Dr. Ricardo Salvador, director of the UCS Food & Environment Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), spoke in Calvin College’s science building last Friday.

“In the world today, the fact that we have disproportionate poverty is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Salvador, an expert in sustainable agriculture practices.There is an intimate connection between the way the food system works and disproportionate poverty today. We need, says Salvador, to connect the events of the past in order to see how poverty came to affect certain groups of people.

A summary of Salvador’s lecture follows.

The food system progressed and grew as a direct result of U.S. policies in appropriating land that belonged to the native peoples and harnessing it to feed a growing nation. This also required labor to work the land in the production of cotton, sugar and other goods, which led to slavery. People from around the world (mostly the African continent) were abducted, families were separated and these people were brutalized, forced to work the plantation fields and clean the plantation homes. They were regarded as low class individuals and were not recognized for the efforts they made. As slaves, they were not paid for the work they did and they owned nothing. Because they had nothing to offer, they were not able to do well in the economy even after emancipation. Still to this day in this country you can only do well if you possess land, rent land or are paid for your labor. It was no accident then that this food system produced poor who continue to remain poor while the wealthy get richer.

The value placed on these factors of food production only continued to increase during the industrial revolution into the 1830s, when the Native Americans were deprived of their own land (which was in fact their livelihood) as America saw the need for more land, and more large scale food production. In order to keep food costs down, though, cheap labor was required but no one was willing to do such strenuous work for such low costs. Slavery evolved, taking on a new identity as laborers were exploited for the work they did. This affected mostly displaced Hispanics who were forced to accept low wages and do unscrupulous field and food processing work. To this day, most of these laborers are migrant workers who have no land or recent immigrants who lack the education and skills for better jobs. Fear and intimidation are tactics still used in the food system to keep these workers powerless; they remain poor as well due to this and, as a result, cannot afford to buy the food that they are growing. Our food system is designed to produce large populations of hungry food laborers.

This is quite ironic because we are in fact over producing food as a nation. So why are we dealing with hunger issues within only a select group of people? Why are those same groups of people struggling with poverty?. Although they were, “exploited and brutalized for 350 years,” as Ricardo says, “they were systematically excluded from the wealth their efforts produced and their labor worked to create.” The people of color are here because of the food system, yet their poverty is due to the food system.

While the food system is not the only thing closely tied to our problem of poverty today, it is one that can and should be challenged as the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as HEAL Food Alliance and other similar organizations hope to change its constitution. Ricardo continued on to share ways in which his organization is working to combat this problem in the food system. They seek to create a comprehensive, specific and coherent national policy for food, health and well-being. In order to do this, they plan to develop political power as well as concrete goals, expose the forces that benefit from the system and provide working examples to create awareness and rally support for their purpose.