Some Awful Truths

Just wanted to share with you a couple of articles that were published on this Sunday's (May 18) issue of the New York Times. Both articles are rather long reads and thus, I will keep my commentary brief. In light of the food crisis that's going on all over the world, both articles serve to remind us of the challenges ahead and what steps we as global citizens can do to alleviate the problem.

This first article ("One Country's Table Scraps, Another Country's Meal") discusses the amount of food an average American family throws away each month. It says that Americans, on the average, throw away 27% of the amount of food available for consumption. The report cited figures from way back in 1997 where statistics showed that a staggering 96.4 billion pounds out of 356 billion pounds of edible food was never eaten.

The food numbers mentioned represent figures from just a single year. It is probably safe to assume that given that the US population has increased by millions more since 1997 that the numbers of food wasted today are billions of pounds higher.

The article does not surprise me one bit. Having lived in the United States for more than a decade, I've always been struck by the amount of food that gets tossed away on a daily basis. It's a common sight in restaurants to see busboys pick plates up with significant amounts of food left and see such food tossed. And yet, the insanity in the restaurant business is that in spite of the amount of food that gets wasted, restaurant executives still keep pushing for bigger serving sizes.

There's a lot of blame to go around. Not only are the industrialized nations guilty of this but poor countries are as well. In a lot of third world countries, our beloved Philippines included, food get wasted even before they get distributed to the consumers due to lack of technology and inefficient distribution methods. When will we in the Philippines ever start developing and constructing an efficient railway system to distribute food products and other goods all across our country's biggest islands such as Luzon and Mindanao?

Although, the article talked about food wastage, it also discussed some steps being taken by responsible restaurant owners and some organizations to put the leftover food to better use.

This second article ("World's Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut") was reported from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. The article talks about the challenges of battling the global food crisis in the face of reduced funding from the US and other foreign governments.

The IRRI, and other similar food research institutes, became victims of their own success. IRRI successfully introduced varieties of rice that were both high-yielding and pest-resistant that by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world enjoyed a food surplus. Except in some countries in Africa where drought and corrupt governments conspired to starve millions of people, the rest of the world enjoyed relative stability and security in its food supply.

The problem was that such success bred complacency in a lot of governments. Since the threat of global hunger faded from the front pages of newspapers around the world, the need and urgency to fund the food research institutes faded too.

The good news is that IRRI's researches are still confident that they still have the technical capability to develop rice varieties that could resist future plant diseases and pests. The challenge, however, is to make foreign governments realize about the urgency of the problem and that if no action is taken soon, the threat of world hunger may come back to the front pages of our dailies, if it hasn't done so already.