American farmers and agribusiness are not feeding the world’s poor and hungry, most agricultural exports from the U.S. rather go to the wealthiest nations. This is the finding of a new report released by Environmental Working Group (EWG), that clearly debunks the myth cultivated by the agribusiness lobby that the world depends on U.S. farmers to double their production to feed a global population of 9 billion people by 2050. “We wanted to dig into the fictitious notion that America’s farmers are feeding people in undernourished countries, and the assertion that so-called ‘modern’ farming techniques are our only option if we ever hope to do so,” said Anne Weir Schechinger, EWG’s senior analyst for economics and author of the report. “This is simply a myth adopted and deployed by U.S. agribusiness to distract the public from reality. The indisputable facts are that we are sending mostly meat products and animal feed to wealthy countries, and we are not sending much food at all to those nations struggling to feed their people.” In 2015, the top 20 importers of U.S. agricultural products – 19 individual countries and the European Union – accounted for 86 percent ($114.4 billion) of the total value of U.S. agricultural exports. EWG’s analysis determined that most of the top importers of U.S. exports had very high or high human development scores, and low levels of hunger. Canada, China, Mexico and the EU are the top four export destinations. According to the data compiled by EWG, meat and dairy products, along with animal feed, accounted for 50 percent of all U.S. agriculture exports to the top 20 destinations in 2015. This means that agricultural exports from the U.S. chiefly meet the demand for more meat and more diverse diets from already affluent countries, or those with growing personal wealth. Only less than 1 percent of U.S. agricultural exports last year went to the 19 countries with the highest levels of undernourishment, including Haiti, Yemen and Ethiopia. Even though the U.S. provides almost half of all food aid to those countries, between 2004 and 2013, U.S. exports and food aid combined contributed between only 2 to 4.4 percent of the food supply of those 19 undernourished countries. “To claim that U.S. farmers and agribusinesses must go all-out to feed the world - regardless of the consequences to human health and the environment - amounts to wrapping a business opportunity in the cloak of moral necessity,” says the report. EWG reminds that modern farming systems that depend heavily on fertilizers and chemicals cause considerable damage to air, water and land resources, as well as public health. For example, farm runoff is often responsible for toxic algal blooms and polluted drinking water. Pesticides from farm fields and antibiotic-resistant bacteria from confined animal enclosures are just another problem. According to the report, experts on world hunger agree that the root cause of hunger is poverty. What U.S. agribusiness really needs to do to help end world hunger while protecting the environment is to help small farmers in the developing world increase their productivity and income, and to promote “agro-ecology” everywhere, including in the U.S., the report concludes. “Reducing poverty, increasing income for women, providing nutrition education, improving infrastructure like roads and markets to increase access to food, and ceasing wars and conflict could all help undernourished populations better feed themselves.” (ab)