The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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Right now, throughout most of the world, fewer and fewer people are in charge of making the decisions about food production. It's become a kind of snowballing phenomenon. Just look back about 25 years ago, to the first introduction of hybrid seeds and modern machinery into Third World agriculture. Who gained from the new resources? Those few literate farmers who already had a decent amount of land and connections in the government! Such individuals were able to profit and then to use that money to buy more acreage . . . which gave them equity to get loans, expand their holdings even further, acquire newer machines, and so on.

In such a process, the majority of people end up with less and less land-or none at all-and they also lose jobs to the new equipment. Worse still, as they become increasingly impoverished, they lose even the power to be part of a strong local buying market. And when the peasants can't afford to purchase basic beans and rice and corn, food production becomes geared more and more toward providing luxury crops and meat for a small elite in the cities and-through exports-for people in other nations. Now this situation isn't part of a plot by cruel landowners to starve local people, yet the very processes that increase the food production in such circumstances also increase hunger!

In our books, we discuss this trend, following it from the village to the national level. As examples, 44% of the basic staple grains grown in Brazil are now being fed to livestock . . . in Central America, two-thirds of the farmland-much of it prime agricultural acreage-is being used to graze cattle . . . and the people of the Philippines are now considered by the World Health Organization to be the worst fed in all of Asia, yet that country exports rice!

All this inequality is inefficient, too-as well as inhumane—because small farms actually produce more food per acre than do large ones. That's true in every country we've studied . . . including the U.S. Bigger is not better: antidemocratic structures are not very effective.

PLOWBOY: You're saying, then, that using advanced technology to grow more food actually increases world hunger. That's a pretty startling idea.

LAPPE: It can do so. It's often said that I'm against technology or increased food production. But that's an oversimplification and thus not true. What matters is always who benefits from the new technology. For instance, consider the impact of biogasification units that convert animal waste to gas energy. Here's a small-scale "appropriate" technology that, on the surface, seems ideal for poor regions . . . and indeed, both China and India have started using it.

There's a difference, though. The biogasification units in China are managed at the village level, so everyone in the area benefits from the new energy supply. But in India the devices are controlled by the few people who have the capital to invest in a unit and the animals to produce the needed waste. Worse yet, once the biogasifier is set up and running, all of a sudden dung has a price. Where before even the poorest people could gather that waste to use as fuel, it's now often valuable enough to be beyond their economic reach. So instead of helping everyone, the technology benefits some and harms others.

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