March against hunger

As soaring food prices lead to hunger, the UN World Food Program sponsored a march against hunger and malnutrition in the streets of San Salvador on Sunday. Participants of the march included leaders of social organizations, diplomats, professors, students and workers, said reports.
Carlos Scaramella, a WFP representative in El Salvador, said the march was designed "to create a movement of global solidarity for the fight against hunger and malnutrition."

"It's very important to join this movement due to the threat ... of rising food prices in the world," he said.

La Prensa Grafica has a photogallery of the march at this link.

Remember -- the problem of food and hunger in the world is not that there is not enough food to feed everyone. The problem is distribution and the ability to pay for that food. For continuing coverage of the global food crisis, go to the special coverage at Global Voices.

Comments

El-Visitador said…
«The problem is distribution»

The problem is distribution only from an U.S.-based perspective, like so:
(a) U.S. produces a surplus of food because of its incredibly efficient large farms
(b) It takes money for Salvadoreans to purchase the U.S. surplus and transport it to El Salvador

But from a Salvadorean perspective it need not be a distribution problem at all. If we were not hemmed by Land Reform to small-scale, inefficient farming, we should be able to feed ourselves.


- * -


It must never be forgotten that the military junta imposed Agrarian Reform in El Salvador in 1979 for two main reasons:

1.- Pressure from U.S. advisors, particularly USAID
2.- Most importantly, validation from the U.S. government, which told the gorillas that such a policy would result in productivity gains (look it up, this false dogma is written into the October 1979 law).

Needless to say, the U.S. government lied to our military goons, small scale farming is extremely improductive, U.S. farm size has been growing continuously since the early XX century, and the U.S. government could never get away domestically with large-scale rapine of farmer's private property like they advocated in ES. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.