“We think biofuels can further our core mission, which is to bring economic opportunity and a better quality of life to the region’s low-income majority.”
--Luis Alberto Moreno, President Inter-American Development Bank

For years, critics and proponents alike have worried that the related methods of organic, low-input, low- or no-pesticide, integrated, small-scale, and sustainable production may address environmental concerns, but cannot produce sufficient food to sustain the large and growing human population. Such skepticism was understandable—the 
so-called Green Revolution of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s had been credited with averting widespread hunger crises by drastically increasing agricultural production, while the downsides of its technological advancements only began to enter the popular consciousness in the years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Questioning the source of the cornucopia that provided plenty to people throughout the world seemed downright ungracious and backward. How could we be critical of the Green Revolution when it had staved off so much hunger?

by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D., Executive Director,
Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

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by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ian Bailey and Devon Sampson

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Coffee Crisis—Take Two
“The Coffee Crisis” used to refer to the disastrous plunge in world coffee prices in the 1980s and 1990s that bankrupted hundreds of thousands of smallholders around the world. The USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) is now poised to bring us the “Organic Coffee Crisis.” With a breathtaking disregard for transparency, consultation and public debate, the NOP is moving to make it prohibitively expensive and logistically impossible for small-scale organic coffee growers.

Across the U.S., farm, food, and conservation advocates are consulting and providing comments on the upcoming Bill. Many family farmers and rural business people are calling for farm policy reform, voicing opposition to costly and unfair USDA crop subsidy payments, and demanding support for organic farming, farmland conservation, rural development, and support for young and minority farmers.1 The Farm Bill is an Agri-food Bill that determines the function (or dysfunction) of the entire U.S. food system. The economic fate of family farmers and the food security of low-income consumers-both high-risk sectors in the U.S.'s food system-are affected by the Farm Bill, which funds Food Stamps and School Commodity Programs (50% of entitlements), Emergency Food Assistance, Commodity Supplemental Food, and Community Food Projects, among other programs. Community food activists point out that this aid (approximately $50 billion) is insufficient to address the needs of the nation's 36 million food insecure citizens.

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Updated by Holly Poole-Kavana based on the book World Hunger: Twelve Myths

Why so much hunger?

What can we do about it?

To answer these questions we must unlearn much of what we have been taught.
Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of ­widely held myths can we grasp the roots of hunger and see what we can do to end it.

Myth 1:

Not Enough Food to Go Around

The market for farm goods, if left to regulate itself, is built to put farmers out of business, and further states that market controls — including much-despised agricultural subsidies — are essential to the health of a market that cannot correct itself.