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TechnoratiA Women's Declaration to the G8: Support Real Solutions to the Global Food Crisis
To:
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda (Japan)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Canada)
President Nicolas Sarkozy (France)
Chancellor Angela Merkel (Germany)
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (Italy)
President Dmitry Medvedev (Russia)
Prime Minister Gordon Brown (United Kingdom)
President George Bush (United States)
This year, the world's eight richest governments (the G8) meet against the backdrop of a global food crisis. With prices for all major food commodities at a 50-year-high, world leaders are discussing pervasive "food shortages" that threaten to destabilize dozens of countries. But worsening hunger is the result of cost inflation, not any absolute food shortage. In fact, the world produces more food than the global population can consume.
The root cause of the food crisis is not scarcity, but the failed economic policies long championed by the G8, namely, trade liberalization and industrial agriculture. These policies, which treat food as a commodity rather than a human right, have induced chaotic climate change, oil dependency, and the depletion of the Earth's land and water resources as well as today's food crisis.
Yet, in the search for solutions, the G8 is considering expanded support for the very measures that caused this web of problems. Calls for more tariff reductions, biofuel plantations, genetically modified crops, and wider use of petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical pesticides are at the forefront of discussions in Japan.
These measures cannot resolve the global food crisis. They may, however, further boost this year's record profits for agricultural corporations. There are viable solutions to the food crisis, but they will not emerge from a narrow pursuit of the financial interests of multinational corporations.
For nearly 30 years, the G8 has insisted that corporations replace governments in shaping and implementing national agriculture policies in the world's poorest countries. This demand has not maximized efficiency or reduced poverty, as promised. In fact, it has ushered in a sharp rise in hunger and malnutrition. As the World Bank itself acknowledged in its 2008 World Development Report, the private sector has failed as a substitute for government when it comes to agriculture.
In fact, corporations have no legal duty to reduce poverty or fight world hunger. Governments, including the G8-and not the private sector-are the ones mandated to resolve the global food crisis. The international human rights framework, which governments are obligated to uphold, is the starting point for a global New Deal on agriculture. In particular, the human rights of small farmers-the majority of whom are women-and rural and Indigenous Peoples must be protected in order to meet the twin challenges of feeding people and protecting the planet.
As women's human rights advocates working with communities on the front-lines of the global food crisis, we call on the G8 to promote a worldwide shift from industrial to sustainable agriculture and to enact the economic policies needed to support this transition.
The Imperative of Sustainable Agriculture
In April 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) released an independent, four-year study conducted by over 400 experts. The study was co-sponsored by the World Bank and multiple agencies of the United Nations and endorsed by over 60 governments. It confirms that large-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture is a major contributor to pollution, climate change, deforestation, social inequity, and the destruction of diversity, both biological and cultural. The study urges a fundamental overhaul of agricultural policy towards sustainable farming, including small-scale and organic agriculture.
The IAASTD report follows numerous other credible studies demonstrating that small-holder organic farms can produce enough food for the global population and avoid the environmental destruction associated with industrial agriculture.
We emphasize that support for small farmers must include a focus on women, who produce most of the world's food. Indeed, in much of Africa, where the food crisis is at its worst, women grow and process 80 percent of all food.
However, the capacity of these farmers is badly undermined by laws and customs that discriminate against women. In many countries, women who grow the food that sustains the majority of the population are not even recognized as farmers. They are denied the right to own land and excluded from government programs that facilitate access to credit, seeds, tools, and training.
We call on the G8 to:
Recognize gender discrimination as a threat to global food security;
Uphold the rights of agricultural workers under the International Labor Organization's Conventions;
Support national policies that provide small-scale farmers with access to land, seeds, water, credit and other inputs and that uphold the rights of farmers to make informed decisions about land use and food production.
