Does consumption need tackling before population?

[bananas]

4. Frances Moore Lappé has it right

see http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1024&pid=789

and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Moore_Lapp%C3%A9

edit to add for those who don't follow links:

Food scarcity is a dangerous myth - Frances Moore Lappé
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/mobile/story.html?id=6033424

Food scarcity is a dangerous myth
Sunday, January 22, 2012
By Frances Moore Lappé

More than 40 years ago, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb
proclaimed that "the battle to feed humanity is already
lost," and today almost a billion people go hungry. In 2011,
a second food-price spike within only five years, along with
heart-wrenching images of famine in parched East Africa,
continued to keep the scarcity scare alive.

There's just not enough, right?

Well, no. Even on the "leftovers" - what's left over after
feeding a third of the world's grain to livestock and putting
more U.S. corn into cars than into animals or humans; even
after feeding a third of the world's fish catch to livestock
and simply wasting a third of all food - there's still enough.
The world food supply comes to nearly 3,000 calories each
day for every person on Earth, enough to make us all
chubby.

The scarcity frame is not just factually wrong, it's dangerous.

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Some excerpts of her bio on wikipedia:

Frances Moore Lappé (born February 10, 1944) is the author of 18 books including the three-million copy Diet for a Small Planet. She is the co-founder of three national organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty and environmental crises, as well as solutions now emerging worldwide through what she calls Living Democracy. Her most recent book is EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want

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In 2006 she was chosen as a founding councilor of the Hamburg-based World Future Council. She is also a member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture and the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She serves as an advisor to the Calgary Centre for Global Community and on the board of David Korten’s People-Centered Development Forum. In 2009 she joined the advisory board of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign.[3] She is a Contributing Editor to YES! Magazine. Lappé's articles and opinion pieces have appeared in publications as diverse as The New York Times, O Magazine, and Christian Century. Her television and radio appearances have included a PBS special with Bill Moyers, the Today Show, CBS Radio, and National Public Radio.

Lappé has received 17 honorary doctorates from distinguished institutions, including the University of Michigan, Kenyon College, Allegheny College Lewis and Clark College and Grinnell College. She also held various teaching and scholarly positions:
-From 1984-1985, Lappé was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, at the University of California, Berkeley.
- From 2000-2001, Lappé was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- In 2003, Lappé taught with Dr. Vandana Shiva in Dehra Dun, India, about the roots of world hunger, sponsored by the Navdanya researching and agricultural demonstration center.
- In 2004, Lappé taught a course on Living Democracy at Schumacher College in England.
- In 2006 and 2008, Lappé was a visiting professor at Suffolk University, Boston.[4]

In 1987 in Sweden, Lappé became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel. In 2003, she received the Rachel Carson Award from the National Nutritional Foods Association. She was selected as one of twelve living "women whose words have changed the world" by the Women's National Book Association.

Lappé receiving the 2008 James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award

In 2008, she was honored by the James Beard Foundation as the Humanitarian of the Year.In the same year, Gourmet Magazine named Lappé among 25 people (including Thomas Jefferson, Upton Sinclair, and Julia Child), whose work has changed the way America eats. Diet for a Small Planet was selected as one of 75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World by members of the Women’s National Book Association in observance of its 75th anniversary.

Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “A small number of people in every generation are forerunners, in thought, action, spirit, who swerve past the barriers of greed and power to hold a torch high for the rest of us. Lappé is one of those.” The Washington Post says: “Some of the twentieth century’s most vibrant activist thinkers have been American women – Margaret Mead, Jeanette Rankin, Barbara Ward, Dorothy Day – who took it upon themselves to pump life into basic truths. Frances Moore Lappé is among them."

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