Petra Kelly on population and hunger
By Frank Noakes
The ongoing debate in Green Left's pages about population could perhaps benefit from consideration of what the late German Green Petra Kelly had to say on the topic. Speaking at the World Food Day Seminar in Dublin on October 16, 1990, she made the following remarks:
"The total food resources available in the world would be perfectly adequate to feed everyone properly if they were only fairly distributed.
"Seen over the long term, total food production in the world has defied Malthus' predictions that it could not keep up with population growth. The 'world food problem' is not so much one of overall production as one of local production and above all distribution. The world's food supply is not shared in such a way as to maximise human welfare. The distribution is just as unequal, unjust, and iniquitous as that of every other element in life. Food inequality is the most damaging form of all inequality. It is inequality not in material possessions but in human flesh and bones."
Kelly went on to point to that much of the Third World's best land is used not to feed the people, but to grow cash crops for consumption in the West.
Kelly said we must ask ourselves "why people in the Third World are forced to cut down their own forests. Just look at the debt crisis and you will know the answer.
"Another myth is that Africa cannot feed itself. As recently as 1970, Africa was self-sufficient in food. Let me say something about the myth that Africa is overwhelmed by population growth. In some countries, yes, the rates of population growth are faster than anywhere else in the world, yet Africa as a whole is not overpopulated.
"The criminal maldistribution of the world's food resources is possible because income is so inequitably distributed. What the poor need, they do not get, unless they can pay for it, The world food market will not match food supply with real human needs until world incomes are more equally distributed."