Anyone who has ever tried dieting knows why ‘stressed’ is ‘desserts’ spelled backward.
Yet you could make the case that too many people don’t feel stressed enough about their desserts. According to one federal study, nearly two out of every three Americans is overweight. Almost half of these people aren’t just a few pounds on the pudgy side--they’re dangerously plump. Indeed, obesity is one of the world’s emerging health dilemmas. It afflicts both wealthy countries and poor ones. Because it touches both rich and poor in virtually every nation, one clever writer dubbed it “globesity.”
At the same time, malnourishment remains a major problem in the developing world. One estimate claims that more than one billion people worldwide don’t eat enough food or consume a proper balance of nutrients.
Here is one of the great paradoxes of the 21st century: Our planet is both overfed and underfed. This is also the theme of this year’s World Food Prize symposium, scheduled for October 13-14 in Des Moines.
“The co-existence of underweight and overweight,” says Catherine Bertini, recipient of the 2003 World Food Prize, “poses one of the greatest challenges to nutritionists, health workers, and national policy makers in the new millennium.”
There is an obvious solution to this feast-or-famine quandary: More people need better access to the right food. Achieving this, of course, is easier said than done, but we know two of the essential ingredients to a winning recipe: freer trade and biotechnology.
Someone who’s starving for food probably has no patience for listening to complaints about the problem of obesity. Although we know that obesity is associated with diabetes, heart disease, and even certain forms of cancer, these must seem like far-off concerns for folks who are having trouble putting enough food on their tables.
At bottom, however, obesity and malnourishment are both the unwelcome results of lacking access to, or eating, the right foods. There are many ways to improve access, and education about what constitutes a proper diet is one of them. Another important step is to remove the barriers that prevent nations from trading with one another. Through the work of the World Trade Organization, countries are exchanging goods and services with each other more than ever before--but agricultural trade, despite considerable progress, hasn’t kept pace. Food suffers from more protectionism than any other product. Unless that changes, we can expect that some people will continue to be cut off from a full menu of food choices.
Biotechnology also offers solutions. As drought-resistant crops become increasingly available, they will help farmers improve their harvests during difficult years. Higher yields during tough times can make the difference between full stomachs and empty ones, especially in developing countries. Moreover, the emerging science of biofortification will result in new varieties of staple crops that contain nutrients unavailable in traditional ones.
For all that the economics of free trade and the science of biotechnology can offer, however, we still must overcome crippling prejudice. I recently visited the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Missouri, where researchers have developed a form of virus-resistant cassava, a potato-like staple crop in Africa.
The United Nations estimates that disease cuts Africa’s cassava harvest by 30 to 40 percent annually. So it would seem as though African governments would leap at the chance to help their farmers by working with the Danforth Center. And yet some African nations continue to resist biotechnology, in part because they’re under pressure to do so from the European Union.
This is madness, but perhaps it is madness of a particularly illuminating variety: It places in full relief the fundamental fact that so many of our global food problems are the products of human error rather than the random misfortune of natural disaster.
Just as the poor will always be with us, so too, I suspect, will be the overweight and the malnourished. Yet the wise deployment of free trade and biotechnology may help lighten the load.
Dean Kleckner is an Iowa farmer and past president of the American Farm Bureau. He chairs Truth About Trade and Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org) a national non-profit based in Des Moines, IA, formed and led by farmers in support of freer trade and advancements in biotechnology.
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Anyone who has ever tried dieting knows why ‘stressed’ is ‘desserts’ spelled backward.
