The Hunger Project - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Nothing is
so powerful as

AN IDEA
WHOSE TIME
HAS COME

i

I

The Hunger Project

The end of starvation within 20 years

Every day it becomes
more difficult to pretend . . .

an introduction by George Leonard

This is a source document on our ability to end hunger on our planet within 20 years.

Cover photograph by Ernst Haas

©1977 The Hunger Project

Hunger is not something impersonal, something "out there." It exists in each of us, in all that is
incomplete and unfulfilled in our own lives, in all that we have disowned in the world.

Fifteen million dead of starvation each year. Perhaps a billion hungry. The fading, failing cry of a
child every moment day and night, undeniable testament to human failure. We try to place that
sound on some dusty plot of ground far away — Asia, Africa, South America — anywhere but here
and now. We succeed at the cost of some portion of our aliveness, our ability to marvel at the miracle
of birth, to hear the hidden depths of love in a son's or daughter's voice.

There is land enough, and food to feed all who live on the earth. There is no shortage of practical,
well-thought-out ways to end the suffering and dying. But in refusing to make the condition of
starvation our own, we allow it to continue.

We allow it to continue by taking positions that prevent us from acting: the cynicism that alleges
starvation to be inevitable, the guilt and shame that go along with powerlessness. We allow it to
continue by supporting doctrines that create their own opposition and solutions that produce their
own new problems. We take refuge in the belief that relieving the world from hunger is impossible.

The time has come for a different approach. It has come in an age of awakening, when history and
technology meet to prepare the way for transformation. Electronic nerve fibers join once-distant
continents. A famine on the Asian steppes affects the destiny of American presidents. The cry of a
single hungry child reverberates around the globe at the speed of light. Every day it becomes more
difficult to pretend we can stand alone and unmoved while millions starve.

The urgent global messages now beating at our conscience offer external evidence of a deeper
connectedness: We are in the world. The world is also in us. Each of us is a self, a whole, a context,
holding all that was and is and can be. In this light, each of us has the power to create our own
universe, our own heaven or hell.

We begin by taking responsibility for the hunger and starvation that exist in this world. And then we
take responsibility for the end of hunger and starvation within 20 years.

A simple thing. Yet nothing under the sun could be more profound. For when context changes, all
that happens within that context takes on a new and different life. Nor is this a private, passive
matter. True personal responsibility always involves action in the world —

Action that hews to no single doctrine.

Action that does not strive to make itself right and others wrong.

Action that claims no credit for its successes.

Action that is flexible and effective and sure.

We need only open our eyes to see a path of action: contributing time and money, fasting, influenc-
ing public policy, working with organizations, supporting those who are directly involved, offering
our own skills and knowledge to starving people. The possibilities are endless. Whatever our own
path toward hunger's end, we move with the power of personal responsibility. Each of us, in our
own way is the end of starvation, each complete and fully responsible. Whether thousands of us or
hundreds of thousands or millions, we act as wholes in alignment, not parts of a movement.

But no need to wait for the thousands and the millions. A moment exists for each of us in which
context suddenly shifts and what has seemed impossible becomes possible, an instant in and out of
time when we take responsibility for the world and what it could be.

In that instant, the end of hunger and starvation begins.

THE HUNGER PROJECT 1

2 THE HUNGER PROJECT

The Hunger Project

* The end of starvation:

Creating an idea
whose time has come

Werner Erhard

You and I want our lives to matter. We want
our lives to make a real difference — to be of genuine
consequence in the world. We know that there is no
satisfaction in merely going through the motions, even
if those motions make us successful or even if we
have arranged to make those motions pleasant. We
want to know we have had some impact on the world.
In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality
of life. We want to make the world work.

When you look at making the world work, you
are confronted by, and cannot pass over, the fact that

THE HUNGER PROJECT 3

each year 15 million of us die as a consequence of starvation. This
unparalleled failure for humanity enables us to see that the
world's unworkability is located in the very condition in which
we live our lives. Thus, it is not people "out there" who are
starving; people are starving "here" — in the space in which you
and I live. You and I are working to make our lives work in the
same condition that results in hunger and starvation.

Starvation both maintains and dramatizes a world that
does not work. Persisting throughout history, it has accounted
for more deaths and suffering than all epidemics, wars, and
natural disasters combined. During the past five years alone,
more people have died as a consequence of starvation than from
all the wars, revolutions, and murders of the past 150 years. As
you read this, 28 people are dying in our world each minute as a
consequence of hunger, three-quarters of them children.

The bare statistics are so shocking that we rarely examine
the further impact of starvation on our own lives. Hunger, by its
persistence, seems to invalidate that our lives could matter. It
seems to prove that we are capable only of gestures. It suppres-
ses the space in which each of us lives.

Yet, precisely because the impact of starvation on our
lives is so great, its existence is actually an opportunity. It is an
opportunity to get beyond merely defending what we have,
beyond the futility of self-interest, beyond the hopelessness of
clinging to opinions and making gestures.

In fact, in experiencing the truth underlying hunger, one
comes to realize that the ordinarily unnoticed laws that deter-
mine the persistence of hunger on this planet are precisely the
laws that keep the world from working. And the principles of
the end of hunger and starvation in the world are the very
principles necesssary to make the world work.

So this paper is not an explanation, a solution, an opin-
ion, or a point of view about the problem of hunger. It is an
examination of what is so about the persistence of hunger,
aimed at answering two questions:

1. What are the laws governing and determining the
persistence of hunger on our planet? Not the reasons, however
cogent; not the justifications, however comforting; not the sys-
tems of explanation, however consistent or clever. If we were
merely looking for reasons to explain the persistence of hunger
and starvation, we could logically deduce them from the facts.

Fundamental laws and principles, however, cannot be
deduced. One knows them by creating them from nothing, out
of one's Self. One does not arrive at fundamental laws and
principles as a function of what is already known. Such laws and
principles do not merely explain; they illuminate. They do not
merely add to what we know; they create a new space in which

4 THE HUNGER PROJECT

This article is adapted from presentations of The Hunger Project made in 11 cities in
the United States during September and October 197/.

knowing can occur. The test of whether we are dealing with
fundamental laws and principles, or with mere reasons and
explanations, is whether there is a shift from controversy, frus-
tration and gesturing, to mastery, motion, and completion.

2. What are the principles of the end of hunger and
starvation on the planet? Not new programs of solution, no
matter how saleable or clever; not different or better opinions,
no matter how arguable; not points of view, no matter how
agreeable. This discussion is not about another good idea. It is
about revealing the fundamental principles of the end of hunger
and starvation on our planet.

Start by examining the examiner

The first step in examining any problem is to examine the
system with which you are going to examine the problem. For
example, there are equations in physics that would be incom-
plete if they didn't take into consideration the nature and con-
sequent effect of the observer.

So, before you and I begin to examine the problem of
hunger and starvation, we are going to examine our own nature
and the effect of that nature on our perceptions and understand-
ing of the problem. Until we understand ourselves, we won't
know the quality of our findings, or how those findings are
influenced by the entity making the examination.

I am not an expert on hunger and starvation. The little bit
of knowledge I've acquired in four years of study is small com-
pared to the knowledge of the true experts in the field. But as a
result of my interaction with tens of thousands of people, I do
have some insight into Self — my Self, your Self, the Self — and a
certain expertise about what a "me" is. I want to take a look with
you at what a "me" is with respect to hunger.

Look inside yourself — not at what you think or what you
feel, not at your opinions or your point of view — but at the
ground of being that gives rise to your actions, thoughts, and
feelings. Look specifically at the unconscious, unexamined as-
sumptions and beliefs which limit and shape our response to
hunger and starvation. This is the territory we are going to cross.

HARVEST

The most important event on earth each
year is the harvest.

Medard Gabel

Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone

(see the bibliography on page 38)

HOW TO EAT

Eating and beingfed are intimately
connected with our deepest feelings. They
are the basic interactions between human
beings on which rest all later evaluations
of one's self, of the world, and our
relationship to it. Theeating experience
conditions our entire attitude to the
world. Not so much because of how
nutritious is the food we are given, but
because of the feelings and attitudes with
which it is given.

Bruno Bettelheim

Food to Nurture the Mind, McGovern
Committee on Nutrition and Human
Needs, February 1977

The assumption of scarcity

The very first component you see in the structure of
beliefs through which we perceive the world is the component of
scarcity. Human beings don't necessarily think that things are
scarce. They always think from a condition of scarcity.

For instance, while you and I might never have had the
thought, "Love is scarce/' it is obvious if we examine our be-

THE HUNGER PROJECT 5

UNDERNOURISHMENT

About 400 million people are seriously
undernourished, maybe twice that many,
according to which estimate you believe.
Fifteen to 20 million deaths, three-
quarters of them children, would not
have occurred in 1977 but for
undernourishment. The figure represents
any normal year's total-normal being
a year in which no special famines or crop
failures occur. Many of those deaths are
attributed to ordinary childhood diseases
such as measles, whooping cough
and gastroenteritis, diseases which do
not kill well-nourished children.

Roy Prosterman and Charles A. Taylor

Hunger, Poverty, Desperation, and Chaos
(to be published later this year)

THE MYTH OF SCARCITY

There is no such thing today as absolute

scarcity. Every country in the world has

the capacity to feed itself.

The malnourished abroad are not hungry

because of the individual greed of the

average American.

The hungry are not our enemies.

Hunger, in fact, is not the problem

at all. Hunger is the symptom

of a disease, and we are its victims in

much the same way as are the

nomads in Mali or peasants in India.

Excerpts (romFood First: Beyond
the Myth of Scarcity, by Frances
Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins
copyright ©1977 by Institute for Food
and Development. Reprinted by
permission of Ballantine Books, a Di-
vision of Random House, Inc.
(see the bibliography onpage 38)

havior that we are "coming from" scarcity with respect to love.
We often act as if we must dole it out carefully and only to those
people who deserve it. Also, because we assume that everything
of value in life is scarce, we act to protect things — regardless of
how much we actually have — because they are "scarce."

Time is also an example. It is something else that people
consider to be desperately scarce. No one ever has enough time.
Watch yourself when you do have enough time and you will
notice that you act as if you don't have enough.

I am not saying that you think 15 million of us die each
year as a consequence of hunger because food is scarce. I am
saying that scarcity is one component of the structure of beliefs
through which we perceive the world.

It is worthless to know that your ground of being contains
the belief that things are scarce if you know it merely because
you have been told it or because it makes sense. You need to
know it as a result of looking inside yourself and actually seeing
how the belief in scarcity shapes your thoughts and actions.
Pierce into your own system of beliefs and observe that you do
believe in scarcity. While confronting this belief, get that it is not
true that hunger and starvation persist on this planet because
food is scarce.

Just as an example — not as a suggested solution to the
problem of hunger — we could feed all the hungry people in the
world every year with the grain fit for human consumption that
is fed to cattle in the United States. I'm not suggesting that if we
stopped feeding grain to our cattle we would eliminate hunger.
I'm just saying that the notion that 15 million of us die each year
because of a scarcity of food is not accurate.

The assumption of inevitability

The second component you will find when you begin to
look into the condition through which you are perceiving the
problem of hunger and starvation is that of inevitability.

As an analogy, suppose I told you that you could go
through the rest of your life without ever having another argu-
ment. Try to put that into your structure of beliefs. Everyone
knows that you can't not argue. Arguments are inevitable.

It is not true that things are inevitable. What is true is that
we perceive the world through a condition — through an uncon-
scious, unexamined structure of beliefs — which has a compo-
nent called inevitability. You just know that, "If hunger could
have ended, wouldn't we have ended it by now? It must be that
when you have human beings, you have hunger. Like death and
taxes, it has to be tolerated.

It is not enough to hear about scarcity and inevitability.

6 THE HUNGER PROJECT

No fear can stand up to hunger,
no patience can wear it out,
disgust simply does not exist where
hunger is; and as to superstition,
beliefs, and what you may call
principles, they are less than chaff
in a breeze,

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

I WANT SOME MORE

The evening arrived; the boys took
their places. The master, in his cooks
uniform, stationed himself at the
copper. . . the gruel was served out,
and a long grace was said over the
short commons. The gruel disap-
peared; the boys whispered to each
other, and winked at Oliver. . . Child
as he was, he was desperate with
hunger, and reckless with misery. He
rose from the table, and advancing to
the master, basin and spoon in hand,
said, somewhat alarmed at his own
temerity:

"Please, sir, I want some more."

