Hungry on a Fertile Land

When we think of food deserts, we think of inner cities with overpriced mini marts, located a hundred miles and a world away from any usable farmland. We don’t think of rural America.

I live in a part of the world better known for its forests than its agricultural potential. I grew up on a hillside farm with topsoil so thin that it took a decade to grow decent pasture—since loggers apparently didn’t realize that clearing land with a bulldozer and pushing mounds of topsoil over cliffs was a bad idea. However, the broad Chehalis river valley and its tributaries were logged before bulldozers and its deep, rich topsoil once supported crops and countless dairy farms.

Now, most of the farms are sitting empty. Some of the dairy farms have been turned into subdivisions, only half the homes sold and sitting empty since the financial crash of ’08.

And much of Aberdeen, the largest town in the region, could be considered a food desert. A fruit stand just moved into downtown, a hopeful sign. Otherwise, in a very poor city, most of us shop at Wal Mart, McDonalds, and the local mini mart, because we can’t afford otherwise.

I find it shocking, in a region with enough agricultural land to feed itself and feed itself very well, our people eat processed hamburgers shipped from the south and canned goods shipped from China. Or can’t afford food at all. After all, seventy percent of kids in Aberdeen eat free and reduced price lunches and one teacher I spoke with wondered aloud if some of them ate lunch at all when they were not at school.

It all boils down to this: to be poor in this country is to lack access. Access to land in a region rich with natural resources. Access to housing in a region that once supplied most of the material for building homes in this country.  Access to basic needs, like healthy food—or food at all.

We think of the Middle Ages and its feudal system as barbaric in part because people starved on fertile land, people were executed for harvesting or hunting on their lord’s land, because people had no access to land or space in order to thrive—or even survive.

Today, in rural America, people who cut the timber that build your home don’t have a roof over their heads. Today, no trespassing signs guard the vast tracks of land that could provide resources to thousands of poor. Banks own hundreds of empty homes foreclosed during the housing crisis. Today, farmland lies fallow because state regulation and a corporate economy make it impossible for small scale farmers to survive. Today, immigrant families who work harvesting or fishing can’t feed their kids.

We think that capitalism is all about money—and it is. Some people—a few—make a killing off this arrangement. But it is also about land, about space, about access to space. In late capitalism, money buys access. 

The prophet Isaiah condemned the leaders of ancient Israel; “Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field, until there is no more room and you dwell alone in the land” (Isaiah 5:8). In our world, all the space has been bought up and the poor lose. 

In Brazil, in India, in France, in Mexico, poor people with no access to land have demanded access. This is why landless farmers in Brazil take over unused farmland. Why communities in Chiapas decide that they will control their own land and build local economies.

In this place, in a forgotten corner of the U.S., where children go hungry surrounded by fertile land, what will we do?