The Imperative of Sustainable Economic Policies
A global New Deal on agriculture requires not only different modes of farming, but a new policy environment for food production and agricultural trade. National policies, including investment, funding, and research, as well as international trade rules, must be redirected in support of small farmers and sustainable agriculture. Towards that end, the G8 should:
1. End Food Dependency
The G8, through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, has required developing countries to reduce support to small farmers, cut investment in food production, slash tariffs that protected domestic agriculture, dismantle the marketing boards that once stabilized food prices, and shift land use from food production to export agriculture.
Developing countries were forced to accept these demands as conditions for loans needed to repay their debts to the financial institutions, development banks, and governments of the North. Yet, it is the G8 itself which is largely responsible for the debt crisis, brought on by massive lending to illegitimate regimes and decades of costly, ill-conceived development projects.
The economic policies demanded by the G8 have destroyed the livelihoods of small farmers in the Global South, leaving millions of people at the mercy of international commodity markets to be able to buy food. The shift from food to cash crops has meant that women, who are responsible for growing food, have lost access to valuable farm land. As a result, rural families have lost a main source of food and nutrition.
Economic policies driven by the G8 eventually transformed food-producing countries in the Global South into net food importers. In the 1960's, developing countries enjoyed an agricultural trade surplus of US $7 billion a year. Today, almost three out of four developing countries are net food importers, although they have the capacity to feed themselves.
We call on the G8 to:
Move beyond the partial commitment it made to debt cancellation at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland and enact immediate and unconditional debt cancellation for all developing countries;
Allow governments to determine their own agricultural policies in consultation with citizens;
Institute international mechanisms for market stabilization that protect the livelihoods of farmers and guarantee affordable food for all people;
Endorse the call of Jacques Diouf, Secretary General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, for developing countries to be enabled to achieve food self-sufficiency.
2. Change Trade Rules
Trade rules demanded by the G8 and administered by the World Trade Organization have bankrupted millions of farmers in poor countries, undermined the role of women in agriculture, and contributed to the current food crisis.
The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture forbids governments in the Global South from providing farmers with subsidies or low-cost seeds and other inputs. These farmers have been turned into a "market" for international agribusiness companies selling seeds, pesticides and fertilizers.
Women, who are traditionally responsible for conserving, exchanging, and breeding agricultural seeds, are threatened by the WTO's Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement. By granting patents to corporations, the WTO transfers ownership of seeds-the basis of all agriculture-from women farmers to multinational corporations.
The WTO has allowed wealthy countries to subsidize corporate farming by $1 billion a day. The subsidies enable companies based in the Global North to sell food internationally at a price below the cost of production. Recently, British International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander estimated that subsidies to Northern agribusiness cost farmers in the Global South $100 billion a year in lost income because small farmers cannot compete with the subsidized cost of imported food.
We call on the G8 to:
Recognize that food is first and foremost a human right and only secondarily a tradable commodity;
Support a process for an international Convention to replace the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture. Such a Convention must uphold the full range of human rights standards and should implement the concept of food sovereignty, whereby communities control their own food systems;
Respect the rights of small farmers to save and exchange seeds between communities and internationally;
Initiate a conversion of national agricultural subsidies from support for agribusiness to incentives for sustainable farming, including small-scale and organic farms.
These demands reflect the rights and priorities of the world's food producers, in particular, rural women, who are directly responsible for feeding most of the world's people.
Central to our policy proposals is the understanding that global challenges regarding food, climate change and natural resource depletion are interrelated and must be resolved together. Policies that seek to solve one aspect of the problem by deepening another will only worsen the crisis as a whole. We see this dynamic in the US and European Union decision to subsidize the conversion of food crops into biofuels: the move to address energy demands at the expense of food needs has greatly exacerbated the current food crisis.
We urge the G8 to ground integrated solutions to the food crisis in the framework of human rights. That framework, rather than further pursuit of corporate profits, has the strongest potential to yield policies that can resolve the global food crisis in tandem with the other urgent issues of climate change and development being addressed by the G8.
