This year of the food crisis, we’ve heard a lot about world hunger in the newspaper and the blogosphere. As countries and as individuals with generally more and better access to more and better food, most of us probably feel imperative to help spread the wealth. The U.S.A., where I come from, is the largest food donor in the world, but this year, on World Food Day at the United Nations, the U.S.A. issued the world’s biggest mea culpa to the international community.

Former-President Clinton did the talking, telling the UN that he “blew it” on food. Not only did he blow it, the IMF blew it, the World Bank blew it, and the UN blew it. In the end though, that’s a lot of air, and not a lot of policy.

Clinton cited policies like a U.S. law that requires all hunger-relief aid to foreign nations to come in the form of food grown and produced in the United States. It’s a deliberate negation of that whole give a man a fish idea, making these nations dependant on imported grains from the US. The IMF and the World Bank have even discouraged African nations from building their own agricultural infrastructure by pressuring them to drop government subsidies of seeds, fertilizer and other farm inputs in order to receive aid. This policy, says Clinton, has weakened the self sufficiency of impoverished nations, fueling a hunger crisis that has increased the number of hungry in the world by 75 million in the year 2007 alone.

Other speakers focused on wealth disparities and called for a major change in lifestyle for the wealthier nations. Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, President of the UN General Assembly, said, “we must stop deluding ourselves… the haves of this world… must change the patterns of consumption that show little or no regard for the disastrous impact of their lifestyles on the wellbeing of their neighbors.”

Barrack Obama echoed D’Escoto’s message in his response to Michael Pollan’s recent “Farmer in Chief” article in the New York Times. In an interview, Obama told reporters at Time that the United States must “completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change,” citing connections between our current agricultural system and greenhouse gases, monocultures, high food prices, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease and obesity.

Speaking from a movement that’s concerned with taking individual responsibility for our part in the global food, energy and climate change crises, I’m glad to see leaders talking about making radical changes on both the macro and the micro levels. But from the coverage of this UN summit, the actual policy changes that they’re suggesting don’t seem all that radical—or all that likely.

Clinton suggested giving more aid in cash as opposed to commodities, and increasing fair-trade provisions and direct marketing schemes to support competition between small farmers across the globe and large agricultural producers in developed nations. That’s great, but so far, a promise of 22 billion dollars in food-related aid made this year by wealthy nations resulted in just 2.2 billion dollars actually given. When President Bush (yeah, him, really!) tried to redesign food aid programs so that a quarter of US food aid would come in cash, congress didn’t pass the bill. In terms of actual change, we’re not doing very well so far.

In addition, this conversation appears to have left out any mention of genetically modified crops, which have been a major issue in food aid, since several countries in Africa have Dreams.org” target=”_blank”>rejected GM corn from the US out of fear that it might contaminate their crops. If it did, the contaminated crops would be unsuitable for sale to the European Union, which has a moratorium on GM food. The argument rages on over whether African farmers should adopt first world farming practices (including the practice of using millions of tons of pesticides and the practice of buying seeds from Monsanto every year, and the practice of growing corn and cotton) or keep indigenous farming practices, which have so far failed to feed a growing population. Moreover, infrastructure is more than just input and output. It doesn’t matter how much food is produced if it doesn’t get to your population because of transportation or wealth issues. Look at the United States, we give out the most food aid of any country in the world and we still have 35.5 million people in this country designated “food insecure”.

I’m glad President Clinton feels bad about the state of food distribution and climate change, but an apology from the former commander in chief and pledges of more cash when we haven’t managed to raise what we’ve already promised seem like a weak response to a moral and social imperative. As a group of people concerned with food and with making a better world, what do you propose? Do you support Bush’s plan to give a quarter of the US’s food relief in cash? Do you work in food aid and want to tell us how it really goes down? From the coverage of World Food Day this year, it seems like our current major export is hot air.