让我们养活世界 填饱90亿人的肚子不是问题

At dinner with a friend the other night, I mentioned that I was giving a talk this week debunking the idea that we need to grow more Food on a large scale so we can “feed the nine billion” — the anticipated global population by 2050.

不久前和一位朋友共进晚餐时，我提到自己要在本周发表演讲，揭穿这样一个误解：只有大幅提高粮食产量，才能“填饱90亿人的肚子”——90亿是预计中的2050年全球人口。

She looked at me, horrified, and said, “But how are you going to produce enough food to feed the hungry?”

她非常错愕地看着我，说道：“但如何才能有足够多的粮食，让饿肚子的人吃饱饭呢？”

I suggested she try this exercise: “Put yourself in the poorest place you can think of. Imagine yourself in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example. Now. Are you hungry? Are you going to go hungry? Are you going to have a problem finding food?”

我建议她试着感受一下：假设你呆在你想得出来的最贫穷的地方。比方说，假设你正置身于刚果民主共和国(Democratic Republic of Congo)。那么你感觉饿吗？你将会食不果腹吗？找起食物来会有什么问题吗？

The answer, obviously, is “no.” Because she — and almost all of you reading this — would be standing in that country with some $20 bills and a wallet filled with credit cards. And you would go buy yourself something to eat.

答案显然是否定的。因为她——以及几乎所有正在阅读这篇文章的人——置身于那个国家时，都会揣着一些面值为20美元的钞票，以及一个塞满信用卡的钱包。你会自己去买点吃的。

The difference between you and the hungry is not production levels; it’s money. There are no hungry people with money; there isn’t a shortage of food, nor is there a distribution problem. There is an I-don’t-have-the-land-and-resources-to-produce-my-own-food, nor-can-I-afford-to-buy-food problem.

你和饥饿人口的不同之处不在于生产水平，而在于钱。不存在手里有钱却在饿肚子的人；不存在粮食短缺；也不存在分配问题。真正的问题是，我既没有自行生产粮食所需的土地和资源，也买不起粮食。

And poverty and the resulting hunger aren’t matters of bad luck; they are often a result of people buying the property of traditional farmers and displacing them, appropriating their water, energy and mineral resources, and even producing cash crops for export while reducing the people growing the food to menial and hungry laborers on their own land.

贫穷以及因贫穷而导致的饥饿不是因为不走运，这一切的源头往往在于：有人攫取了传统农民的土地；占用了他们的水资源、能源和矿藏；他们甚至一边生产经济作物用于出口，一边让粮食生产者在自己的土地上成了卑微、饥饿的劳工。

Poverty isn’t the only problem, of course. There is also the virtually unregulated food system that is geared toward making money rather than feeding people. (Look no further than the ethanol mandate or high fructose corn syrup for evidence.)

当然了，贫穷并非唯一的问题。另一个麻烦是，当前的粮食体系几乎没有受到任何监管，其目标为赚钱，而非养活人。（乙醇定量生产指令和高果糖玉米糖浆足以证明这一点。）

If poverty creates hunger, it teams up with the food system to create another form of malnourishment: obesity (and what’s called “hidden hunger,” a lack of micronutrients). If you define “hunger” as malnutrition, and you accept that overweight and obesity are forms of malnutrition as well, than almost half the world is malnourished.

贫穷在制造饥饿的同时，还和当前的粮食体系一起制造了另一种形式的营养不良：肥胖（以及所谓的“隐性饥饿”——缺乏某些微量元素）。如果你把“饥饿”界定为营养不良，并且认为超重和肥胖也是营养不良的表现形式，那么世界上几乎半数的人都处于营养不良的状态。

The solution to malnourishment isn’t to produce more food. The solution is to eliminate poverty.

解决营养不良问题的方法不是生产更多的粮食，而是消除贫困。

Look at the most agriculturally productive country in the world: the United States. Is there hunger here? Yes, quite a bit. We have the highest percentage of hungry people of any developed nation, a rate closer to that of Indonesia than that of Britain.

来看看世界上农业生产水平最高的国家：美国。这里有人挨饿吗？有，而且相当多。我们国家的饥饿人口比例是所有发达国家中最高的，更接近印尼，而不是英国。

Is there a lack of food? You laugh at that question. It is, as the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler likes to call it, “a food carnival.” It’s just that there’s a steep ticket price.

美国缺少粮食吗？这是一个让人发笑的问题。就像美国食品药品监督管理局(FDA)前局长戴维·克斯勒(David Kessler)喜欢说的那样，这里简直是在举办“粮食嘉年华”。只不过门票价格太高。

A majority of the world is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, some of whom are themselves among the hungry. The rest of the hungry are underpaid or unemployed workers. But boosting yields does nothing for them.

世界上的大部分人口所需的粮食，是由数亿小农户生产的，有些农民自己也在挨饿。其余的饥饿人口是报酬过低或失业在家的工人。提高产量对他们毫无帮助。

So we should not be asking, “How will we feed the world?,” but “How can we help end poverty?” Claiming that increasing yield would feed the poor is like saying that producing more cars or private jets would guarantee that everyone had one.

所以我们就别再问“该如何养活世界人口”了，还是问问“该如何终结贫困”吧。主张通过提高产量来养活穷人，与宣称生产出更多汽车或者私人飞机就能做到人手一辆(架)是一回事。

And how do we help those who have malnutrition from excess eating? We can help them, and help preserve the earth’s health, if we recognize that the industrial model of food production is neither inevitable nor desirable.

我们又该如何帮助因为吃得太多而营养不良的人呢？如果能够认识到粮食生产的工业化模式既非不可避免，也非理想选择，那我们就可以在帮助这些人的同时，帮助维护地球的健康。

The best method of farming for most people is probably traditional farming boosted by science. The best method of farming for those in highly productive agricultural societies would be farming made more intelligent and less rapacious. That is, the kind of farming we can learn from people who still have a real relationship with the land and are focused on quality rather than yield. The goal should be food that is green, fair, healthy and affordable.

对大部分人而言，最好的耕种方式或许是借助科学知识得到改进的传统农耕方式。对农业生产水平很高的一些地区的人而言，最好的耕种方式则是知识含量更高的、不那么贪得无厌的那种。即，我们可以从依然和土地真正连结在一起、依然关注品质而非产量的人们那里学到的耕作方式。目标应该是产出绿色、优质、健康，而且便宜的食物。

It’s not news that the poor need money and justice. If there’s a bright side here, it’s that it might be easier to make the changes required to fix the problems created by industrial agriculture than those created by inequality.

穷人需要金钱和公正，这已经不是什么新闻了。如果往好的一面看，那就是解决工业化农业带来的问题可能比解决不公正带来的问题更容易一些。

There’s plenty of food. Too much of it is going to feed animals, too much of it is being converted to fuel and too much of it is being wasted.

世界上的粮食已经足够多了。多到可以拿很大一部分来饲养动物，可以拿很大一部分来制作燃料，可以拿很大一部分来浪费。

We don’t have to increase yield to address any of those issues; we just have to grow food more smartly than with the brute force of industrial methods, and we need to address the circumstances of the poor.

我们不必靠提高产量来解决上述任何一个问题，只要摒弃使用蛮力的工业化模式，更巧妙地生产粮食就可以了。我们还需要改善穷人的境遇。

Our slogan should not be “let’s feed the world,” but “let’s end poverty.”

我们的口号应该是“让我们终结贫困”，而非“让我们养活世界”。