Sincerely,
Vivian Stromberg
MADRE
USA
Rose Cunningham
Wangki Tangni Women's Center
Nicaragua
Adriana Gonzalez
LIMPAL
Colombia
Sandra Gonzalez Maldonado
Comité de Trabajadoras de la Maquila Bárcenas; Women Workers' Committee
Guatemala
Anne Sosin
KOFAVIV - Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim; The Commission of Women Victims for Victims
Haiti
18 Comments so far
Show AllG8 and the neo-Malthusians sure make strange bedfellows ! I guess the so-called "left" is RACIST now that they support MALTHUSIAN BULLSHIT !
Shut up and stop hoping that the G8 will stand up for you. Start your own and work with one another. From there, G8 can be SHUT DOWN !
Oh, I forgot to mention the two Global WMD Crises:
1) Iraq's WMD ("We know exactly where they are, just can't find 'em...yet.")
2) Coming Soon: Iran's WMD (Just change the final "q" to and "n" and you'll get it.)
Don't you know, once Iran pulls those two nukes from their reactors 10 years from now they'll threaten the entire planet! The Chinese and Russians have over 10,000 nukes combined but Pentagon Officials have certified those Environmentally Friendly. So don't worry about those.
I take issue with several points made above.
1. In the Madre piece itself I like the call for "a global New Deal on agriculture," as the US farm policies that came out of the New Deal are just what is needed (price floors and price ceilings with supply management and grain reserves), and with no subsidies needed since the big corporations are forced to pay a fair price instead. This is strongly reinforced by Madre's call to "Institute international mechanisms for market stabilization that protect the livelihoods of farmers and guarantee affordable food for all people."
I have concern, however, with their statement that "subsidies enable companies based in the Global North to sell food internationally at a price below the cost of production," and their call to "Initiate a conversion of national agricultural subsidies from support for agribusiness to incentives for sustainable farming, including small-scale and organic farms." Subsidies for organics are needed, but not commodity subsidies that compensate for a lack of New Deal policies. More to the point, subsidies do not so enable dumping in any economic sense. The LACK of New Deal Mechanisms I listed above do enable dumping. I know that's hard to decipher, but that's what the historical record and recent studies show. For example, on corn, econometric studies on eliminating subsidies found only +4.3% to -3.0% change in dumping according to a Tufts University summary (http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01136/_res/id=sa_File1/ p. 21), while dumping until recently was well into the double digits for the main "program crops," up to 61% for cotton, for example. To repeat, price floors and other New Deal mechanisms that were lowered (since 1953) and eliminated (since 1996), allowed corporations to buy below cost thus draining the wealth from agricultural regions, including those in the U.S. Policies that merely end commodity subsidies or make them sustainable do not raise prices to stop dumping, so these policies subsidize (with below cost commodities) exporters, processors, animal factories, food and feed mills, etc. WTO spin to focus on subsidies and forget the lack of price floor mechanisms is pure corporate spin. Yes, subsidies are grossly unfair, slowing decline in US farming as other regions are devastated, but equalizing this decline is no just solution. And yes, subsidies politically (not economically) contribute to these policies. Their purpose is to keep western farmers quiet, and that's worked on some farmers and their groups (ie. Farm Bureau, National Corn Growers Association) but not at all on others (National Family Farm Coalition, which works with Via Campesina, American Corn Growers Association, which testified for Global Farmer). Too many groups have unwittingly been on the wrong side of this. For a historical perspective see: "Crisis by Design" at http://www.iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?accountID=258&refID=48644 and "A Legacy of Crisis" and related pieces at http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ra07/crisis_86.html
2 On Madre confronting the G8 vs UN, etc., this is the Obama issue of negotiating with dictators. Obama's paradigm, if I understand it is superior, (including superior to realpolitik). It's ALL negotiation, including war, in this paradigm, and those who make the real decisions (ie. G8) are fair game. So the alternative is ineffective negotiation. The recent conservative spin that all negotiation is like appeasing Hitler and the only alternative is to be like Hitler is utter nonsense. What also makes no sense, to take a common but extreme kind of example, are strategies to target those with no power, ie. holding up protest signs for people driving by in cars.
