The United States' Failing Food System

The following conversation with Anuradha Mittal is an excerpt from the new book Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots (PoliPointPress, 2007) by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. You can read more about the book here.

Anuradha Mittal is Founder and Executive Director of the Oakland Institute, a non-profit research and advocacy organization in Oakland, California, that works to ensure public participation and democratic debate on crucial economic and social policy issues. A native of India, Anuradha is an internationally renowned expert on trade, development, human rights, democracy, food security, and agriculture issues.

Q: What are the biggest problems with the food system in the United States?

AM: I think the biggest problem in the United States is that food, instead of being about communities, is now about commodities. It is controlled, not by the family farm, growing food for families and communities, while maintaining bio-diversity; it has come to mean large corporate industrial agriculture farms, where machines have replaced farmers, where monocultures have replaced biodiversity, where corporate agribusiness has replaced family farms. What we see as a result is a disconnect between us and the food system where we have been reduced to mere consumers. So we have to rethink our relationship with the food system before we can effectively challenge that.

One of the biggest myths about hunger is that people are hungry because we are not producing enough food, and therefore technological solutions and genetic engineering is put forward as a solution. There is no shortage of food production. If you look at the figures compiled by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there is enough food to provide over 2,720 calories per person per day around the world. If the problem was a shortage of food production, you would not have hunger in a country like the United States.

The real problem is the absence of living-wage jobs. Many people have to choose between putting food on the table or having a roof over their heads or having medical insurance for their families. There is a real deficit in governance of the food system, as a result of which today we have nearly 60 percent of the processed food that we eat in the U.S. has genetically modified organisms in it. There was no democratic process whereby people of this country could determine for themselves what kind of food they would eat, how it is grown, and who grows it. So while we have regulatory agencies asleep at the wheel, we have seen genetic contamination -- we don't even know the health impacts of this dangerous technology -- and we have seen negative impacts on the livelihoods of farmers.

Basically we have been turned into guinea pigs. We have been reduced to people who think freedom is about choosing from 40 different brands of toothpaste, but we have really forgotten what true freedom looks like, what true democracy looks like.

Q: Defenders of the system say that through supply and demand people get the food they want because they choose to buy it in the marketplace. Is there democracy in the marketplace?

AM: It's a big mess. According to a recent poll, 90 percent of Americans want their food labeled. Right now our food does not say it contains GMOs. So when you are drinking your "all natural" Minute Maid orange juice, it doesn't have to say it's not really natural, that it contains GMOs because of the high fructose corn syrup in it. The system is not very democratic.

We are living in a world where corporations are taking so much control of our food system that they are creating monopolies. Less than four companies control 80 percent of pork production, and two grain companies control the majority of the world's grain trade. So we don't really have a choice. What we have are monopolies-Cargill, ADM, Conagra are monopolies, controlling our food system and dictating prices. The biggest brunt of this system has been borne by the farmers, so when U.S. government officials talk about promoting trade agreements to benefit farmers, it's a joke because we have an agricultural system that is destroying our farmers.