The master was a fat, healthy man,
but he turned very pale. He gazed in
stupefied astonishment on the small
rebel for some seconds, and then
clung for support to the copper. . .

"What?" said the master at length,
in a faint voice.

"Please, sir," replied Oliver, "I
want some more."

The master aimed a blow at Olivers
head with the ladle, pinioned him in
his arms, and shrieked aloud for the
beadle.

The board were sitting in solemn
conclave when Mr. Bumble rushed
into the room in great excitement,
and addressing the gentleman in the
high chair, said:

"Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon,
sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!"

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

A MOTHER'S PRIDE

No Madonna and child could touch
that picture of a mother's tenderness
for a son she soon would have to
forget.

The air was heavy with odours
of diarrhoea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies.

Most
mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a

mother's
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then —
singing in her eyes — began carefully
to part it. . . . In another life this
must have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.

Chinua Achebe

Refugee Mother and Child

THE RIGHT TO LIFE

Hunger came back, gnawing me in
the chest, sending sudden shouts and
delicate pinpricks that hurt. . . .

I was bitterly hungry and didn't
know what to do with my exorbitant
appetite. I writhed about on the
bench, and pulled my knees up
against my chest as hard as I could ....

The pains of hunger were
unbearable, and never let me alone. I
swallowed spit over and over to take
the edge off, and I felt it did some
good. I had very little to eat generally
for several weeks, even before this
current trouble, and my strength now
was falling off noticeably. Whenever I
had been lucky and scraped up five
kronen by some manoeuver or both,
the money never managed to last
long enough to get me back on my
feet before a new famine fell on me.
My back and my shoulders bothered
me most; the small ache in my chest I
could stop for a moment by coughing
hard or walking carefully bent over,
but my back and shoulders I couldn't
do anything with. Didn't I have the
same right to life as anybody else...?
Hadn't I lived like a miser, eaten
bread and milk when I was rich,
bread when I wasn't, and gone
hungry when I had nothing?

Knut Hamsun

Hunger

THE HUNGER PROJECT 7

EFFICIENT FARMING

Research sponsored by AID suggests

that redistribution of land, besides

improving equity in most cases, can

actually increase aggregate domestic

saving as well as food output over time.

World Bank studies indicate that small

farmers, given appropriate price policies,

are more efficient in the use of farm

resources than are large farmers.

Gerald R.Ford

The President's Second Annual Report on

Development Issues Transmitted to The

Congress, May 1976.

THE POVERTY OF ABUNDANCE

. . . contrary to popular understanding,
food production is not the major
or sole problem facing the world's food
systems. The world already produces
more than enough food for every-
one to be adequately nourished. . . . "Even
during the 'scarcity' year of 1972-73,
there was nine percent more grain per
person on earth than in an 'ample'
year like 3960. Inadequate production is
clearly not the problem." [Frances
Moore Lappe, More Food Means More
Hunger.] Distribution is not the sole
problem either; nor is land reform, food
storage, population control, or insur-
ing that the means of producing food
belongs to the rural poor. The world food
problem is not a single problem; it is
a complex web or constellation of problems;
it is a system of problems that includes
all the above in an interacting network. The
world's food problems need to be dealt
with holistically, not reductionistically.
In our complex world, we can no longer
point the finger in any one direction; to
pervert a famous saying ofPogo, "We have
met the enemy and he is everywhere. "

MedardGabel
Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone

You have to first see for yourself that you have been looking
through these two filters. It is impossible to ever get clear about
anything until you first truly clear yourself. You need to see that
15 million of us do not die as a consequence of hunger each year
because hunger and starvation are inevitable. These deaths are
not inevitable, any more than slavery was inevitable, any more
than smallpox or polio was inevitable.

The assumption of no solutions

The last and perhaps the most pernicious and insidious
aspect of the unconscious, unexamined structure of beliefs
through which we perceive hunger and starvation is that com-
ponent called "no solutions/'

There's not a person on earth who would tolerate 21
children dying every minute as a result of hunger if we thought
we had a solution that would prevent their dying. There is not
one person who would be reading this now if he or she thought
that it were possible to get up and do something that would
actually stop those deaths. You and I know that the only reason
that we would allow those deaths to occur is that there is no
solution. If there were a solution, we would have to apply it.

The truth is that people do not die of starvation because
there are no solutions. The failure to grasp that is what makes
people ask: "Well, what are you going to do about it?" As if what
we did or didn't do were what caused the problem to persist in
the first place. What they want to know is, what more are we
going to do about it? What better solution have we come up with?
What are we going to do that is different from what the experts
have already done?

Look into your own structure of beliefs, inside the condi-
tion from which you think about the persistence of hunger, and
observe that you do believe there are no solutions. While con-
fronting this belief, get that there are solutions. And they are not
merely good ideas. There are, for example, at least four general
areas of solutions which have been applied to ending starvation
in more than 30 nations since the end of World War II. [See pages
20-21 and 31-34 for a discussion of these and other solutions.]

Fifteen million of us do not die as a consequence of
starvation each year because there are no solutions.

The result of taking a position

In examining our unconscious system of beliefs, we dis-
cover the origin of gestures, that is, behavior arising out of
hopelessness and frustration. If you have now recognized and
accepted the existence of your own personal and individual

8 THE HUNGER PROJECT

filter — that ground of being, that condition, that unconscious,
unexamined structure of beliefs through which we perceive the
facts of starvation and our attempts to eliminate starvation on
the planet — you have begun to move out of the sense of frustra-
tion and hopelessness into no sense at all. You are beginning to
be able to just be with and actually observe the problem clearly.
After transcending your system of beliefs, you can just be with
the problem. This is an opportunity afforded, not by informa-
tion, expertise or learning, but by taking responsibility for your
system of beliefs.

Now we are ready to look at the problem of starvation
itself. Well, what could we do? What position could we take that
would end hunger and starvation?

I looked at a lot of positions that people have taken:

• The position of feeding people through better distribution.

• The Malthusian position of seeing starvation as nature's way of
maintaining a population that the world can feed.

• The position of giving away your excess food.

• The position of having the Government solve the problem.

• The position of getting industry to do it.

• The position of getting churches to do it.

I found out that any position you take with respect to the
end of hunger and starvation automatically and inevitably calls
up the opposite position in equal measure.

To illustrate: When I say "left/' notice I don't need to say
"right." If I say "up," I don't need to say "down."

It is a fact in the universe in which you and I live that any
position requires its opposite position. The assumption of any
position necessarily implies its opposite position. If I take the
position, "Let's end hunger and starvation," without further
ado I have called up the opposite position in some form or other,
Maybe the form is, "It can't be done. "Maybe the form is, "There
are more important things to do." Maybe the form is, "Let them
do it." Whatever the form, it is in opposition to, "Lefs end
hunger and starvation."

When our positioning calls up the opposite position, we
habitually redouble the energy we invest in our position. That's
how we handle opposition, isn't it? When you're opposed, don't
you redouble your force? And when you redouble your force
what happens? Obviously, you call up redoubled opposition.

Pea soup

A term I use to describe the mess that surrounds most
issues in the world today and prevents us from getting at what is
really so about the world's problems is "pea soup." The pea soup

ALTERNATIVE EATING

On a worldwide basis the human species
now relies on 11 plant species for
about 80 per cent of its food supply. This
base is not as limited as it might
seem. Most of the plant species represent
enormous genetic complexes: some,
such as wheat and corn, have more diver-
sity than is found in all but a few
wild species.. . Moreover, most of the
species on which man relies are
capable of flourishing in a variety of envi-
ronments, so that a considerable
amount of substitution in culture and use
is possible. For example, although
wheat is gradually displacing rye, barley
and oats from their traditional role
as Temperate Zone food crops, they remain
(along with corn and potatoes) alter-
natives for the region. Triticale, a new
species arising from hybrids of wheat and
rye, also has the appropriate traits.
In the event of a failure of a crop such as
wheat, the solution lies more with
man's perception of the event, his willing-
ness to change and his speed in making
the change than it does with the issue
of whether enough alternatives exist.

Roberts. Loomis

Scientific American, September 1976

THE HUNGER PROJECT 9

THE MECHANICS OF STARVATION

What happens when a human being
starves to death? A 150-pound man
in a northern country needs
approximately 3,000 calories a day; a
125-pound woman or a 6-year-old
child each need about 2,000
calories per day. In the tropics where
body heat is easier to maintain,
these figures are less. When food
intake drops below energy
expenditure, the body must draw
on its own tissues for energy.
When this energy drain continues too
long, the person starves. The body
burns up its own fats, muscles
and tissues; kidneys, liver and
endocrine systems often cease to
function properly; the heart
shows a ''brown atrophy"
characteristic of starvation; blood
pressure and pulse fall
drastically; edema usually happens;

skin acquires the consistency of
paper; abnormal "lanugo" hair
grows on the forearms and backs of
children; lassitude and confusion
set in so that starvation victims
often seem unaware of their plight;
"the individual becomes obsessed
with food, mentally restless,
physically apathetic, and
self-centered to varying degrees,
the extremes being murder and
cannibalism [J. Mayer, Science,
September 9, 1975]/' and the body's
immunological defenses drop.
Large-scale panic, separation of
families, adolescent gangs,
banditry, looting, the spread of
epidemics and the loss of farm
animals and seeds for future crops
all add to the impact of famine.
Most famine victims die from
infectious disease before they
actually starve to death — Once
more than 40 percent of body weight

is lost, death is virtually inevitable.
. . .Adults can recover from near
starvation. Children are permanently
damaged. . . No amount of vitamin
D can straighten bones damaged
by rickets. Eighty percent of human
brain growth occurs between
conception and the age of two.
Brain development cannot take place
in the fetus if the mother is
malnourished, nor can it take
place if the infant is starving. Brain
development that does not occur
when it is supposed to will
never take place. The child is perman-
ently damaged by physical
deformity and mental retardation
with no hope of recovery.

Medard Gabel

Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone

10 THE HUNGER PROJECT

is a mass of confusion, controversy, argument, conflict, and
opinions. It is, in fact, composed of positions and oppositions.

The mass of the pea soup is created like this: As a nucleus,
you have "yes" and "no" as position and opposition. Then
around the nucleus an enormous mass called "other solutions"
builds up. For example: "That way won't work. Try it this way
instead." "We need to do more." "Oh, no, that won't work, I've
got a better idea." "No, none of that will work, we need to do it
differently."

Then this mass of solutions becomes the larger nucleus
for an additional round of more/better/different, which becomes
an even larger nucleus for. . .and on and on. That's how you get
the mass of the pea soup. That is the way we create the confu-
sion and conflict and controversy that keep us from even seeing
the truth of what the problem is.

You can't discover this principle of opposites by making
gestures. The United States Congress can make an enormous
gesture, a billion-dollar gesture. There are organizations around
the planet that can make big gestures, hundred-million-dollar
gestures. There are small organizations that can make small
gestures. And as individuals we can make even smaller gestures.

But as long as you are gesturing — as long as you are
asking what more can you do, what better solution have you
got, what have you come up with that's different — as long as
you're asking those questions, you cannot see that the confu-
sion, controversy, conflict, doubt, lack of trust, and opinions
surrounding the problem of hunger and starvation result inevit-
ably from any position you take.

Once you are clear that you cannot take any position that
will contribute in any way to the end of hunger and starvation,
that any position you take will only contribute to the pea soup
that engulfs the problem of hunger and starvation, then hope
dies. And when hope dies, hopelessness dies with it: Without
hope you can't have hopelessness.

You are now close to the source of the problem of hunger
and starvation on the planet. If you can see that the problem is
without hope, you are no longer hopeless and frustrated. You
are just there with whatever is so. There's just you, without the
structure of beliefs through which you try to look at the prob-
lem. By getting clear yourself, and then getting underneath the
pea soup, you can then look deep down into the problem and
see its source.

THE DESPERATE STRUGGLE

Nothing more overwhelms the human
spirit, or mocks our values and our
dreams, than the desperate struggle for
sustenance

Dr. Henry Kissinger
World Food Conference
Rome, November 1974

HUNGRY AMERICA

During that fall of 1974 when I first
found Mrs. fames hidden away without
food, I went with my seven -year- old
daughter, Rebekah, to our local
supermarket, and it became our habit to
take a bag of food to Mrs. fames each
weekend. Rebekah thought of it as thebest
part of our week. There was something in
that experience of giving that moved her
and she thought we were solving the
problem. But by then I had learned from
theU.S. Government Census figures
that there were more than 53,000 people
65-and-over living below the national
poverty level in Philadelphia alone. Late
Start, another federally funded program
of this kind, fed about 1,000 of them; the
Corporation for Aging was feeding
another 1,300 one meal a day, five days a
week. That's all most of them ate.

