May - July 2000

How Do We Attain True Food Security?

When There's More Than Enough Food To Go Around, Why Do So Many of Us Suffer from Malnutrition?

Hunger and starvation. These words evoke haunting images of Ethiopian famine victims a world away from our well-fed lives. In a world where we produce enough food to feed every man, woman, and child four pounds a day, why does malnutrition still stalk the land?

• Worldwide, 1.2 billion people are underfed and 760 million are chronically hungry
  
  
• In this country, some 30 million people -- most of them children -- can't afford a healthy diet

But that's only half the story. For malnutrition is not just an affliction of the poor. In fact, as many people suffer from eating too much of the wrong kinds of foods as from eating too little of everything.

• Half of all Americans are overweight and a quarter are dangerously obese
  
  
• Worldwide, 1.2 billion people are overweight. Half of humanity lacks essential vitamins and minerals
  
  
• More than half of all diseases are attributable to poor diet

Whether we eat too much or too little, our eating habits are often driven by a sense of insecurity. Not enough time to prepare our own food, to shop wisely, to watch what we eat. Tempted by ads and fashions to eat what we least need and to skip what would best nourish us. Do we eat because we're hungry or because we're feeling bored, anxious, or lonely?

Do human beings have a right to "food security"? (Is there any more fundamental right?) What would it take to assure every human being receives an adequate diet? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that supply and how can it be efficiently distributed to those most in need?

How can we increase the food supply to meet the demands of a growing and increasingly affluent population? Will genetically engineered foods propel a new "Gene Revolution" to match the productive but environmentally costly Green Revolution of a generation ago? Or should we switch to "sustainable agriculture," forswearing pesticides in favor of more natural, "organic" practices?

Who grows the food we eat and what is their relation to the land they cultivate? Right now, most is grown on vast corporate plantations harvested by migrant laborers working for minimal wages under back-breaking conditions. Meanwhile, family farms that were once the backbone of our culture are rapidly going the way of the buffalo. What will be lost if they disappear? How can we revive them?

In May through June of 2000, MMP mounted a public education campaign to raise awareness about these issues. In all we scheduled and completed 214 interviews, of which 39 were nationally, globally, or regionally syndicated. More than two-thirds were broadcast on commercial radio, where such issues are seldom given an informed airing. Sixty-one nationally known authorities were interviewed on such topics as the right to healthy food, hunger and malnutrition at home and abroad, organic and sustainable agriculture, genetically engineered foods, preservation of small farms, urban agriculture, agribusiness and public relations, the dangers of pesticides and herbicides, and the globalization of agriculture.

Guest Speakers by Topic:

Kathy McAfee, Executive Director, Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First)

Anuradha Mittal

David Beckmann, President, Bread for the World

Gary Gardner, Director of Research, Worldwatch Institute

Doug O'Brien, Director, Public Policy and Research, America's Second Harvest

Lynn Parker, Director, National Policy and Child Nutrition Program, Food Research and Action Center

Lucas van den Broeck, Executive Director, Action Against Hunger

James Weill, President, Food Research Action Center

Neal Barnard, President, Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine

Kelly Brownell , Professor of Psychology and Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University, Director, Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders

Michael Jacobson, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest

Jill Auburn, National Program Leader for Sustainable Agriculture, USDA Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service, Director, USDA Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education Program

Joan Dye Gussow, Professor Emerita of Nutrition and Education - Teachers College, Columbia University, Board Member; Board Chair, National Organic Standards Board; Just Food

Amy Little, Executive Director, National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture

Charles Benbrook, President, Benbrook Consulting Services

Ronnie Cummins, National Director, Organic Consumers Association

Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director, Center for Food Safety, Executive Director, International Center for Technology Assessment

Margaret Mellon, Program Director - Agriculture and Biotechnology Program, Union of Concerned Scientists

Martin Teitel, Executive Director, Council for Responsible Genetics, Editor, GeneWatch

Bill Christison, President, National Family Farm Coalition, President, Missouri Rural Crisis Center

Leon Crump, State Director, Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund

Fred Kirschenmann, President, Kirschenmann Family Farms, Member, National Organic Standards Board

Rhonda Perry, Program Director, Missouri Rural Crisis Center, Co-founder, Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment

Ted Quaday, Program Director, Farm Aid, Inc.