On this topic see the books Beyond Machiavelli and Coping with International Conflict (basically a textbook version) by Roger Fisher et al of Harvard. (Earlier books include International Conflict for Beginners and Dear Israelis, Dear Arabs.) The MAP chart in International Conflict for Beginners illustrates the relatively small role of war in this paradigm. Fisher's shortcoming is that he encourages individuals to go it alone, not the group method of organizing. So add Shel Trapp's Basics of Organizing http://www.tenant.net/Organize/orgbas.html and Dynamics of Organizing http://www.tenant.net/Organize/orgdyn.html (NTIC, NPA). But Fisher.is a must read for anyone serious about change, and neglect of this kind of perspective easily explains why activists haven't stopped the recent wars yet.
3. Generally and here, I'd like to see a lot more comments about real issues and real change, not just hot air.
Oh gosh, here they come again. "And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, May I have your attention please. We are now experiencing...drum roll...THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS."
Let's see. Yesterday it was The Global Water Crisis. The day before that it was The Global Oil Crisis. The day before that it was The Global Terror Crisis (Featuring Big Bad Bin Laden and His Al Qaeda Boys). The day before that it was...trying to remember...ahhhh, sorry. The day before The Global Financial Crisis came The Global Oil Crisis? It's hard to keep track sometimes.
Anyway, if you haven't figured it out by now, folks, all we have to do is lay down our arms, surrender our individual liberties, and join the Global Borge Solution, otherwise known as The New World Order. The elite of The New World Order will use systems science to solve all our Global Problems and we will all live according to Peace and Love...on a Global Basis, of course.
Just remember one little caveat: the Bush People, the Pelosi People, the Obama People, the McCane People, the Clinton ("I never touched that woman") Gang, and the Mainstream Media absolutely LOVE The New World Order. They have mentioned it like some 300 times over the years.
Does that tell you anything?
Another perfect example of the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.
Solutions to the problem are to empowering women, population control, limiting GM crops (or just destroying monosanto) and of course letting a poor preferably atheist WOMAN into power who knows what real suffering is like (unlike the maid not pressing your favorite armani shirt and the cook not preparing your favorite $300 a plate meal like the current politicians.)
I applaud what these women are doing, and the food crisis will temporarily get better with their recommendations to the G8. But, population growth will wipe out all the improvements in a number of years. I don't see a lessening of the human birth rate as one of their suggestions to G8, and it should be.
I agree with pangolin that Malthus will be proved right shortly. I've always had a belief that a malthusian crisis will occur at some point early in the 21st century. But with the big runup in oil prices indicating we've probably passed "peak oil", and a harsh adjustment for mankind looming during the next decade, my belief now is that the coming malthusian crisis will arrive sooner, and be much worse, than I originally expected. Many agricultural inputs that boost yield, like fertilizers, pesticides, etc., depend on fossil fuels; remove fossil fuels, and worldwide grain production is going to drop like a rock. Meanwhile, world population goes up by 77 million each year. This is a recipe for an epic disaster.
The suggestions they are presenting to the G8 will be helpful, no doubt. But add to them, the need to quickly stop and reverse population growth, and plan for the coming, inevitable drop in food production, with a corresponding drop in human numbers, via a much lower worldwide birth rate.
One sentence in the article which is blatantly false is: "In fact, the world produces more food than the global population can consume." Ummm....Why have grain stockpiles been shrinking 7 of the past 8 years??? The facts are that production has been LESS than consumption during most of the last decade, causing grain stocks to decline. You can check the facts from USDA, the UN FAO, or elsewhere. You can debate whether or not increasing ethanol production is to blame, or not; but you cannot deny that production has already been falling short of consumption. And if you believe that we are coming to the end of the petroleum age, grain production shortfalls will be RAPIDLY increasing in coming years.
The best way to look at worldwide grain stockpiles is to see how many days it would last, or "days of consumption". This link gives a graph of this "days it would last" time period over the years:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2008/Update69_Stocks%20in%20Days.GIF
At 54 days, the "days of consumption" figure is now the lowest on record. Does this sound to you like the world has produced more food than the global population can consume?