Loretta Schwartz

Ms. magazine, October 1977

The condition in which we live our lives

What you discover is that hunger and starvation on this
planet are a function of the condition in which each of us lives his

THE HUNGER PROJECT 11

THE GUILT REFLEX

Americans, we are told, have a special
role to play in staving off the apocalypse.
We are made to feel that world hunger
is our cross to bear. Again and again we
read and we hear that the U.S. is
the world's only remaining buffer against
starvation. We see world food security
defined strictly in terms of how much
grain theU.S. can produce or hold as grain
reserves. Inevitably the American
consumer believes that food exports are to
blame for our rising food prices. . . .
Such a reaction to the frightening story of
scarcity would be typical of even more
Americans, if it were not for an equally
deceptive and ultimately negative
message pulling us in the opposite direc-
tion. Well-intended attempts to stir
public action have shifted the world food
crisis out of the political-economic
arena onto the ground of individual
morality. Our consumption is tirelessly
contrasted with deprivation elsewhere; the
message being that our consumption
causes their suffering. We are told, for
example, that the amount of fertilizer used
on our lawns, golf courses, and
cemeteries equals all of what India uses to
grow food. We inevitably experience
some shame, feeling our wastefulness must
reflect a moral failing. Some find
protection by pointing out, quite rightly,
that eating one less hamburger a week
will not mean that the grain saved will
necessarily get to a hungry mouth. Yet with
no understanding of how hunger is
actually created, we are defenseless against
a diffuse but powerful sense of guilt for
just being American ....

Frances Moore Lappe

and Joseph Collins

Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

or her life. It isn't what you are doing, or what I am doing, or
what they are doing. It isn't what you are not doing, or what I am
not doing, or what they are not doing that is causing the persis-
tence of hunger and starvation on the planet. The source of the
problem is that you and I and they live in a condition.

Here is an analogy that will explain what I mean by a
condition: Our bodies as physical entities exist in an atmosphere,
and no matter how healthy a body may be, if we pollute the
atmosphere, that body will be damaged in direct proportion to
the pollution.

The environment for living organisms is called the bio-
sphere. You as a living organism may be very functional, but if I
put you into an unhealthy and unworkable biosphere, you will
cease to function.

The environment for you as a human being — the being-
sphere, if you will — is a system of concepts and forces. It is the
condition in which your humanity exists. It is the condition
which surrounds us as human beings. And it is in that condition
that starvation persists.

A condition is a position, a point of view or belief, that
functions as a fundamental ground of being. Forces are the
processes that arise out of conditions.

The forces in the world

It is the forces in the world which result in 15 million of us
dying each year as a consequence of starvation. It is the forces
emanating from the condition in which you and I and all of us
live that result in those 15 million deaths each year.

Call them political forces, if you like. Study the political
forces and you will see that hunger and starvation on the planet
are the inevitable result of those forces. It doesn't make any
difference what form the forces come in, or how you change
them. When you study the various forms of political forces, you
see that hunger and starvation are the inevitable result. If you
don't like politics, do it with economic forces. If you don't like
economics, do it with sociological forces. Psychological forces.
Philosophical forces. Or if you prefer, a combination of them.

The forces in the world come from and are consistent with
the existing content, the existing circumstances. In turn, these
content-determined forces circle back to reinforce the existing
content, the existing circumstances, in an endless cycle. This
process describes the condition of unworkability in which, no
matter what you do, it does not work.

The point is that when you get your own belief system out
of the way and you get through the confusion, controversy and
opinions, down to the source of the problem of the persistence

12 THE HUNGER PROJECT

of starvation on the planet, you see that it is a function of the
forces on this planet.

As an analogy, let's assume we live in a world in which the
forces are represented by invisible horizontal lines. Any attempt
to take vertical actions is stopped by the horizontal forces that
turn all vertical movement into horizontal movement. You can't
see those forces. They are like magnetism or gravity. You can see
their results, but you can't see the forces themselves.

To continue the analogy, let's assume that horizontal ac-
tions result in the persistence of hunger and that to end hunger
you need to take vertical actions. But if you do that in a field of
horizontal forces, you can see what happens. You end up being
forced to move horizontally. So what you do, even when you try
to end starvation, is consistent with the persistence of starvation.
Inevitably. No matter what you do, it will be ultimately ineffec-
tive in ending starvation. Starvation will persist.

By the way, this is not a justification for doing nothing,
either. The truth doesn't justify anything. It's a place to come
from, not something to argue with. This paper is not an attempt
to take a stand. What we're attempting to do is to get at the truth
about hunger and starvation on our planet. And when you get to
the truth of it, when you work your way to the source of it, you
see that hunger and starvation on this planet are a function of
the forces in which we live on this planet.

VIEW FROM THE FORTRESS

Sitting in the middle of the Amazon, 1

finally got a handle on all those

institutions 1 found so strangling. You

can't sit with a shorn Indian

matron of 23, who's crawling with lice and

children, stomach distended from

eight years of childbirth, lungs spitting

out phlegm from some undefined

respiratory ailment, and not get some

appreciation as to why our venerable

institutions were built and

clung to so ferociously. They are fortresses

against ever again having to sit

in a grimy hammock all day, swatting

mosquitoes and dying of malaria. . . .

Nancy Harris, Yale University
letter in Life Special Report
"The New Youth/' Fall 1977

An idea whose time has come

Victor Hugo said, essentially, that all the forces in the
world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

If, in fact, the time were to come for the end of hunger and
starvation on this planet, hunger and starvation on this planet
would end. That's it. When the time for things comes, they
happen by whatever means are available. When an idea's time
comes, the forces in the world are transformed so that instead
of what you do being unworkable, what you do works. And
you do what works.

The Wright brothers would have died bicycle merchants
had flight not been an idea whose time had come.

If you understand this, you begin to understand why
things in the world have progressed as they have. In 1800,
slavery in this country, exactly like hunger around the world
today, was seen as inevitable. The attitude was: "When you've
got human beings, one is going to dominate the other/'

Remember, it doesn't make any difference what those
forces were: psychological, economic, political. The consensus
among people was that slavery was a function of inevitability In
addition, those people knew that the economy of the country

THE RUSH TO WASTE

While Garbageology, a course started
[at the University of Arizona] five years
ago, appears to have the bonehead
overtones of Basketweaving 101, the
students have rooted out significant infor-
mation -for example, that when
a particular food item starts to grow
scarce, people waste more of it,
presumably because they rush out and buy
more than they can store or consume.

Life Special Report

"The New Youth/' Fall 1977

THE HUNGER PROJECT 13

THE HUMAN INVESTMENT

The croplands of Japan were once inferior

to those of northern India. Today,

Japan's food- grain yield per acre is five

times that of India. The original soils

of Western Europe, with the exception of

thePo Valley and parts of France,

were, in general, once of very poor quality

yet today they are highly fertile....

Depending on the human investments

made, an acre might be capable of feeding

five people or one-or none at all.

Frances Moore Lappe
and Joseph Collins

Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

RICH AND POOR

I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to

health
With ease and plenty. Else small aid is

wealth

For daily gladness; once a man be done

With hunger, rich and poor are all as one,

Euripides

Elect ra

THE ENEMY WITHIN

In some parts of the world, the net
nourishment available to a child isn't just
what goes into the child's mouth; it is
what is left after the child's system shares
it with whatever parasites dwell within
that child's body. As much as 20 percent
of the food that is eaten in the less-
developed world feeds the parasites, not
the people.

Roy Prosterman

Hunger Project presentations

September-October 1977

would collapse without slaves. Everybody would be damaged,
even the slaves themselves. It was better to be good to your
slaves than to end slavery. Besides which, if we ended slavery, all
those blacks would overrun the country and play havoc with the
white citizenry. Everyone knew you could not end slavery. You
just couldn't do it.

But when that idea's time came, slavery ended. Now, in
the case of slavery, it took a cataclysm. When something's time
comes, it takes whatever form is available to it, and it happens.

It is not a solution which makes something happen. It is
its time coming which makes the space for creative solutions and
enables the solutions you use to work.

If you have traveled in Asia or Africa in the past, you
know that smallpox was a scourge there. People died from it.
They were disfigured by it. Recently, there have been signs in
red on the walls of towns in Asia, offering a sizeable reward to
anyone who lets the local health authorities know about a case of
fever and spots.

Nobody collected those rewards while I was in Asia the
last time. Why? Because, for all practical purposes, there is no
more smallpox on this planet. It was not the solution that ended
smallpox. We have had the solution to the end of smallpox — the
vaccine — for over 150 years.

As anybody who has worked with the problem or studied
the problem knows, smallpox persisted, not because of a lack of
solutions, but because of the economic, political, sociological,
psychological forces in the world. For example, we couldn't get
into some countries because they didn't want any outside help.
Some people didn't want to be vaccinated. And so forth. But
somehow smallpox ended when the time came for it to end.

When an idea's time comes, whatever you do works, and
you do what works.

An answer you can't figure out

It is clear that any position one takes will only add to the
pea soup. It is clear that nothing we do in this condition will be
anything more than a gesture. It may be ambitious and massive,
but it will be a gesture nonetheless. It is clear that given the
current set of forces, given the current condition, nothing will
end starvation on the planet. And it is clear that when its time
comes, starvation will end as a function of what we do and we
will do what ends it. It is clear that mere opinion, argument,
doubt, mistrust and explanation only contribute to hopeless-
ness and frustration. It is clear that making and supporting
gestures is only a way of avoiding responsibility. It is clear that
defending a position, arguing a point of view, only adds to the

14 THE HUNGER PROJECT

WHAT'S A KUNGRY?

Hunger stole upon me so slowly
that at first I was not aware of what
hunger really meant. Hunger had
always been more or less at my elbow
when I played; but now I began to
wake up at night to find hunger
standing at my bedside / staring at me
gauntly. The hunger I had known
before this had been no grim, hostile
stranger; it had been a normal hunger
that had made me beg constantly for
bread, and when I ate a crust or two I
was satisfied. But this new hunger
baffled me, scared me, made me
angry and insistent. Whenever I
begged for food now my mother
would pour me a cup of tea which
would still the clamor in my stomach
for a moment or two; but a little later I
would feel hunger nudging my ribs,
twisting my empty guts until they
ached. I would grow dizzy and my
vision would dim, I became less
active in my play, and for the first
time in my life I had to pause and
think of what was happening to me.

"Mama, I'm hungry," I complained
one afternoon.

"Jump up and catch a kungry," she
said, trying to make me laugh and
forget.

"What's a kungry?"

"It's what little boys eat when they
get hungry," she said.

"What does it taste like?"

"I don't know."

"Then why do you tell me to catch
one?"

"Because you said that you were
hungry," she said.

I sensed that she was teasing me
and it made me angry.

"But I'm hungry. I want to eat."

"You'll have to wait."

"But I want to eat now."

"But there's nothing to eat — "

"But I want to eat," I said,
beginning to cry.

"You'll just have to wait," she said
again.

"But why?"

"For God to send some food."

"When is He going to send it?"

"I don't know."

"But I'm hungry."

She was ironing and she paused
and looked at me with tears in her
eyes.

Richard Wright
Black Boy

THE HUNGER PROJECT 15

CULTIVATED AREA
PER PERSON
1970 (HECTARES)

.00 .10 .20 .30 .40 .50 .60 .70 .80 .90 1.0

SnKlli AMI Kit A

MiUIH AMlKrt a

Amount of cultivated land per person
could be increased in every part of the
world between now and the year 2000. Of
the 2,360 million hectares under actual
cultivation in 1970, only a tiny fraction
yielded more than one crop a year, The
potential gross cropped area of 4,230 mil-
lion hectares projected for AD. 2000 rep-
resents a figure that could be achieved by
growing more than one crop a year on
roughly a third of some 2,900 million net
arable hectares.

