, fertilizers, stresses of the last century regarding food
pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibi- safety and nutritional adequacy, new con-
otics in an attempt to maintain increasing cerns about the health impacts of diets have
productivity in a market dominated by fewer emerged. Worldwatch Institute estimated that
and fewer TNCs. Farming has become while the world’s underfed population
increasingly separated from its populist roots declined slightly between 1980 and 2000 to
as a ‘way of life’ under pressures of com- 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people,
modification, intensification and globaliza- during the same period, surged to 1.1 billion.
tion. Yet, an increase in productivity only The same report quoted the World Bank
ensures survival for some, at least for one figures to the effect that hunger cost India
more season. Farmers rely increasingly on between 3% and 9% of its GDP in 1996. At
extra-farm income, and many could not sur- the same time, obesity cost the United States
vive without costly government assistance 12% of its national health-care budget in the
(Lobao and Meyer, 2001). late 1990s, around $118 billion, more than
Identifying progress as growth-oriented twice the $47 billion attributable to smoking
industrial models of production, technologi- (Gardner and Halweil, 2000). In Canada
cal progress and commodification, agricul- the prevalence of obesity has increased dra-
tural development policies often encourage matically since the 1980s. In 1978/79, the
the tendencies that caused the problems. age-adjusted adult obesity rate was 14%.
The Green Revolution, which emphasized Twenty-five years later, this figure was 23%.
mechanization, artificial irrigation, special-
ization, hybrid and genetically modified seed
technologies, has been promoted without
critical scrutiny of its long-term conse- FRAGMENTED GLOBALISM,
quences for rural ecology, soil, water and air MARGINALIZATION AND HUNGER
quality, deforestation, and loss of biodiver-
sity and gas emissions that are responsi- Since the 1980s, the impact of neo-liberal
ble for global warming (Wackernagel and restructuring has been to add to the ranks of
Rees, 1996). the poor and the marginalized on a global
The anarchy of production was inevitable scale. Whether living in the shantytowns of
in a system that was organized around the Third World cities, or in the flooded slums of
goal of maximization of profit for each enter- New Orleans, the poor face similar condi-
prise rather than for societal needs. Unique tions of poverty, exclusion and marginaliza-
features of the commodity markets, includ- tion (Therborn, 2006; UNDP, 2005). In the
ing the subsidies and other incentives offered meanwhile, the income gap between the rich
by governments, led to the build-up of sur- and the poor has continued to grow. A
pluses and created the crisis of overproduction. study released by the Helsinki-based World
This is cyclical in nature in capitalist Institute for Development Economics
economies and a permanent feature of the agri- Research of the United Nations University
food system. Hunger and surpluses continued (UNU-WIDER) reports that in the year 2000,
to grow together, and attempts to use surpluses the richest 1% of adults in the world owned
to alleviate hunger have only worsened the 40% of global wealth, the richest 2% owned