Feast or Famine?
For fifty years I have served people who lack the basic requirements of life. At the start of my ministry, my wife and I spent 8 years among the slums of Melbourne. There, in every street were people without adequate housing, food, clothing, employment and health care.
The last twenty seven years of my ministry was as Superintendent of Wesley Mission, during which time Wesley Mission became the largest carer of people in Australia providing daily support to people without adequate housing, food clothing, employment and health care.
It has always been an anomaly that in this prosperous country it was feast for most, but famine for many. Why do we have charities like Wesley Mission having to run breakfast kitchens in some Sydney suburbs because there are at least one hundred children in each school who come to school without any breakfast, while in other suburbs there are over a hundred children in every school medically obese?
Some ground breaking research ( the Left out and missing out: Towards new indicators of disadvantage project ) has been undertaken through a partnership between the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales and three community service organisations, namely ANGLICARE (Sydney), Mission Australia and the Brotherhood of St Laurance, as well as the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), the peak community sector organisation.
The research explored the measurement of, and interaction between, three dimensions of disadvantage: poverty arising from insufficient income; deprivation in relation to goods and services; and social exclusion which is the experience of being unable to fully participate in mainstream society.
At a time when obesity is considered a national crisis, one in seven Australians who turn to a welfare agency for help say they do not have enough to eat. Having a substantial meal at least once a day is considered an “essential of life” by most Australians. Over 15% of clients to these community service organizations do not have this.
For children living in the households of the clients of community service organisations, there is a risk of hunger with over 16% of children under 18 years not having a substantial meal at least once a day.
There are also problems with dental health as well as a lack of access to local safe play areas. Many are unable to access up to date school books, nor able to participate in school activities and outings, or hobby and leisure activities – things seen by the general community as being essential for all Australians.
These national trends can be extrapolated on a world scene, as a TIME magazine book review Hard to Swallow by Krista Mahr points out. The author Raj Patel in his new book Stuffed and Starved – gives a sweeping look at the development of the international food chain that delivers calories from nation to nation with an alarmingly uneven hand.
As its title promises, the book tackles one of the chief dysfunctions of our unique era in alimentary history: that 800 million people are getting too little to eat and are malnourished, while over 1 billion are getting so much they’ve become overweight or obese.
In our life time we have seen the corporatization of agriculture, the organization of the global trade in food, and the dominance in Australia of Woolworths and Coles in providing cheaper food from the four corners of the globe, rather than supporting Australian grown product.
We are all aware of the impact of the drought on farmers and the significant rise in suicide in rural areas. Unfortunately, that is now an international rural trend.
Patel opens the book with the epidemic of farmer suicides that have hit rural India, South Korea and the United States, depicting a grim picture of despair and debt, and conclusively dispelling the strangely persistent myth of farming as some sort of pastoral pleasure.
He then argues that the past century’s lowering of trade barriers and opening of agricultural markets, with the help of bodies like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the World Bank, have wrested control of the land and what grows on it from the hands of farmers and have given it to corporations and bureaucrats.
Supermarket procurement desks, he writes, “can fire the poorest farm workers in South Africa, flip the fates of coffee growers in Guatemala or tweak the output of paddy terraces in Thailand”. And yet, at the end of every day, mountains of food waste end up in the supermarket dumpsters and kitchen bins of the developed world while millions starve in the poorer developing countries.
I think we have to make serious food choices these days. We should eat less, seek to eat locally produced food, buy organically grown food and produce more ourselves. Even those living in apartments can have a vegetable box on the balcony, or a mushroom box in the bottom of the cupboard.
My wife plants vegetables in some vegetable boxes we have built, watered from a tank. Every day there is a fresh crop of new vegetables, and from the flower box, fresh flowers for the table.
Even in the centres of our most populous cities there are community gardens growing food for local residents who enjoy the open air although they own no land.
What you consume are global products, with the power to affect environments, economies and people’s lives. Understanding how they reach your table will help people at every link in the food chain.
If we shared what we have as individuals and as nations, no one would starve or be obese. The problem is not one of production, but of equitable distribution. Christians should be leading the way with our care for God, our selves and our neighbours and I commend to the house these sentiments.
Economic growth is not an end in itself but a servant in the task of reducing poverty and achieving sustainable and equitable human development.