POTENTIAL CULTIVATED
AREA PER PERSON
2000 (HECTARES)

00 3 "° 2,0 3.0 4.0

I Vn " ^ lUllllitMCt ntl

Scientific American, September 1976

pea soup. It is clear that when the end of hunger and starvation
on this planet is an idea whose time has come, then this mess in
which we have been living will be transformed into the end of
hunger and starvation on this planet.

What causes an idea's time to come?

When you know the answer to that, you are no longer a
mere speck of protoplasm on a dustball hurtling through space.
You know how to have an impact on the world. You know what
can make your life matter. The answer to "What causes an
idea's time to come?" is what The Hunger Project is about.

The Hunger Project is not about doing something more to
end hunger. It is not about doing something better to end
hunger. It is not a different set of solutions to the problem of
hunger. It is simply about causing the end of hunger and starva-
tion on this planet to be an idea whose time has come. The
people who enroll themselves in the project commit themselves
to that. What they do will be derived from that commitment.

The question, "What causes an idea's time to come?"
belongs to a particular class of question. Its answer is not the
normal and conventional, reasonable type of descriptive or
explanatory statement that a mind likes, that we are used to
handling. It is not an exposition, concept, or theory The answer
to this class of question is, instead, a principle more powerful
than all the forces in the world.

To answer this class of question, you have to give up your
normal way of arriving at answers. Rather than knowing more
and then more as you go along, you will need instead to be
willing to know less and then less — that is to say, to become
somewhat more confused as you go along. Finally you will have
struggled enough to be clear that you don't know. In the state of
knowing that you don't know, you get, as a flash of insight, the
principle (i.e., the abstraction) out of which the answer comes.

While this is work that transcends ordinary intellect, all it
requires is an unusually high degree of openness, commitment
and intention. You will need these qualities to get you past the
impatience, frustration and confusion that almost certainly will
result from the feeling that what you are reading doesn't make
any sense. In fact, the statement we are seeking isn't sensible; it
transcends the senses. One doesn't test the validity of such a
statement by seeing if it fits into one's system of beliefs. The test
is whether there is a resulting shift from controversy frustration
and gesturing to mastery, movement and completion.

Answers in this class are fundamental principles; they are
the source of parts, rather than the product of parts. They come
as a whole, which whole can then be divided into pieces. You
cannot reach the whole by adding up pieces; obviously the
pieces don't even exist as pieces until there is a whole of which to

16 THE HUNGER PROJECT

be a piece. Answers in this class — fundamental principles — can
be known only by creating them.

Causing an idea's time to come

What causes an idea's time to come? An idea's time comes
when the state of its existence is transformed from content into
context.

As a content, an idea expresses itself as, or takes the form
of, a position. A position is dependent for its very existence on
other positions; positions exist only in relation to other posi-
tions. The relationship is one of agreement or disagreement
with other positions. This agreement or disagreement manifests
itself in various familiar forms. For example, your position is
similar to, cooperates with, or supports other positions; it is
independent from or ignores other positions; it protests, con-
flicts with, or opposes other positions. Positions exist by virtue
of contrast, such as being different from, or more than, or
unrelated to, or better than other positions. A position cannot
stand by itself; it is not self-sufficient.

To come at this from another direction, we can look at
content as thing, because an idea as a position is a thing. That
which is without limits is either everything or nothing, and
therefore not something, not a thing. It follows then that a thing
requires limits to exist. These limits are expressed as the bound-
ary of that thing. Since the existence of a thing is dependent on
its boundary, and a boundary, by definition, is that place be-
tween a thing and not-that-thing (i.e., something else), the
existence of a thing is dependent on something else — anything
else. Therefore a thing, a content, is dependent on something
outside itself for existence. Content is not self-sufficient.

Context is not dependent on something outside itself for
existence; it is whole and complete in itself and, as a function of
being whole, it allows for, it generates parts — that is to say, it
generates content. Content is a piece, a part of the whole; its very
nature is partial. Context is the whole; its nature is complete.

When an idea exists as a position — when it is a content —
then it is an idea whose time has not come. When an idea's time
has not come, whatever you do to materialize or realize that idea
does not work. When an idea's time has not come, you have a
condition of unworkability in which what you do doesn't work,
and you don't do what works.

When an idea is transformed from content to context,
then it is an idea whose time has come.

When an idea is transformed from existence as a position
to existence as a space, then it is an idea whose time has come.
Now an idea as position literally requires other positions for its

THE HUNGER PROJECT 17

FORCE-FEEDING THE LAND

For many people concerned about the

environment, "technology" is a red flag.

Machines are seen simply as fuel-guzzlers

that damage and rape the earth. For

others, agricultural technology is our

last, best hope —

For most countries, agricultural

machines mean imported machines plus

imported fuel and parts. Often poor

countries just do not have foreign

exchange for these imports New loans

of foreign exchange are not of much help.

Annual payments on old loans already eat

up over 40 percent of the total new aid

from the industrial countries.

In any case, making a nation's

food production dependent on imported

machinery that requires foreign

exchange can be self-defeating. In a real

sense, the machines tend to determine what

is to be grown. In order to import

agricultural technology, a country has to

sell someth ing else to get the foreign

exchange to pay for it. Thus, the

more tractors and harvesters imported, the

more peanuts, vegetables, cotton, meat,

palm oil, or cocoa are likely to be produced

for export to pay for them. Relying on

imported ag ricu It u ral tech nology can thus

reduce the domestic food supply

simply because land that migh t be growing

food is forced to "grow*' foreign

exchange to pay for the machines.

Frances Moore Lappe

and Joseph Collins

Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

A WELCOMING CONTEXT

Technology is tremendously important,

but it has to have a welcoming context for

its use. Technology alone is not going to

solve the balance of our problem.

Roy Prosterman

The Hunger Project presentations

September-October 1977

existence, while an idea as space is both self-sufficient, requiring
nothing else in order to exist, and allows for — is the space
of — the existence of other ideas. When an idea is transformed
from existing as a function of other ideas to being the space that
allows all other ideas, then it is an idea whose time has come.
When an idea is transformed from content to context,
then it is an idea whose time has come.

Creating a context: putting a man on the moon

Contexts are created by the Self, out of nothing. When
you stop identifying yourself as a thing, as a position, and start
experiencing your Self as the context, as the space, for your
life — when you start experiencing that you are the context in
which the content of your life occurs — you will automatically
and necessarily experience responsibility for all the content in
your space. You will experience that you are whole and complete
and that you are aligned with other Selves, with the Self.

When you experience your Self as space, you create con-
texts from which you can come into the world. One such context
is the end of hunger and starvation on our planet within two
decades.

You are probably not yet clear about what context is — at
least, not how it works — so we'll use an example. On May 25,
1961, President John F. Kennedy initiated a context when he told
Congress: "This nation should commit itself to achieving the
goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the earth."

By creating the context, "A man on the moon in 10 years,"
Kennedy transformed space travel from merely a good idea —
which had not succeeded despite considerable attempts, the
feasibility of which had been questioned, argued, and
discussed — into an idea whose time had come.

The result of what Kennedy did can be understood by
analogy. It is as if he created a building named, "A man on the
moon in 10 years," and inside that building he put offices for all
the various ideas, positions, notions and people that had to do
with space flight. The first office inside the front door of the
building in 1961 would have been called, "It can't be done." This
office would have been inhabited by the skeptics and cynics.

A content or position is threatened by any opposite posi-
tion. Given two opposing positions, only one can survive. On
the other hand, a context gives space to, it literally allows, it even
encourages, positions that are apparently opposite. In fact, the
most important position in a newly-created context is the posi-
tion which appears to oppose the context.

It is important to get that opposing positions actually

18 THE HUNGER PROJECT

contribute to establishing a context. In the case of the civil rights
movement during the 1960s, for example, all those people who
opposed civil rights for blacks actually contributed to creating a
national dialogue that demonstrated to the country that the
issue could no longer be ignored. Every government official in
the South who stood in the doorway of a school and prevented
black children from entering had been a cause, a part of the
persistence, of the problem, of the oppression. After the cre-
ation of a context — "equal rights and dignity for blacks" — the
very same action that had been a part of the problem's persistence
became an action contributing to the end of legal discrimination
against minority races. Then, every such action contributed to
an increased awareness of the issue, to the passage of civil rights
legislation, and to the gradual change in attitude that ultimately
evidenced itself in the recognition that civil rights was an idea
whose time had come.

In a newly-created context the most important position is
the position, "It can't be done." That is the first and most
important content to be processed, to be realigned. Anyone who
has created a context knows that context generates process;
process in turn grinds up content, it changes content so that it
becomes aligned with the context.

In the building of "A man on the moon in 10 years," the
skeptics and cynics were working on "It can't be done" in the
context of doing it, so that instead of being a threat or a stop to
the goal, suddenly their skepticism and cynicism started con-
tributing to the achievement of the goal.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea
whose time has come. Context generates process. A contextu-
ally-generated process transcends the existing forces; it trans-
forms those forces. A contextually-generated process aligns the
existing forces within the context. Then the aligned forces pro-
vide a condition of workability Every action taken in a context is
a fulfillment of, an expression of, and a manifestation of that
context. The pessimism, the cynicism, the position, "It can't be
done," are ground up by the process generated by the context,
and are transformed into the material out of which the result is
achieved. When an idea is transformed so that the apparently
opposing idea actually validates and gives expression to the
idea, then it is an idea whose time has come.

Pretty soon the it-can't-be-done people became aligned.
They were still skeptics (that's their nature), they were still
cynics (that's their nature), but they were suddenly now cynical
and skeptical and in alignment with the context called "A man on
the moon in 10 years."

Then they just moved out of the way and the new office in
the front of the building was: "You can't put a man on the moon

THE MOST NATURAL THING

. ..But let us not think that development
or employment is anything but the most
natural thing in the world. It occurs in
every healthy person's life. There comes a
point when he simply sets to work. . .
What is stopping us? Theories, planning.
1 have come across planners at the
[Indian] Planning Commission who have
convinced themselves that even within 15
years it is not possible to put the willing
labor power of India to work.. . What is
the argument behind it? Oh! The
argument is very clever, a splendid piece
of model building. They have ascertained
that in order to put a man to work you
need on average so much electricity, so
much cement, and so much steel. This is
absurd. . . The Taj Mahal was built
without electricity, cement and steel
and. . . all the cathedrals of Europe were
built without them. It is a fixation in the
mind, that unless you have the latest you
can't do anything at all, and this is the
thing that has to be overcome. . . What
makes us think we need electricity,
cement and steel before we can do
anything at all? The really helpful things
will not be done from the centre; they
cannot be done by big organizations but
they can be done by the people
themselves. If we can recover the sense
that it is the most natural thing for every
person born into this world to use
his hands in a productive way and that
it is not beyond the wit of man to
make this possible, then 1 think the
problem of unemployment will disappear
and we shall soon be asking
ourselves how we can get all the work done
that needs to be done.

E.R Schumacher

Small is Beautiful

(see the bibliography on page 38)

(continued on page22)

THE HUNGER PROJECT 19

We are in
the final push

Hunger is a condition that has

ruled for more than half the
I t since World War
II, 3: . i slhan 1.6

billion people — 40 percent of the

planet's population — have eliminated
hunger as a basic i*sue. When the
populations of the long-time
developed countries are added, the
total comes to more than 2.1 billion.
These countries have brought about
the end of starvation for half of us
with a combination of measures that
; y . improved nutrition and v
complemented in each cabe with b

preventive health measures such as
immuni7,iion programs and clean
\ al if supplies. This is not to sav that
nobody is hungry in the counti tes
named on the map below. It does
mean that living standards have
changed recently in 32 of them so tha
hui longer doi tes the lives

of t h • | met e . The ch a n ge can

be measured in terms of life and

□

Q

Q

SWE

ICELAND

NORW

DENMARK

GREAT BRIT/

IRELAND

WEST GERMANY -

THE NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
LUXEMBOURG-
FRANCE'
SWITZERLAND
PORTUGAL'
% °A

SOUTHERN REG

We are in
the final push

Hunger is a condition that has

ruled for more than half the
I t since World War
II, 3: . i slhan 1.6

billion people — 40 percent of the

planet's population — have eliminated
hunger as a basic i*sue. When the
populations of the long-time
developed countries are added, the
total comes to more than 2.1 billion.
These countries have brought about
the end of starvation for half of us
with a combination of measures that
; y . improved nutrition and v
complemented in each cabe with b

preventive health measures such as
immuni7,iion programs and clean
\ al if supplies. This is not to sav that
nobody is hungry in the counti tes
named on the map below. It does
mean that living standards have
changed recently in 32 of them so tha
hui longer doi tes the lives

of t h • | met e . The ch a n ge can

be measured in terms of life and

□

Q

Q

SWE

ICELAND

NORW

DENMARK

GREAT BRIT/

IRELAND

WEST GERMANY -

THE NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
LUXEMBOURG-
FRANCE'
SWITZERLAND
PORTUGAL'
% °A

SOUTHERN REG

(continued from page 19)

"YES, BUT..."

