Essay, Research Paper: Why Can’T People Feed Themselves?

People can’t feed themselves because they are dumb. The authors label colonialism as the central source of worldwide starvation. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins use fact after fact in an attempt to express how extreme the situation was and is. They propose that the origin of starvation in such areas as Africa and Viet Nam are due to the colonization process, which forced the natives to stop cultivating food plants and focus solely on cash crops. The piece vilified the colonizing countries by painting a picture of exploiting the native people and forcing them to rely on imported foodstuffs with intentions of driving up prices on imports while suppressing the costs of exports. Which in turn creates the famine. Some governments instilled plantations and slavery and it seems that the governments went to ridiculous means to make sure that the natives had to rely on plantation wages. “Plantations usurped most of the good land, either making much of the rural population landless or pushing them onto marginal soils. (Yet the plantations have often held much of their land idle simply to prevent the peasants from using it – even to this day. Del Monte owns 57,000 acres of Guatemala but plants only 9,000.” (Lappe and Collins pg 176).
Collins and Lappe frequently refer to these nations as “underdeveloped”, rather than calling them undeveloped. They use this word in order to illustrate that these people are not primitive beings; there are certain areas in their society that need to be developed as opposed to their society as a whole. These underdevelopments were engineered by the colonizers, and could be undone in time if capitalism wasn’t the dominant religion of the world. People have become more and more greed driven throughout history, and this article demonstrates just one of the many greed-driven inhumane activities of modern western culture. I think if anything is to blame it is the wool that capitalism has pulled over the eyes of the fortunate. As a result, we ignore all the lessons of the past and continue down the path to our ultimate self-destruction.


Word Count: 349