Food First

FOOD FIRST IS THE popular name of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, a nonprofit grassroots think tank and activist education center. Food First was founded in 1975 by Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins as a means to continue and extend the research and advocacy begun in their widely read book Diet for a Small Planet. Through the production and dissemination of research reports, books, and videos Food First has provided a wide range of accessible resources for popular movements in the struggle to reform the global food system.

In addition, Food First provides speakers to discuss issues of hunger, trade policy, and genetically modified crops within mainstream media. Food First advocates people's basic economic right to food and to food-pro-ducing resources while providing research that both addresses the root causes of hunger and poverty globally, and offers possible solutions for hunger and poverty.

Food First argues against neo-Malthusian and neoliberal positions on hunger, as expressed within agribusinesses, biotech companies, the World Bank, and the U.S. government, which suggest that population growth outstrips the capacity to grow food. Such perspectives have accompanied the expansion of free trade regimes and capitalist globalization, providing an intellectual cover for trade and investment policies that actually contribute to the spread of poverty and hunger. Food First argues that such misconceptions obscure the causes of and solutions to hunger while dismissing practical alternatives and encouraging a sense of fatalism about the prospects for ending hunger globally.

In popular books such as Food First and World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Food First has clearly shown that the problem of hunger is one of food distribution rather than food production. Food First notes that globally 80 percent of people who suffer hunger make their living off the land, while 50 percent are actually small-scale farmers. In the world's wealthiest countries, such as the United States, poor people cannot gain access to affordable and nutritious food even as family farmers [Page 371]receive low prices for their crops. Neoliberal governments respond with insufficient ad hoc appeals to charities such as food banks, which are not able to meet people's needs. Food First argues that the current global systems of industrial food production and transport are unsustainable, both socially and ecologically.

Among the problems addressed by Food First are the massive subsidization of industrial farmers and agribusinesses by the U.S. government, as well as the dumping of cheap surplus grain stocks domestically as consumer snacks and internationally as so-called food aid. More recently, Food First has offered critical analyses of the crop biotech industry. Against the claims of biotech advocates, research undertaken by Food First illustrates the extent to which the biotech industry has served primarily to increase corporate profits while doing little to help poor farmers or make food available.

Food First argues that ending hunger requires an investigation into the structural roots of poverty. This means confronting the growing inequality characterizing neoliberal capitalist globalization, as well as implementing structural changes related to access to food, jobs with living wages, and access to land and food productive resources for poor people.

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