Frances Moore Lappé is the co-founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, the Center for Living Democracy, as well as the Small Planet Institute. She is the author or coauthor of sixteen books. Her 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, sold more than three million copies. Her latest book is called Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad.

Frances Moore Lappé: ... Faith-based economics! What we have been locked into and what is underneath this crisis is that we accept a power-centralizing, power-concentrating economy, which means that no matter how much is produced—I mean, there is no food shortage. I just want to really underscore that. Food production has been keeping ahead of the numbers of people on our earth. There’s no food shortage. We are creating scarcity out of plenty because of this power-concentrating model that we’ve—this idea that is more powerful than our food-sharing instinct that we evolved in.

One often hears about oil independence. And the idea that if one’s very survival is dependent on something you have no control over, in this case the diversion of good land to grow fuel, agrofuel, or other changes that you have no control over, then are you really a free people? Do you have any food security? In this case, the core question. Maybe more important than oil independence is food independence. And yet, you know, from the beginning of my work on hunger, way back in the ’70s, in our book Food First I wrote with Joseph Collins, we made this point that in a world where clearly power is concentrating, if you can’t grow food to feed yourself, then you are highly insecure.

So, all of the policies, however, of the last several decades that international agencies have been pursuing, in some ways coercively, by making their aid dependent on this kind of policy of—what I’m suggesting here, that third world countries have been encouraged to grow whatever will bring the highest price in the global market and then import food when needed. And they are, therefore, set up for this disaster, where we see a skyrocketing of food prices. And so, the imports then become unattainable, and they are on the edge of hunger or starvation.

So it’s—I’m saying that when we talk about oil independence, we should also be thinking about food independence. And this is the theme of the term “food sovereignty,” which is now being pursued by an international coalition, Via Campesina, which is the small farmers of the world uniting.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/9/as_global_food_crisis_tops_g8#middl...

Nomi Prins, former investment banker turned journalist. She used to run the European analytics group at Bear Stearns and is now a senior fellow at Demos. She is the author of two books: Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Jacked: How Conservatives Are Picking Your Pocket.

Nomi Prins: ... The Senate is trying to band-aid a crisis that the Senate effectively, and the rest of Congress, helped to create by things that David was talking about in terms of making it difficult to understand what is going on. Every single bit of financial deregulation makes it impossible to understand what’s going on.

So what the Senate is now discussing is a bill that will help 400,000 or so families in terms of facing a foreclosure and being able to renegotiate their mortgage payment and the balance of their mortgage down, because the market has gone down and they have also had their rates go up in their face. So, basically, to make up that difference they can’t pay for, the Senate is coming in and saying, “You know what? Here’s $300 billion to the Federal Housing Association, and they will be able to effectively insure those mortgages to the lenders.”

In effect, it will help people, but it is also, to a large extent, a lender bailout, because it’s basically saying to lenders, “You know what? Instead of you having to foreclose on a loan and deal with selling it in this market and whatever problems might occur because of that, we’re actually going to guarantee—we’re going to effectively government-guarantee the loan to you, if you choose”—and this is voluntary on the part of lenders—“if you choose to renegotiate down the balance of that mortgage with your borrower.” That’s effectively what is going on in the Senate right now. It will help some borrowers. It does not change the lending landscape, and it does not make lenders have to come to the table and change the terms of the loans that were, in many cases, abusive or slightly predatory or obtuse, to begin with.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/9/five_ways_wall_street_and_washingto...