Anyone who has enrolled in The Hunger

Project has certainly examined his or her

reservations about ending starvation. Of

the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of

considerations on the subject, a few are:

1 have enough worries of my own. It's too

bad and all that, but I don't really uxint to

be bothered by it right now.

Death by hunger is an unfortunate but

necessary check on population growth.

Giving food to h ungry people will just

make the problem much worse.

I really want to do something about people

starving, but Ym not sure how big a

sacrifice 1 could make. If it means eating

soybean hamburgers, or being a

vegetarian, 1 don't think my commitment

is that big.

If the big charity organizations and

governments haven't solved the problem,

what can Ido?

There's no way you can help people who

aren't intelligent and resourceful enough

to take care of themselves.

You'd have to change human nature:

Farmers would have to revolutionize

agriculture; people would hove to change

their diets; governments would have to

accept new ideologies. It could

never happen.

Land reform is the only answer-but land

reform isn't possible without socialism.

The "Green Revolution" is a failure. If

technology can't solve the problem,

nothing can.

It's all too depressing to think about. It's

all hopeless anyway. There's nothing that

can be done about it.

without this specific kind of metal and we don't have this specific
kind of metal."

As we all know, the metals were invented and produced.
Then what moved up was: "But you don't know whether to do it
with high technology or high energy" We know that that one
was resolved. The Russians said high energy. The United States
said high technology. It didn't make any difference. Within the
context of putting a man on the moon in 10 years, either one of
the solutions would have worked.

Unlike the problem of hunger, in which solutions already
exist, there were no solutions to the problem of getting a man to
the moon in 1961. President Kennedy created a context called
"A man on the moon in 10 years," and out of that context, in
which the question of feasibility was merely one of many posi-
tions within the context, came the workable solution: the Con-
gressional approval, appropriations of money, technological
breakthroughs, NASA, and, ultimately, men on the moon. Be-
fore then, space travel was not possible because the attempts to
make it real existed in a condition of un workability.

In 1961, the people all the way in the back of the building
called "A man on the moon in 10 years" were optimists. Much
less than 10 years later they had the first office, the office of "It
will be done." In 1969, it was done.

The position "It will be done" and the position "You can't
do it" are merely positions within the context of "A man on the
moon in 10 years'' — or within the context of "The end of hunger
and starvation on this planet in two decades."

The Hunger Project should not be compared literally with
the space project. It is the power of a context to cause an idea's
time to come that is analogous; nothing else.

The context of an end to world hunger

Within two months of the initiation of The Hunger Proj-
ect, the National Academy of Sciences published a report based
on a two-year study announcing that we have the ability to end
hunger and starvation on the planet in two decades. The report
stressed that a key factor in ending hunger is the will to reach
that goal. As you can see, the facts support that the end of
hunger and starvation is an idea whose time has come.

A month after The Hunger Project was initiated I was in
Honolulu having dinner. The man sitting on my left was a
retired aerospace executive. He had been so successful that he
became a consultant. Then he'd become even more successful
and he retired.

He was polite. He listened to my whole presentation, and
finally he got so riled up that he stood up and shouted: 'T am

22 THE HUNGER PROJECT

tired of listening to people talk about hunger who don't know
anything about it! What are you going to do about hunger? You
can't end hunger with words] You've got to do something^

At that point everything calmed down a bit. I stood up, to
even the game out a bit so people at the table wouldn't feel
strange, and I said: "You know something? You're right. And
we'd like to invite you to be the person in The Hunger Project
responsible for, 'You've got to do something.'"

The point is not that I somehow one-upped him, but that
his annoyance and apparent opposition were simply signs of
frustration at his inability to affect a situation that he cared about
very much. Since that evening, he has gone out of his way to
support The Hunger Project.

Let's not be stupid. Obviously, something has to be done.
Anybody can see that. When people say, "But don't you see that
you can't end starvation with words?" that's like saying, "Don't
you see the floor down there?" Of course, but that isn't the point
of The Hunger Project. Everybody sees that something has to be
done. The point is to create a climate, an environment —
specifically to create a context, a commitment to the end of
starvation — in which what is done is effective.

Instead of the condition in the world creating lines of
force running horizontally and our activities to eliminate hunger
running vertically, the context will generate a process to realign
the forces so that the lines of force start running vertically. Then,
within a realigned set of forces, what you did that didn't work
before suddenly works. It's the same thing you were doing
before, except that suddenly it now works. Every action taken in
a context becomes a fulfillment of, an expression of, and a
manifestation of that context. In that context your intention to
end starvation can be realized.

The Hunger Project is not something more to do. It is not
something better than what is being done. It is not some new
and different and wonderful thing which makes everything in
the past obsolete. No. The Hunger Project is about causing the
end of hunger and starvation on the planet in two decades to be
an idea whose time has come, by causing the end of hunger and
starvation in two decades to exist as a context for what we do and
for the process of decision and discussion by which we arrive at
what to do.

MORE "YES, BUT../'

How can I contribute on a large scale

when I can't even handle hunger on a

one-to-one basis? Every panhandler

means a trauma of indecision for

me-should I give this man a quarter,

but not that one? Does giving him money

make me a sucker?

Why should the United States worry

about other countries' internal problems?

Don't we have enough problems

of our own?

Nothing can be done unthout changing

the basic structure of international

economics. The huge multinational

companies that control the means of

production and distribution are not

interested in tackling the problems of food

distribution in poor countries.

The rate of population growth is greater

than the rate of increase in the worlds

food production. The only solution is

birth control.

If people are really responsible for

themselves, then starving people are

responsible for starving. It's too bad, but

it's their problem, not mine. I didn't cause

starvation.

Only the smartest and the strongest

survive. It's always been that way, and

that's the way it was meant to be. It's the

way of the world. Nobody I know is

hungry.

I contribute to charities, I support aid

legisbition. I've done my part; now let

somebody else do theirs.

We've alwayshad starvation. Why should

I be asked to do something about it? Why

me? Why now?

The power of context

There isn't a person reading this who does not know the
power of context in his or her own life. Whether you were
conscious of it or not at the time, there have been times when
you created a context in your life. As a consequence of your

THE HUNGER PROJECT 23

OPPORTUNITY

If there is the political will in this
country and abroad ... it should be
possible to overcome the worst
aspects of widespread hunger and
malnutrition within one generation.
By the end of the century, food
production could be doubled in the
developing countries. In the
high-income countries, grain pro-
duction could be increased by
more than the total grain production
of the United States today, even
while maintaining reasonable
production costs despite the rising
costs of energy, water, and other
requirements. We find these
prospects exciting and worthy of
strong national and international
efforts, and we believe that a latent
political will now exists in numerous
countries which could be mobilized
in a mutually supporting fashion to
commence and support such efforts.

National Academy of Sciences
World Food and Nutrition Study, 1977

24 THE HUNGER PROJECT

doing so, suddenly things started to work: That which
previously did not work, that which was stuck and not moving,
suddenly began to move and start working. When you create a
context, it's not that you are now doing something very much
different from what you were doing before or even that you now
know something very much different from what you knew
before. It is that there is a shift in the climate, the space —
specifically, the context — in which you work, that makes things
suddenly workable.

I tell you that the power of context is real True, it doesn't
seem very real if you operate out of a system of reality that says
that the body of the person over there is more real than the love
that that person experiences. My love for you is a lot more real to
me than your body is. Your love is an experience more real for
me than your face. The context — the end of hunger and
starvation on the planet in two decades — is very real for me. It's
more real than the "yes-buts/' "how-abouts," the confusion,
the doubt, the controversy, the conflict. This context is now
more real for me than the facts regarding the persistence of
starvation. For me, the context created now has a power greater
than those facts. It has the power to generate a process, to
generate a set of forces which are aligned with the end of hunger
and starvation and which will create the circumstances within
the next 20 years for the end of starvation.

I have something I want to tell you which is very delicate.
Perhaps delicate things should not be said in public because they
are apt to be misunderstood. This is something so delicate it
requires intimacy So I say this to you not as a public statement
but in the intimacy of the relationship which we have now
established as beings.

Until now, each time someone has died as a consequence
of starvation, that death was further evidence of the persistence
of hunger and starvation. The instant you create a context — the
end of hunger and starvation on the planet — then deaths
resulting from starvation occur in that context, and suddenly the
same deaths that had been a manifestation of the persistence of
the problem become a manifestation of, virtually a contribution
to, the end of the problem.

When a space in which something happens is trans-
formed, the same happening takes on a different meaning and
therefore leads to a different result. No one would ask anyone to
die as a contribution toward the end of death — and it is a fact that
when you create a context around death and make that context
real, it does shift the meaning and result of the event.

A person can die as evidence of the persistence of hunger
and starvation, in which case that person's life and death have
been reduced to meaninglessness. A person can die in the

ACE IN THE HOLE

Shukhov sat himself on the edge of a
wooden form, he'd sat on worse things.
He leaned back against the wall his jacket
tightening about hisbody, and felt a lump
in his clothing. Ah, yes, his little ace in
the hole, the hunk of bread he'd brought
along for lunch. He always brought alon<:
the same amount, and never touched it
before lunchtime. The other half he ate for
breakfast, usually, but today he'd saved it.
Now he saw he wasn't going to gain by it
he was still hungry and he had a terrific
craving to eat right now, here where it
was warm. Five hours until lunchtime.
A hell of a long time.
The ache in his back had traveled down
to his legs nozo, they were weak and
trembling. If he could only get near the
stove. He laid his mittens on his knees,
opened his coat, untied the face-cloth
from around his neck (breaking the ice off
it to fold it) and put it in his pocket. Then
he eased the bread out of his pocket and
laid it in a clean rag, guarding it behind
the flap of his overcoat so not a crumb
would fall, and began to chew. He'd had
the bread next to his body under two
layers of clothing, so it hadn't frozen.

He used to think about how they'd
eaten at home in the village: big boiols of
potatoes and platefuls of groats and, way
back, great big chunks of meat. And
they'd guzzled milk until their guts burst.
But now, in the camps, he knew they'd
gone about it the wrong way then. You
had to eat concentrating on the food, as he
did now, nibbling off little corners, and
turning them on his tongue, and rolling
them around in his mouth. That was the
way to get the taste out of food. Even this
soggy black bread. For eight years noio-
morc-what had he been eating? Not a
damn thing. But look at the work
he'd been able to do on that nothing!
It came of knowing how to eat.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

THE HUNGER PROJECT 25

context of the end of hunger and starvation, and the context
affords meaning — almost purpose — to that life and death.

THE SILENT CRISIS

Historically, famine has been limited to
relatively small geographic areas, as
in Ireland in 1847 and in West Bengal in
1943. But advances in global and
national food distribution and transpor-
tation systems now ensure that food
scarcity is allocated according to income
levels, with scarcity concentrated among
the world's poor, wherever they are.
Today, even while the threat of traditional
famine persists in some areas, a less
visible crisis of hunger and malnutrition is
emerging among the world's lozvest
income groups -whether in the Philippines,
Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa,
northeastern Brazil, or among the Andean
Indians. The silent crisis of
malnutrition may be denying close to a
billion human beings the basic
right to realize their full genetic potential,
their full humanity —
The world's principal unrealized
potential for expanding food production is
now concentrated in the developing
countries. Although soil quality
in Bangladesh is as good as in Japan, rice
yields are only one third of those attained in
japan. India's area of cropland is
roughly comparable to that of the United
States, yet it harvests only 100 million
tons of grain, while the United States har-
vests 250 million tons. And corn yields
in Brazil and Thailand are still less than
one third those of the United States.

Lester R. Brown with Erik P. Eckholm

By Bread Alone

(see the bibliography on page 38)

What can the little individual do?

There are four generating principles of The Hunger Proj-
ect and I want to discuss them now.

The first generating principle comes from a question
Buckminster Fuller asks. Bucky's question is: "What can the little
individual do?" What can you do as an individual that some big
organization or government can't do?

