Do Americans share in the blame or responsibility for global hunger?
The U.S. is by no means the only country that has been pushing this. Big countries have been demanding that companies compete on the open market, which would be all well and good if there was a free market in agriculture. What can the average American do about world hunger? At the end of the day, all politics is local. You start from where you are, and you reclaim the food system by buying local; by not going to the local supermarket and going to a farmers market; by starting a local food policy council. Raj Patel is author of “Stuffed and Starved: Global Food Issues.” We shouldn’t be scared of politics, particularly in the U.S. Over the last eight years, we have been encouraged to think merely as consumers. We are much more than that. Should we export America’s agricultural technology or work to improve the situation for subsistence farmers in other countries? Unfortunately, I don’t think we should be exporting what we’ve got. A lot of U.S. farmers don’t think what we’ve got is good,
