Food Sovereignty!?

international | environment | news report Monday November 03, 2008 14:30 by F - Food Sovereignty Ireland

Something is wrong. We grow enough food to feed the planet, yet people starve everyday. Now, as companies look to crops as a fuel source to further feed our energy demands, and food prices continue to rise, Agriculture is very much back on the agenda.

Food is and always has been an essential part of human life. Today we are preached to by television chefs and dieticians, health gurus and supermarkets to consume all sorts of exotic products from all corners of the globe. It seems we have moved incredibly quickly from a simple diet to a modern, pre-packed, style-driven one. In Ireland, one of the last countries in Europe to experience a famine, the transition to a world of 24 hour availability of fresh green asparagus, Vietnamese tiger prawns, Californian strawberries and pineapples on demand has been alarmingly quick.
This 24 hour plastic supermarket experience is new to us however, and we have yet to grasp the true significance of it. The reality of the situation is that supermarkets are the sales points of an enormous agribusiness trade system. The entire system of international agricultural trade, from the genetic codes of the seeds which are planted to cropping, processing and distribution systems, is dominated by large corporations which trade the “commodities” produced by the farmers of the world on international stock markets.
This means that food is treated as a commodity which is bought and sold on the stock exchange and can be speculated upon by international investors. It also means that the implementation of the Right to Food, a right enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the UN, becomes evermore difficult to implement.
Farmers across the world produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. Since 1961 the world’s cereal output has tripled, while the population has doubled. Stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, it’s true, but the bottom line is that there is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn’t get to all of those who need it.
Less than half of the world’s grain production is directly eaten by people. Most goes into animal feed and, increasingly, biofuels – massive inflexible industrial chains. In fact, once you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system. We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. Agricultural policy has completely lost touch with its most basic goal: feeding people. The UN World Food Programme estimates that recent price hikes have meant that an additional 100 million people can no longer afford to eat adequately. For years the World Bank and the IMF have told countries that a liberalised market would provide the most efficient system for producing and distributing food, yet today the world’s poorest countries are forced into an intense bidding war against speculators and traders, who are having a field day.
Hedge funds and other sources of hot money are pouring billions of dollars into commodities to escape sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, putting food stocks further out of poor people’s reach. According to some estimates, investment funds now control 50–60% of the wheat traded on the world’s biggest commodity markets. One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures – markets where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007.
The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, has tried to win the world over with his call for a “New Deal” to solve the hunger crisis, but there is nothing new about it: he calls for more trade liberalisation, more technology and more aid. Today’s food crisis is the direct result of decades of these policies, which must now be rejected. While immediate action is necessary to lower food prices and to get food to those who need it, we also need radical changes in agricultural policy so that small farmers around the world gain access to land and can make a living from it.
We need policies that support and protect farmers, fishers and others to produce food for their families, for the local markets and for people in cities, rather than money for an abstract international commodity market and a tiny clan of corporate boardroom executives. And we need to strengthen and promote the use of technologies based on the knowledge and in the control of those who know how to grow food.
This solution has a name; food sovereignty – and it is this solution which is pushed by small farmers all over the world. Small farming is non-intensive, pollutes less, and is more productive than large-scale intensive agriculture.
For Ireland, food sovereignty means buying locally, encouraging farmers markets, avoiding foods which have been transported halfway around the world and artificially ripened, eating seasonal food and above all, beginning to grow and produce fruit and vegetables ourselves on the ample agricultural lands in Ireland which now lie vacant.
The current system of mechanised, industrial agriculture is more harmful to the environment, more damaging to rural communities, and is ultimately a completely unsustainable way of feeding the planet. The hungry people of the world, -all 845 million of them, and 80% of which are small farmers - have been clamouring for change for many years now.
The changes which are needed are structural, large and long-term. As always, the best place to start is in your own back yard, and for those of us living in the so called “developed” world, the changes are very simple. In a consumer society, each choice you make affects the system as a whole.
We cannot expect to have 12 month, 24 hour access to all the exotic fruits and vegetables we wish, and we cannot expect the rest of the world to starve at the same time as they watch food being exported to rich European and American markets. Ireland during the great famine continued to export grain to lucrative markets across the water.
In the globally connected world of today, it is more important than ever that every one of us can step back and see how we fit in and how the choices we make can effect those on the other side of the world.