What you can do that no other entity can do is create a
context. Only you have the power to create a context. It cannot
be done by a group. It cannot be done by an organization. It
must happen within the Self. The home of context is Self. Only
within your Self can you create the context: The end of hunger
and starvation on the planet within two decades. That is what
the little individual can do.

I know that underneath our facades, underneath the junk
that we bother ourselves with in life, right underneath the
surface — and I have been underneath the surface of tens and
tens of thousands of people — is the experience of an innate and
natural responsibility for the world in which we live. It is not
something you have to jam in there or convince people of.

I want to convince you of nothing. I have nothing to
convince you of. The experience of responsibility already exists
within your Self. All you have to do is experience your Self as the
space of your experience and you will automatically and neces-
sarily experience responsibility for everything within your
space. The Hunger Project is a natural consequence of the ex-
perience of individual and personal responsibility, of your Self's
experience thathungerand starvation existint/owr space, inyour
world.

Now as a practical expression of that, you will ask: "What
can I do?" The Hunger Project does not answer that for you. It
goes out of its way to not answer that question for you. Instead,
it creates a context in which you get to answer that question
yourself, so that the answer is your own answer.

The first generating principle of The Hunger Project is
that it is a project of individual and personal responsibility.

It has nothing to do with guilt. If you want to feel guilty,
fine. Keep it to yourself. It's not part of the project. The Hunger
Project has nothing to do with feeling sorry for starving people. I
consider feeling sorry for those people demeaning to their hu-
manity. If you want to feel sorry, please don't get it on me. The
project is not about being ashamed. You do not have to be
ashamed about what you eat, even about what you waste. Being

26 THE HUNGER PROJECT

ashamed of what you waste is a mere gesture. It's a cop-out. Ifs
cheap. The project is not about blaming anybody. Ifs not even
about your personal interest. Of course, it is very much in your
personal, selfish interest to eliminate starvation. If people don't
get fed, your life is going to get very miserable in about 20 or 30
years, according to the experts. And this project is not about
your selfish interest.

People have said to me: "Sure, you can talk to 40,000
people and get them all fired up. How long will that excitement
and commitment last? What will happen after it wears off ?"

If I have to keep people fired up, this project is a joke. If
this project isn't natural to your Self, this project is a fraud.

This project is about you, and I suggest that if you get in
touch with your Self, you will experience a natural, spontaneous
sense of responsibility.

An alignment of wholes

The second generating principle is that the project is an
alignment of wholes, not a sum of parts. In this project you do
not do your "part." There is no "part" for you to do. This is a
project in which you are the whole project.

If you enroll yourself in the project you become the source
of the project. It becomes your project and anyone working to
eliminate hunger and starvation around the world will be work-
ing for you because you have taken the responsibility to create
the context of the end of hunger and starvation on the planet.
When you do that, anybody doing anything is working for you.

Let me give you an analogy. If you take a transparency, a
photographic slide, and you cut the transparency in half and
you project one half on a screen, what you see is half a picture.
On the other hand, if you take a holographic transparency and
you cut it in half and you project it, what you see is the whole
picture. In a holographic transparency, each part is not a part.
Each part is a whole that contains the entire picture.

Similarly, The Hunger Project is not you doing your part.
It is a transformation from you doing your part, to you being the
source of it all. The Hunger Project is an alignment of sources, an
alignment of wholes. You are the source of The Hunger Project.
You make the project completely yours in a way that allows
others to make it completely theirs. No one gets credit for the
project, and each of us is allowed to own the project completely

This is not a movement. This is not a bandwagon. There is
no movement or bandwagon to join. You can't be a part of
something here. You can only be the whole thing, aligned with
other people who also are the whole thing.

Alignment is the spontaneous cooperation of wholes com-

mmmm

THE HUNGER PROJECT 27

ing from a context or common purpose. Agreement, on the other
hand, is a banding together of parts in support of a position or
point of view. You don't need anyone's agreement to create a
context. You don't need anything from anybody

All you need to create a context is your Self. The Hunger
Project is an alignment of Selves taking responsibility for creat-
ing a context.

A TRANSFORMATION

Off the coast of japan area number of tiny

islands where resident populations of

macaques have been under continuous

observation for more than 20 years. The

scientists provide supplementary food,

but the monkeys also feed themselves by

digging up street potatoes and eating

them dirt and all. This uncomfortable

practice continued unchanged for many

years until one day a young male monkey

broke with tradition and carried his

potato down to the sea where he washed it

before eating it. hie taught the trick to his

mother, who showed it to her current

mate and so the culture spread througli

the colony until most of them, let us say

99 monkeys, were doing it. Then one

Tuesday morning at eleven, the

hundredth individual acquired the habit r

and within an hour, it appeared on two

other islands in txvo physically

unconnected populations of monkeys who

until that moment had shoum no

inclination to wash their food.

I believe that ideas in human societies

spread in the same kind of xvay and that

when enough of us hold something to be

true, then it becomes true for everyone.

Lyall Watson

foreword to Rhythms of Vision

by Lawrence Blair

Context, not content

The third generating principle of The Hunger Project is
the one I've already discussed with you: the creation of a
context, to cause the end of hunger and starvation on this planet
in two decades to be an idea whose time has come. It can be done
only within your Self.

And you create a context from what? From nothing.
Within your Self and from nothing you create the space, "The
end of hunger and starvation on the planet in two decades/' and
in that space you put all content and all process, and within the
space, process is generated, which reorganizes and realigns the
process and content. In that context, everything that happens in
every moment is really the end of starvation manifesting itself.
Each position that used to contribute to the pea soup now
becomes a position manifesting itself as contributing to the end
of starvation.

An idea transformed from content to context is an idea
whose time has come. Create a context and you have mastery. I
promise you that at the point in this project when you actually
experience the context, "The end of hunger and starvation on
the planet in two decades," you will experience a transforma-
tion in the quality of your own life. You will experience a kind of
mastery that you have never experienced before.

I said mastery, not force. Many of us have a lot of force.
Mastery requires no force. If everything is going vertically, what
do you have to do to get something to go vertically? Nothing,
Just do whatever you're doing.

Out of the context, "The end of hunger and starvation on
the planet in two decades," sometime in the next month some
opportunity to do something to make real the end of hunger and
starvation on the planet will cross your path. Instead of interact-
ing with it out of a position, you will be able to interact with the
opportunity out of this context. Then, what you do will be
wholly appropriate to the end of hunger and starvation.

A transformed space

The fourth generating principle of The Hunger Project is

28 THE HUNGER PROJECT

the principle of transformation. I cannot predict exactly what
will happen to end starvation on the planet. In fact, any predic-
tion begins to place a limitation on what can occur.

If you and I were caterpillars talking about flight, can you
imagine what the talk would sound like? "We don't have the
power to fly Caterpillars don't fly. They wiggle. We're too bulky
and fat and we don't have wings. We can't do it."

To which someone might reply: "But if a caterpillar could
fly by what method do you suppose it would happen?" Don't
you see that you can't answer that with a caterpillar mentality?
Whatever answer you figure out comes from the limited condi-
tion; it is deduced from what already exists, that is, the form of
the caterpillar. The creation of a context dissolves the limitations;
it transforms the condition of unworkability and creates an
opportunity for solutions to occur,

I talked to about 40,000 people in a series of presentations
of The Hunger Project in September and October of 1977. Those
40,000 people experienced alignment and began to talk to tens of
thousands of other people, who, in turn, will enroll tens of
thousands of other people. Soon there will be over 100,000
people enrolled in The Hunger Project, people committed to
causing the end of hunger and starvation in two decades to be an
idea whose time has come.

We can predict what 100,000 people banded together in a
movement, each doing his or her part, could do about hunger
and starvation — but no one has ever seen 100,000 aligned
people. No one can predict what 100,000 people can do who
are aligned out of themselves, out of their individual sense
of responsibility, out of being whole, out of being willing to
create new contexts within themselves — within themselves as
individuals, within themselves as relationship, within them-
selves as a group, within themselves as organization or institu-
tion, within themselves as society, within themselves as
humankind. We have no idea what a group of 100,000 aligned
people can do. And I say that any attempt to predict it limits it.

So I only predict miracles.

Twenty years from now, when we're looking back at how
hunger and starvation ended, it will not look as if miracles had
happened. Everyone will know how it happened. They will
point to events that were pivotal, that made a difference. There
will appear to be an obvious relationship between what was
done and the logical consequences of what was done. The wea-
ther got better; there were bigger crops; this government
changed; the president said that; the government did this; and it
all resulted in the end of starvation on the planet. In retrospect,
that's how miracles always appear to happen.

Butterflies can explain how caterpillars came to fly ■

A SHIFT IN THE WIND

When people say, "Well, what do you
think is going to happen with hungry
folks?" I give them the answer that I've
h card fi refigh ters g ive wh en t h ey 're fig h t-
ing a forest fire that's out of eon tr oh
Someone would ask the Fire Marshal,
"What's it look like?" and he would an-
swer, "Well, if we don 't get a shift in the
wind, we can't sane it, " He didn't say we
couldn't save it; he said, "It's out of our
hands now."

I've always felt that if we didn't get a shift
in the wind, we couldn't save it. But I left
leeway for that un iversa I God that con-
trols all winds to step in, And I cannot
tell you hoie I feel tonight, knowing that
this is that shift in the xvind.
Dick Gregory

Hunger Project presentation
Washington, D.C.
September 25, 1977

THE HUNGER PROJECT 29

30 THE HUNGER PROJECT

The Hunger Project is not about any particular solution or group of solutions; rather,
it is about creating the context in which old solutions can work and new solutions can
appear. Here is a review of some solutions we already know about.

A catalogue of solutions

Roy Prosterman and Charles A. Taylor

from Hunger, Poverty, Desperation, and Chaos

Estimates are that at least 400 million people on the planet
are seriously undernourished, and the number may be twice as
great. This occurs because some 30 to 40 million tons of grain are
not available each year where and when they are needed, and it
occurs against the following broad background:

• Compared to the 30-40 million ton "shortage," we annu-
ally produce 1.2 billion tons of grain on the planet.

• We could produce 2.4 to 2.6 billion tons of grain.

• And, out of the 1.2 billion tons we do produce, an esti-
mated 30 percent, or 360 million tons, are lost annually,
chiefly to rats and insects, because of poor storage. A
further 400 million tons are fed to animals producing
milk, meat, and eggs for well-to-do countries.

■ A further 50-100 million tons, although "eaten" by people
in the poor countries, actually get consumed by the para-
sites that inhabit their intestinal tracts.

So what are the solutions? In the very short term, a
partial solution is to use the well-off countries' existing food
resources more rationally, at the same time building up world
food reserves and making larger food-aid shipments wherever
distribution problems can be solved. A shift from grain feeding
to forage-grass feeding of beef cattle in the U.S. alone would, for
example, release resources equal to the present shortage — but
there would be problems in getting the food where it is needed.
Even moderating the rate at which feeding of grain to animals is
increasing in Russia, Europe, and America would go far toward
meeting the deficit in a "balance-sheet" sense — and again we
would have the problem of distribution.

In the mid to long term, the struggle must chiefly be
won in the less-developed countries themselves.

There are four major models of solution that have been
applied successfully (see map, pages 20-21):

• Family farm

• Collectivized or cooperative agriculture

• Populist

• Grass-roots revenue

Measures to increase agricultural productivity at the local
level are probably the most promising of all, not only because

WHERE FOOD IS CHEAP

Although the [U.S. agricultural devel-
opment] program was put together
piecemeal over many decades, by and large
instruments of policy were consciously
devised to encourage the agricultural sec-
tor to expand its resources and increase its
output. As a result of such conscious pol-
icy the consumer in the U.S., and to a
lesser extent in the rest of the world, has
realized a favorable price for food. By 1971
only 15.7 percent of the disposable income
of the average American consumer was
spent for food. (In 1975 that figure rose to
16.8 percent because of inflation, and it
has remained there ever since.) By way of
comparison, in developing countries in
1971 the average consumer spent 65 per-
cent of his disposable income for food, in
the USSR he spent 30 percent and in
the countries of the European Economic
Community he spent 26 percent.

Earl O. Heady

Scientific American, September 1976

THE HUNGER PROJECT 31

SIGNS OF STRESS

Death rate in 1975

Companiganj, Bangladesh

by size of land holdings

••••• •••#• •++++ •##»

t

•4

Death rate #-1 person

(Source: The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene
& Public Health, preliminary data.)

