Food for Thought: Part 1

No doubt many of you, as stubborn children refusing to eat your broccoli, have been subjected to the familiar refrain: "Eat your dinner. There are people starving in the world!" Frankly, I'd often wished that there was just someplace I could give away my dinner so that some starving child in Africa could eat my broccoli, if he wanted it (I couldn't, at the time, see how he would).

If only the solution were that simple. GCB attended the Food for Thought conference at Stanford today--a gathering of students, economists, ethicists and experts in the fields of technology and the environment--to understand some of the multidimensional issues facing food, agriculture and global poverty.

According to the United Nations, there are more undernourished people in the world than the populations of the U.S., Canada and European Union combined... and 94% of these people live in the developing world. This is despite the fact that there is more than enough food produced globally to feed the world's 6.7 billion people. As Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen wrote, "Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat."

Food security therefore is not just an issue of availability, but access as well. War, natural disasters, poor infrastructure, depleted natural resources and chronic poverty are the primary challenges to food access.

Here were just some of the GCB's takeaways from the conference:

1. Food security is not self-sufficiency; trade and trade regulations are still a necessary part of shifting global resources and a system which relies on competitive advantages (however flawed the system is today).
2. Effective investments in agriculture will be key--particularly those with a focus in long-term growth and sustainability--coupled with a redesign of social assistance programs in developing nations to cope with transitory poverty.
3. Foreign aid programs need to be redesigned for greater efficiency. While we don't knock foreign aid in its intentions, the fact that the U.S. earmarks nearly $2 billion/year on food aid, yet two-thirds of this money goes towards costs such as shipping U.S. commodities overseas is wasteful, inefficient and causes commercial displacement in the targeted countries (local people aren't buying from local farmers).

After 6 hours of lectures on trade policy, ethical dilemmas, advances in genetically-modified foods and climate change's effects on agricultural productivity, I noticed a definite lack of discussion on the role of for-profit businesses in solving global hunger. Can social businesses such as Grameen-Danone become a more effective force at fighting global hunger and malnutrition? How can we create incentives for businesses to become part of the solution?