One Earth -- Two Worlds

Publisher:  Food Project, Idea Centre, Winnipeg, Canada
Year Published:  1977
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX230

Package of materials dealing with food-related themes.

Abstract: 
This Food Kit is divided into five sections dealing with the following related themes: production and consumption patterns, coporate structures, alternatives, and finally population and develpment. It thus seeks to show the interdependence of political and economic structures in the northern and southern worlds. Each package contains an introductory article by the editor with accompanying discussion starters, a selected bibliography, resource contacts, game plan, fact sheets, graphs and statistics.
1) Production and Consumption Patterns: one paper addresses six myths on Canadian hunger and malnutrition, another the enviornmental crisis, while a third the failure of the Green Revolution.
2) Food and Corporate Structures: the fact sheet shows that the two centres of power in our food system are the agrichemical producers at the pre-farm end and the processors at the post-farm end. What links them together into one relatively homogeneous group is the large multinational presence of both, and their control over government policies relating at one and the same time to food trade and to their own food industries. The other link between the two power centres of agribusiness are large and commercial banks that control shares of stock of both the largest processors and the largest energy companies. Prime examples of American based multinational trading companies in Canada are listed as Cargill, Inc., Continental Grain, Bunge, Cook and Louis Dreyfus. At the same time the Canadian Wheat Board is cited as the main protection left to Canadian farmers and consumers against fluctuating markets and higher bread prices.
3) Food and Alternatives: the purpose of this packet is to help people work systematically through many issues after considering strategies and models for change. The enclosed articles address themselves to improved nutrition, the how and why of food co-ops, lifestyle alternatives to consumerism and a decentralist approach to the world food crisis.
4) Food and Population: the combined effect of population growth on the part of the poor and the increasing demand for affluence on the part of the rich, is described as having the potential to outstrip the earth of its resources and its capacity to produce sufficiently. Tarzie Vittachi, Executive Secretary of
World Population Year 1974, stresses the need for international dialogue, which would enable rich and poor, East and West, North and South to understand each other's particular situation and viewpoint, and which would lift the subject of population over the barriers of prejudice, colour, race, religion and ideology.
5) Food and Development: this study packet is an attempt to help individuals and groups to work through some development issues such as: the quality of human existence, liberation from the injustice of economic colonialism and the division between rich and poor. The thrust of development is to help people and nations move from poverty and dependece toward inter-dependence in the global village.