The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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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. By 1980, though, it accounted for 20% of the calories in that nation's diet. And American-style fastfood outlets are expected soon to make up 70% of all such sales in Japan . . . displacing most of the traditional rice, fish, and noodle bars.

PLOWBOY: But what about all of the U.S. food aid that's sent abroad to feed hungry people?

LAPPE: I'm afraid that the role of U.S. government assistance-even direct food aid-is to reinforce all of these patterns we've talked about. In countries where economic control is concentrated in the hands of a few, our aid strengthens the local and foreign elite . . . whose stranglehold on land and other productive resources helped to generate poverty and hunger in the first place. 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.S. foreign assistance fails to help the poor because it's based on two fundamental fallacies. The first is the belief that it's possible to go through the powerful to reach the powerless. The second is that U.S. government aid can be separated from the military and economic strategies of U.S. policymakers. 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 1972, our aid to that country increased fivefold. It's now the sixth largest recipient of U.S. development assistance, yet-as I pointed out earlier-it has the worst-fed people in all of Asia.

And the Philippines are hardly alone. India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are among the ten countries that receive over one-third of all U.S. aid . . . and each of those nations has a government internationally notorious for its neglect of the poor and repression of those wanting change.

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.S., because the same repressive patterns of economic control-and the same increase in exports by corporations with no accountability or loyalty to the wellbeing of the people of their country-that are crippling the Third World are at work here, too! 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. . . we're all victims of the same economic forces!

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