Even within a poor society, the poorest

arc the hardest hit. A classification

of deaths in Companiganj for 1975 by the

Johns Hopkins medical team showed

that death rates differed profoundly

according to the victims' land-owning

status. The less land a family had,

the less likely were all of its members to

survive a food crisis. Death was a

frequent visitor to that one-fourth of the

population that owned no land at all.

A death rate of '36 within the landless

group indicates extreme nutritional stress.

Those xvilh three acres or more had a

death rate of 12, only fractionally higher

than that for those living in Western

industrial countries. Perhaps the most

disturbing message of these figures

is what they portend for the future as

population growth further reduces the

average size of landholdings and swells the

landless population.

Lester R. Brown

World Population Trends: Signs of Hope,

Signs of Stress, Worldwatch Paper No. 8

October 1976

food can thereby be produced exactly where the deficits exist,
but also because the increased income to villagers can then
permit them to undertake complementary measures, such as
improving storage and developing village safe- water wells and a
whole range of other farm and village land improvements, using
their own resources. The potential for increasing productivity is
tremendous. What we call "The Triumph of Lorenzo Jose" (see
page 33) shows what can be done. Lorenzo Jose and some of his
neighbors exemplify the family farm model, which means they
own their own land and have basic small-owner support —
access to credit, technical advice, extension and marketing sup-
port in the form of research, regional irrigation works, farm-
to-market roads, warehousing, price floors.

Collectivized or cooperative agriculture has also shown
that it can do quite well: East Germany produces only nine
percent less wheat per hectare than West Germany, while North
Korea appears to be as highly productive for rice as South Korea.

Small-owner or collectivized-ownership systems — and
more readily the former — open the way for major productivity
increases. A shift away from landlordism constitutes an abso-
lutely necessary, but not by itself sufficient, condition for achiev-
ing such increases. Interestingly, none of the really "rich"
countries has a landlord-dominated system of agriculture
— which may say a lot about how they got to where they are.

To understand the process by which agricultural produc-
tion is increased, it is necessary to go back to the fundamental
fact that food production always combines three basic factors:
land, labor, and inputs. The latter may be longer-term "capital"
inputs which last for a number of years, or shorter-term "cur-
rent" inputs.

The quality of these factors must, of course, be taken into
account with their sheer quantity: the quality of the land, includ-
ing the structure and nutrient content of the soil, and the
amount of rainfall which it receives under natural conditions;
the quality of the labor, including the degree of motivation to
work carefully and long; and the quality and appropriateness of
machines, irrigation works, and other long-term "capital" in-
puts, as well as the quality of the seeds, fertilizer and other
shorter-term "current" inputs.

On-farm irrigation works are, in fact, the most crucial of
all the improvement works needed for achieving productivity
increases, and they are essential if a second crop is to be pro-
duced in the "dry" season. This means digging wells; leveling
the land to an even flatness; digging ditches that will carry
nearby irrigation water to the crops and permit drainage of
excess waters in the rainy season; and building impoundment
areas that can hold extra water.

32 THE HUNGER PROJECT

mi ^

a

X

THE TRIUMPH OF LORENZO JOSE

Lorenzo Jose is a farmer who has one
hectare (a piece of land approximate-
ly twice the size of a football field) in
the Philippines. There, as in India
and Bangladesh, a hectare usually
produces less than 2 tons of rice a
year. By comparison, a hectare of
Japan's intensively worked riceland,
and the energy-intensive rice farms of
Southern California, produce about 6
tons a year. Lorenzo Jose is getting 30
tons a year from his hectare.
What kind of miracle is farmer Jose
working? He has the same amount of
land as his neighbors, the same
water, the same climate, and access to
the same types of high-yielding seeds.
To utilize his land more productively
than his neighbors, Jose divides it
into 100-square-meter plots and
plans meticulously for the planting
and harvesting of each. Every day, he
gives at least one plot a fresh planting,
fertilizing, weeding, or harvesting.
He monitors all the plots for any sign
of disease. Each plot goes through
a complete cycle, from planting
to harvesting, four times a year.

The weather is warm enough to allow
constant vegetative growth, as long
as there is irrigation beyond the
June-to-October monsoon season.
Jose husbands his water resources,
carefully dispensing and rationing
water to each plot, and monitoring
drainage closely. Almost every day of
the year, some of the crop goes to
market. It is an understatement to say
that the work is demanding: Lorenzo
Jose takes only five days a year as
"time off."

Lorenzo Jose's triumph is compound-
ed out of two fundamental but simple
elements: First, he owns the land he
farms. Second, he has access to basic
credit and technical and marketing
support. Other farmers in the same
area, following Jose's lead, get the
same results. Ownership gives them
the motivation to put in long hours,
and to make extensive "sweat equity"
improvements such as irrigation and
drainage. The support facilities give
them the wherewithal to acquire
those things that "sweat" alone
cannot create — such as fertilizer,
insecticide, better seeds, and the
technical know-how for their
optimum use — plus the assurance

that their resulting crops can be
profitably sold.

By contrast to these owner-farmers,
their neighbors who produce roughly
one-sixteenth as much are tenant
farmers. Even where similar support
facilities are available to them, there
is little increase in the tenant farmers'
productivity. Invariably, they fear
making basic long-term improve-
ments on the farm: The landlord
might seize the fruits in increased
rent, or seize the newly-improved
land for himself, leaving the evicted
tenant to fare as best he can.
There are other places (northern
Portugal, for example) where small
farmers own their land but don't have
credit or technical or marketing
support. Like the tenant farmer who
has support but no land, their
productivity is low.
Both are needed: ownership of the
land, and the support to fulfill the
promise that ownership brings.
Where both are present, agricultural
productivity shows marked gains.
Where either is missing, production
stagnates.

Roy Prosterman

THE HUNGER PROJECT 33

DEFUSING THE
POPULATION BOMB

The experience of the developed countries

gave rise to the theory of the demographic

transition. It holds that societies tend to

move through three distinct demographic

stages: 1. high birth rates and high death

rates, resulting in near stationary

populations;!, high birth rates but

declining death rates, producing growing

populations; and finally, 3. low birth

rates and low death rates, re-establishing

near stationary populations.

The fundamental question is: What, if

anything, can rationally and humanely be

done to accelerate the demographic

transition in the developing world? Is that

acceleration realistically possible? It is.

. . . The importance of enhancing the status

of women is critical. The number of

illiterate females is growing faster than

illiterate males.

Of all the aspects of social development,

the educational level appears most

consistently associated with lower

fertility.

...Malnourished mothers give birth to

weak and unhealthy infants, and have

problems nursing them. Such infants

often die, and this leads to frequent

pregnancies, which in turn diminish [the

parents'] occupational and economic

status.
. . . But through an increase in income,
small-farm families will almost certainly
experience a beneficial decline in their
traditionally h igh fertility. For the income
will give them access to better health and
education and living standards, which in
turn are likely to lead to smaller families.

Robert S. McNamara

in Time magazine,

from a speech at Massachusetts

Institute of Technology

It is such crucial productivity-increasing improvements
which only owners (whether family farmers or cooperativists)
are willing to undertake, never tenants or hired laborers.

New technologies may help the motivated owner-
farmers even more in the future: For example, the new "super
slurper/' made of a flour material which can absorb more than
1,000 times its weight in water, appears to be the cheapest and
most promising water-mobilizing invention to date and is likely
to be valuable to agriculture in the U.S. and abroad.

Other proven solutions to hunger besides the family farm
and cooperative models are the populist model and the grass-
roots revenue model. The populist model uses distribution of
food via government action, and has worked in countries like
Cuba, Argentina, and Uruguay The grass-roots revenue model,
which has usefully served countries like Portugal and Spain,
and a series of island societies from Puerto Rico to Malta and
Mauritius, has mostly been accomplished through massive
tourism or through large-scale remittances of funds from com-
patriots working abroad.

Some countries represent several models simultane-
ously: Israel, for example, probably reflects elements of all four.

None of these models, however, can work alone. Any
solution depends on basic preventive health care. Then the
bowls begin to fill with food that is not shared with parasites or
metabolized fighting disease. In what has now become a wel-
coming and supporting village setting other improvements take
effect: family planning, basic education, the improvement of
housing, and the generation of jobs.

A variety of new technologies may help to further sup-
port these successful models in the future — ranging from the
"super slurper" to inexpensive methods of local-level storage to
techniques for farming the oceans or getting the basic grains to
"fix" their own nitrogen out of the atmosphere.

Other approaches have been tried which, historically,
have not yet led to any successes:

Industrialization: Too costly and often inappropriate.
Typically, only a "favored few" reap any benefits. Saudi Arabia
is currently attempting to use this model and it looks as if it
might work for them, because of their vast financial resources.

Trade, not aid: Superficially attractive, encourages
single-crop farming for export, does not feed the population.

Boy scoutism: This "medicine-and-blankets" approach
makes the helper feel good, but does little long-term good.

Technology transfer: Done on the right scale, using the
right kind of technology, it works. It is often inappropriate,
substituting capital-equipment for labor and reducing employ-
ment, which eventually means more hungry people. ■

34 THE HUNGER PROJECT

MORE FOOD, FEWER CHILDREN

The rate of population growth does
not increase when people are fed. In
the long run, just the opposite
happens.

People in the less developed
countries don't have babies by
"accident," or because they don't
know how babies are made. When
they have had enough, they are as
capable — even in the absence of
modern birth-control
technologies — of practicing coitus
interruptus or abortion as their
Western European counterparts who
started bringing down their own
birth rates in the 19th century.
Consider the total of 65 million
families of tenant farmers on all the
continents, and the 35 million
additional families of agricultural
laborers, many of them living in areas
where children under six years of age
account for half of all deaths.
As they grow older and less capable
of working long hours in the field,
especially if the husband of the
household should fall sick or grow
frail, they can only look forward to
eviction or dismissal. There are few
old tenant farmers, and even fewer
old agricultural laborers. For tens of
millions of other families, the
circumstances are equivalent.
How then are they to survive? The
answer is simple: Having sons who
will be able to work is the equivalent
of old-age insurance. The woman
becomes a child-bearing machine,
forced to bear eight or nine children
in an effort to have at least one
surviving son who can take care of
the parents in their old age.
What happens when conditions
improve? With higher food
productivity and reduced
unemployment, with most people
finding more food to put in their
children's bowls, and more resources
to spend on preventive health
measures, parents come to realize
that their well-nourished, healthy
children are going to survive.
It is then that "insurance births"
taper off and the birth rate drops
substantially. And it is then that a
welcoming context is created for the
adoption of modern family planning.

Roy Prosterman

THE HUNGER PROJECT 35

LABOR DOWN, OUTPUT UP

The United States has reduced the per-
centage of its total labor force on farms
from 72 percent 150 years ago to 5 percent
now. Yet productivity per American farm
worker has increased enormously: In 1920
each farmer fed 17 people, and today feeds
135 people in the U.S. and abroad. A
comparison of percentages of labor force
on the land in different parts of the world
is shown below.

UNITED STATES

5%

WESTERN EUROPE )

12%

USSR |

31% I

LATIN AMERICA

40%

AFRICA

73%

ASIA

58%

Scientific American, September 1976

What the U.S. has done so far

Some 64 years ago, work began in the United States to
end hunger on the planet. The first push was Belgian Relief —
which soon became a general European Relief effort — from 1914
to 1923. The second great push came with the Marshall Plan after
World War II. Each represented the work of hundreds, or at most
a few thousand, committed people; largely through them, more
than half of the problem of hunger has been solved.

Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United
States, organized food relief for Belgium in August 1914, just
after the outbreak of World War I. His food-saving tactics —
meatless days, wheatless days — gave rise to the word
"Hooverize," meaning to conserve food. With Hoover as head
of the U.S. Food Administration, the relief operation was ex-
tended to most of Europe when the war ended. During those
years, we gave four times as much assistance, relative to our
gross national product, as we give today

The end of World War II in 1945 found Europe devastated
again. When George C. Marshall (who had been overall com-
mander of the U.S. war effort) became Secretary of State in 1947,
the European Recovery Program began a four-year run that
pumped over $11 billion into Europe's economy in food, ma-
chinery, and products.

