TV REVIEW : PBS Documentary Explores ‘The Politics of Food’ Tonight

The premise of “The Politics of Food” is that there is more than enough food to feed the planet and that world hunger is not caused by famine or overpopulation but by inept or misdirected politics (tonight at 8 on Channel 24, at 9 on Channels 28 and 15, and 10 on Channel 50).

This premise, however, is applied rather selectively. The documentary, produced by an international consortium headed by Yorkshire Television of England and edited for PBS by KCET, appears to offer a balanced and thorough view. Instead, it seems intent mostly on trying to prove that the West is the cause of Third World economic problems.

The opening sequence of monstrous grain combines chewing across wheat fields intercut with film of starving African children is an early hint of the direction in which the producers are headed.

When, for instance, the film makers visit a Minnesota farm to lament the demise of the American family farmer, they attack agribusiness for being too concen-trated, too efficient and too mechanized. The benefit to consumers in lower food costs is breezed by in a sentence and quickly contradicted by a Hunger in America official. His statement that 20 million Americans still are “without proper nutrition” because our national government isn’t caring enough is left unclarified and unchallenged.

In Brazil, we are shown scenes of urban squalor and rural poverty. These conditions are blamed on faulty government agriculture policies (Western mechanized methods that displaced smaller farmers) and the World Bank, the documentary’s conspiratorial devil, which is later blamed for food scarcities in the Sudan and Bangladesh.

By the time praise is heaped on an apparently paradisiacal state in India--where the Communist Party is the political power, and where food is subsidized and no one is hungry--the film makers have demonstrated their leftist political bias.

There are no doubt many things wrong with the politics of American and European agriculture policy, including protective tariffs and generous, politically motivated government subsidies to farmers that create huge food surpluses, drive world prices down and undercut Third World farmers in their own countries.

There’s no doubt that the cheap loans of the World Bank and the free food of the international aid agencies often have actually impeded the ability of Third World nations to feed themselves.

Whether it’s all been a conspiracy to unload the West’s mountains of surplus grain, as is intimated in this Martin Sheen-narrated program, is less certain.

Some Third World developmental experts, such as Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics, have said that severe food shortages are created by internal politics--by civil wars, by the Draconian application of ideologies (e.g., Communist Ethiopia) and by deliberate economic policies that subsidize their more politically important urban populations and hurt their own farmers. But in two hours of examining the politics of food around the world, the producers never found the time to address these issues.