THANKSGIVING always reminds me of one of my city slicker uncles and his visits to my dad’s fourth generation Quebec farm.
Jim Hayes would come to our subsistence farm where horses were used into the late 1960s with great-grandfather’s equipment and there was no electricity and little cash. My uncle would eat a feast, push his chair back from the table and say: “I wonder what the rich people are eating?”
We all got the message. Poor as we were in modern material goods, we were blessed with the richness of great and plentiful food.
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Yet here we are in 2005 with agriculture more productive than ever and yet hunger still stalks the world. More than 800 million citizens of the world are chronically hungry even though farmers in developed countries like Canada perpetually lose money because prices are low due to perceived surpluses and rich country subsidies.
So in this Thanksgiving period when we celebrate and enjoy our good fortune, let’s face some facts.
Chronic hunger in the world is a political choice, a choice not made by the hungry but by leaders of the societies with the food, the money and the means to feed everyone in the world if they chose.
Hunger is not for lack of food. It is for lack of will to get available food to those who need it.
A fraction of the money spent on wars, military procurement and preparedness would solve the hunger problem.
Last week, Malawian activist Mildred Sharra was in Ottawa to talk about her campaign to force the Malawi government to accept the principle that access to adequate food should be a right of citizenship for the more than four million of her fellow citizens facing starvation this winter because of a failed harvest.
She accepts that chronic hunger in her country is not because of a bad harvest but because of political choices made by those who could help and choose not to.
This reality has led a group of prominent Canadian musicians, writers, activists and church people to come together in a campaign to tackle poverty and the malnutrition that often accompanies it.
From musicians Gordon Lightfoot and K-OS to writers like Jane Urquhart and activists like former United Church moderator Lois Wilson, they have created a campaign www.makepovertyhistory.ca that promotes political solutions – more effective aid programs, fewer strings, debt elimination for the poorest counties and trade deals that allow poor countries to make money.
The campaign demands that Canada use world trade talks to make the world a fairer place for poor developing nations.
“Currently, international trade is neither free nor fair,” says their website message. “Trade rules allow rich countries to pay large subsidies to a small number of companies to export food. These policies encourage overproduction, destroy the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers in developing countries and hurt the environment. We need trade justice so poor countries can protect small farmers and staple crops … so governments can access affordable medicine and maintain public services … and so trade rules support, rather than undermine, human rights and environmental protection.”
Their idealistic campaign is based on a simple, sad and very real truth.
Chronic world hunger, like recurring wars, is the result of deliberate political choices. It is not inevitable.