The purpose of the program that came to bear Marshall's
name was, in Marshall's words, to work "not against any coun-
try or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and
chaos." In its time we gave about six times as much assistance,
relative to our gross national product, as we give today

Although anti-communist government policies at the be-
ginning of the Cold War helped to obtain funding for the Mar-
shall Plan, the energy for the entire operation came from the
personal commitment of individuals across the nation. People
organized their churches, their unions, their business and civic
organizations. Large resources for publicity and education were
marshaled behind the Plan. A registered lobby was set up in
Washington. Congressmen reluctant to vote for funds got a
barrage of letters. As Adam B. Ulam of Harvard has written,
"This was an impressive example of how an idea conceived by a
few enlightened minds, yet clashing with the longstanding tra-
dition and whole temper of American politics, could gain —
through entirely democratic processes and public debate — a
decisive hold on the majority of citizens."

A final push to end the rest of hunger on this planet could
be this generation's present to ourselves and to the generations
that will follow the millennium.

John Poppy

36 THE HUNGER PROJECT

Talking to your government

One day in 1969, while waiting to see a Massachusetts
Congressman, I asked an aide who was opening his mail,
"What's the issue of the day?"

"Whew! Anti-ballistic missiles/' she replied.

"How many letters did you get about it?"

"Ten!" she exclaimed.

Ten letters in one day in one Congressional office can put
an issue at the top of a Representative's priority list. Having
worked closely with officials in Washington, I have observed at
close hand the powerful relationship that can exist between
elected officials and their constituents.

I am also aware that officials often feel isolated from the
insights of constituents. This is hardly surprising — statistics
indicate that less than one percent of Americans communicate
with those persons we have elected to serve us.

Of course, not every letter that is written is going to be
read by the person to whom it is addressed, and often a form
letter is sent in reply But don't think that your communication is
"lost." A record is kept of the pros and cons of all issues, and
sample letters are brought to the attention of the official.

Letters typed on business stationery seem to carry greater
weight, but personal letters — not form letters but individual
expressions — also have influence. Senator Wendell Anderson
(D-Minnesota) has said that when he gets personally written
letters from a dozen constituents he moves that issue up to the
front burner very quickly.

Personal visits with legislators can be especially effective,
either in Washington or at their home offices. Make an appoint-
ment or stop by Find out if your Representative has an aide
assigned to the subject of world hunger. Ask to see both the
Representative and the aide together. If the Representative, or
Senator, is unavailable, the aide can follow through. Senator
Anderson says that if as many as four or five people in his home
district come to see him regarding a single issue, then that
subject is given his full attention and priority

Support your Senator or Congressperson by assisting
with research, speech writing, with whatever ability you can
share. Invite him or her to attend Hunger Project community
meetings to explore the project in depth. When we approach
legislators in the spirit of supporting them to be effective, our
role as constituent-partners becomes one of participating with
them, rather than leaving them adrift on the raft of "authority."

Your letter, your visit, are your continuing vote. Make
sure it is counted.

Joan McKinney

OUR DAILY BREAD

...the world is producing each day two
pounds of grain, or more than 3,000
calories, for every man, woman, and child
on earth. 3,000 calories is about what the
average American consumes. And this
estimate is minimal. It does not include
the many other staples such as beans,
potatoes, cassava, range-fed meat, much
less fresh fruits and vegetables.

Frances Moore Lappe

and Joseph Collins

Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

AREAUTYTEST

There is a way to tell if hunger is being
eliminated: Check the infant and early
childhood mortality figures. If what we
are doing is working, the statistics for
deaths among children in their first two
years will drop significantly. In countries
where data are poor or not up-to-date,
this can be easily remedied with current,
random-sample surveys that will tell us
what is happening as it is happening.

Roy Prosterman

CHICKENS AND HUMANS

i have noticed that when chickens quit
quarreling over their food they often find
that there is enough for all of them i won-
der if it might not be the same with the
human race

Donald Robert Perry Marquis

archy's life of mehitabel (1933) random
thoughts by archy

THE HUNGER PROJECT 37

For further information:
Publications, Organizations and Films

Publications

By Bread Alone

Lester R. Brown with Erik P. Eckholm,
Praeger Publishers, 1974.
Describes the dimensions of hunger in the
70s, and the ecological undermining of
our food systems. Discusses alternative
solutions: viz., the Green Revolution,
fisheries, non-conventional food sources.

The Challenge of World Poverty

GunnarMyrdal. Random House, 1970.
Contains policy recommendations that
Myrdal omitted from his major work, The
Asian Drama. Analyzes the effects of trade
agreements, agriculture, land tenure,
international finance and education. In-
cludes problems in the United States.

Diet For a Small Planet

Frances Moore Lappe\ Ballantine, 1971.
Shows how meatless lifestyle can provide
a healthy diet while saving vital food re-
sources. Includes recipes.

Employment, Growth, and Basic Needs:
A One-World Problem

International Labor Office, 1976.
A collection of papers dealing with the
effects of a "basic needs" strategy on
world employment and economic growth.

The Food and People Dilemma

George Borgstrom. Duxbury Press, 1974.
Describes the problems of feeding an ex-
panding world population. Questions the
usefulness of technological innovation
alone. Has an environmental perspective.

Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

Frances Moore Lappe" and Joseph Collins.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977.
Concludes that there is indeed more than
enough land in the world to produce more
than enough food. Stresses that land re-
form and political action are the way to
realizing success. Parallels How the Other
Half Dies by Susan George.

The Home of Man

Barbara Ward. W. W. Norton & Co., 1976.
Describes how fundamental decisions
made in areas like hunger, pollution
control, natural resources and energy
will have far-reaching effects. Stresses
the interdependence of the problems
with human settlements, suggesting a
new economic order as a way of satisfying
all of humankind.

Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone

MedardGabel. To be published in 1978.
A comprehensive inventory of food re-
sources, present food production, and its
potential. Uses Buckminster Fuller's
, dymaxion approach to world mapping
1 and the World Game Workshop. Written
from the context of sufficiency and
abundance, illustrating throughout that
there are more than enough resources and
food to feed everyone.

Hunger, U.S.A.

Report by the Citizens' Board of Inquiry
into Hunger and Malnutrition in the
United States, 1968.

A thorough study of hunger, malnutrition
and human needs in the United States.
Concludes that, in 1968, the U.S. faced a
problem which affected 10 million Ameri-
cans. (This report helped considerably in
the birth of the Food Stamp Program.)

In the Human Interest

Lester R. Brown. W. W. Norton & Co., 1974.

An analysis of the ecological stresses in-
volved in maintaining a world population
substantially larger than the present one.
Offers a strategy to stabilize the world's
population at a reasonable level. Suggests
that now is the time to act.
Also on the relationship between social
and economic progress and success in
Family Planning, see Accelerating Popula-
tion Stabilization Through Social and Eco-
nomic Progress by Robert S. McNamara.
Overseas Development Council, Devel-
opment Paper 24, August 1977.

Losing Ground

Erik P. Eckholm. WW Norton & Co., 1976.
Describes various problems in food pro-
duction, ranging from the lessons of the
Dust Bowl and deforestation to encroach-
ing deserts and problems of tropical soils.
Relates the growth of food to ecological
trends in the earth's history and suggests
a holistic approach to food production.

The Politics of World Hunger

Paul and Arthur Simon. Harper's
Magazine Press, 1973.
A discussion of the problem of world
hunger and its solutions written from a
public policy perspective, urges a "grass
roots" political effort in the U.S. as the
first step in any solution to the problem.

Reaping the Green Revolution

SudVur Sen. Orbis Books, 1975.
Focuses on India, but deals generally with
the problems and potential of agriculture
in the less developed countries. Stresses
need for a systematic approach to food
production.

A Richer Harvest — New Horizons for
Developing Countries

Sudhir Sen. Orbis Books, 1974.
Fairly technical treatment of the prospects
for vastly increased world food produc-
tion. Urges rich and poor countries to join
in collective effort. Stresses technology.

Small is Beautiful — Economics as if
People Mattered

E.F. Schumacher. Harper & Row, 1973.
Argues the case for appropriate low-
energy technology coupled with the em-
ployment of hand labor in lieu of capital-
intensive, energy-intensive approaches to
development.

World Food and Nutrition Study:

The Potential Contributions of Research

National Academy of Sciences, 1977.
Examines closely the socio-economic
aspects of the problem, and affirms the
feasibility of ending hunger and starva-
tion on the planet before the end of
the century.

WorldWatch Paper No. 2, The Politics and
Responsibility of the North American
Breadbasket

Lester R. Brown. Worldwatch Institute,
1975.

Sets out the critical dependence of the
world on U.S. and Canadian grain exports
and outlinesproblems such as the declin-
ing yields in North America and the insta-
bility of world grain markets. Describes
the results of the Green Revolution,

Organizations

Who's Involved With Hunger: An
Organization Guide

American Freedom from Hunger
Foundation and World Hunger Education
Service, 1976.

A listing of more than 200 "anti-hunger"
organizations, with addresses and names
of principal officers. Its purpose is to be
"educational rather than encyclopedic/'
to encourage further inquiry by readers.

Films

Hunger

Animation, 1973.

Satire of self-indulgence in a hungry
world. Available through Canadian Con-
sulate film libraries.

Hunger in America

CBS-TV documentary, 1968.
Influenced Congress to reexamine domes-
tic hunger. Available for rent from
Carousel Films, 1501 Broadway, New
York, NY 10036.

Hunger in Mississippi

WLBT-TV documentary, 1977.
Details hunger in rural Mississippi and the
inadequacies of the Food Stamp Program.
Lays particular emphasis on diseases re-
lated to malnutrition. For details write to:
KayeFortenberry, WLBT, 715 S. Jefferson
Street, Jackson, MS 39205.

The Hungry Planet

Documentary, 1977.
Focuses on solutions to world hunger,
with emphasis on long-term self-
sufficiency via land reform and com-
plementary small-farmer support. Also
looks at recent Congressional action to
improve aid program, to move it towards
"earth aid." Write: The Hunger Project,
765 California Street, San Francisco,
C A 94108.

38 THE HUNGER PROJECT

It's our planet,

and our Hunger Project

The Hunger Project is not mine or even, strictly speaking, yours. It is the Self's project. As my
Self, I know that I am responsible for the end of hunger and starvation on this planet. I know
that my Self can matter. And out of that experience, I know that your Self can matter.

When we clear away the myths, arguments and positions around hunger, we see clearly that
what is required is a transformation of the condition in which the problem and its solutions are
held. This transformation is The Hunger Project.

The work that resulted in The Hunger Project began four years ago. After considerable
research and discussions with authorities such as Buckminster Fuller, Roy Prosterman and
other experts on world hunger, the project was formally presented at the February 1977
meeting of the est Advisory Board. The est Foundation took responsibility for bringing The
Hunger Project into existence as initial custodian for those to whom the project actually
belongs.

A series of Hunger Project presentations in 11 United States cities in September and October
1977 and a nationwide fast on November 14 th, 1977, were conceived as a contribution from the
est organization to The est Foundation's work in establishing the project. As elements of the
establishing phase, the presentations and the fast were designed to allow people to experience
themselves as source of The Hunger Project.

It is our project. It is your project wholly, totally, in a way that allows it to be my project wholly
and totally in a way that allows it to be their project wholly and totally. It isn't "My project and
you can't have it." It is "My project and you can have it all." As a matter of fact, this project will
not really belong to you until you give it away.

As The Hunger Project develops, you will discover ways in which you can contribute to
creating the end of starvation — ranging from expanding your own awareness of the problem
and its solutions, to visiting people in government, to communicating The Hunger Project to
others, to formal participation in specific programs and activities. There are no rules about
expressing your participation in The Hunger Project. This source document on our ability to
end hunger within 20 years is intended as a reminder that the answer to "What are you going
to do?" is to look inside yourself and see what to do. An important aspect of the project is the
space it creates for a process of discovering ways in which the end of starvation will become a
reality. You answer the question, "What can I do?" out of the context that the project creates.

It is our planet, and our Hunger Project.

Werner Erhard

THE HUNGER PROJECT 39

Precisely because the impact
of starvation on our lives is so great, its
existence is actually an opportunity. . .

In experiencing the truth underlying
hunger, one comes to realize that the
ordinarily unnoticed laws that determine
the persistence of hunger on this planet
are precisely the laws that keep the world
from working.

One comes to realize that the principles
of the end of hunger and starvation within
20 years are the very principles necessary
to make our world work.

You make the difference