Michael Sligh, Director of Sustainable Agriculture, Rural Advancement Foundation International

Michael Ableman, Executive Director, Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens

Andy Fisher, Executive Director, Community Food Security Coalition

Jac Smit, President, The Urban Agriculture Network

A.V. Krebs, Director, Corporate Agribusiness Research Project, Author, The Agribusiness Examiner (a newsletter)

John Stauber, Executive Director, Center for Media and Democracy, Editor, PR Watch

Theo Colborn, Director and Senior Scientist, Wildlife and Contaminants Program, World Wildlife Fund

Jay Feldman, Co-founder and Executive Director, Beyond Pesticides/National Coalition Against Misuse of Pesticides

Monica Moore, Co-Director, Pesticide Action Network North America

Marion Moses, Director, Pesticide Education Center

David Wallinga, Senior Scientist - Public Health Program, Natural Resources Defense Council

Kristin Dawkins, Director, Global Governance Program, Vice President International Programs, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Debra Harry, Executive Director, Indigenous Peoples Coalition on Biocolonialism

Deborah James, Fair Trade Director, Global Exchange

Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy - Center for Food Policy, Wolfson Institute of Health Sciences, Thames Valley University

Mark Ritchie, President, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Patricia Bertron, Nutrition Consultant, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Chris Campany, organizer, national Campaign for sustainable Agriculture

Rex Dufour

Paul Faeth, Executive Vice President and Managing Director , World Resources Institute , Member, Sustainable Agriculture Task Force, President's Councilon Sustainable Development

Gabriella Flora, Program Associate, Agricultural Biotechnology

Paula Ford, Associate Faculty, Kansas State University, Regional Professional Development Program Coordinator

Joel Fuhrman, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Dun Gifford, Founder and President, Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust

Rebecca Goldburg, Senior Scientist, Environmental Defense

Jacqueline Hamilton, Senior project Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council

Michael Hansen, Research Associate, Consumer Policy Institute, serves on the USDA Advisory committee on Agriculteral Biotechnology

Bill Harris, Cafe Campesino

Liana Hoodes, Associate Director, National Campaign for sustainable Agriculture

Ruth Hubbard, Professor Emeriti of biology, Harvard University

Rhonda Janke, Kansas State University

Elizabeth Johnson, Executive Director, Garden Features

Susan Kegley, Program Coordinator and Staff Scientist, Pesticide Action Network North America

Kim Kroll, Associate Director, USDA sustainable Agriculture and SARE

Kathy Lawrence, Executive Director, Just Food

Brian Leahy, Executive Director, California Certified Organic Farmers

Mark Lipson, Policy Program Director, Organic Farming Research Foundation

richard mott, World Wildlife Fund

Mark Muller, Senior Associate - Environment, Agriculture and Trade Policy, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Sophia Murphy, Program Director - Trade and Agriculture Program, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Danila Oder, food irridation coordinator, organic consumers association,CA

Kathy Ozer, Director, National Family Farm Coalition

Duane Perry, Executive Director, Farmers Market Trust

Martin Richards, Community Farm Alliance

Jane Rissler, Plant Pathologist, Unioin of Concerned Scientists

David Schardt, Center for Science in the public Interest, DC

Gina Solomon, Senior Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council, Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Gilles Stockton, Rancher

Brie Turner, Dietician, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Bill Weida, Director, Resource Action Center for the Environment, G.R.A.C.E.

Elizabeth Woody, Member, Co-Author, Confederated Tribes of the Reservation of Warm Springs, Oregon

Seth Zuckerman, Circuit Rider, Ecotrust, Writer and Author