For more facts and figures, see:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2008/Update69_data.htm
matti says: "The G8 is not an institution of democracy, it is a tool for subverting democracy -just like the World Bank, WTO, GATT, IMF, and the U.N. Security Council."
I would add our own government to that list, and Canada's and Japan's, etc.
But really, what do you expect? This is not a debating society, but a gathering of venal Imperialists, for the purpose of solidifying their illegitimate power and wealth!
If and when they submit to public pressure for humanitarian reforms, it will only be because the situation is desperate, and the masses appear to be awakening. A few crumbs will then be tossed, the worst of the 'radicals' will be neutralized, a "Change" candidate or two will be put up as front men, and they will retire to their exclusive country clubs until the disturbance burns itself out. The reforms will then be pulled.
I know there are good hearts at MADRE, but there stated and implied reformist program is an cynical insult to the workers of the world. Their proposal is essentially a call for a touch-up of imperialism, and that is ahistorical, and either insane, naive or sinister. These G8 types are flirting with globnal nuclear conflagration, and you are asking them to lighten up on the food thing! To go begging to them, and to encourage others to do so, without even pointing to THE lasting solution (global proletarian socialism), is a crime against humanity in its own right.
Stop dreaming that we can avoid socialist revolution! It is the only known way forward, and all other plans can be swept away by ample historical examples. On these pages, I have repeatedly asked for an intelligent rebuttal to this assertion, but they never appear because there is none!
You definitely will not be able to vote justice into place through the rigged mechanisms of capitalist 'democracy'. If you really want lasting peace, equality, prosperity, and harmony with nature, you MUST build the party of proletarian socialism. That is, a democratic centralist political party that has a solid Trotskyist perspective and is integrated into the major industrial sectors. No, this is not easy in the present circumstances, but the choice is that, or the endless barbarism of imperialism.
MADRE has handed the opium pipe of capitalist reform to her children!
It is rather misguided to "call" on the G8 to "do" anything for the People.
The G8 is not an institution of democracy, it is a tool for subverting democracy -just like the World Bank, WTO, GATT, IMF, and the U.N. Security Council.
There can be no legitimate "decisions" or "agreements" made on Global Issues at a meeting of the "leaders" of the 7 richest nation-states plus the poor nation-state with the most nuclear weapons.
From the G8 we can only expect the proclamations and commands of the Rotating Spokespeople for the Plutocracy.
Most of the concepts and proposals in this article are good and should be implemented. But I suggest this "call" go not to the anti-democratic G8, but to the U.N. and to the representative systems within individual states.
I know some will say it is more "realistic" to attempt to deal with the institutions that now hold most of the power in the World, but I disagree.
Hoping to use "People Power" to influence groups set up for the purpose of keeping power out of the People's hands is living in a fantasyland, not being "realistic".
Some may also point out that this article represents a quite small exertion of energy on the part of MADRE, but I believe ANY exertion in actions that can do nothing for us -except perpetuate the media myth that the G8 is anything but a dinner party for oligarchs- is too much.
Perhaps this is a "radical" line to take, but, as I watch civilization crumble around me, I'm just about fed up with namby-pamby-rich-boy country club B.S. like "realpolitik".
I'm feeling pretty damned Radical, isn't anyone else?
have fun,
-matti.
great job women! Madre rules!
thanks for the link forextrader- i think. i almost kicked a hole in my screen...
also don't forget Vandana Shiva and Navdanya:
http://www.navdanya.org/earthdcracy/food/index.htm
Paul_GA July 8th, 2008 4:30 pm
As Josey Wales once said, "With governments, you don't get a fair shake … or a fair fight."
And it was a good movie too.
I've always maintained that women should be making food and agricultural policy. They've got their head on straight.
Men, the rulers of the world, not only don't have their head on straight, they have it in an altogether different location. Which is why they're always looking behind instead of ahead.
As Josey Wales once said, "With governments, you don't get a fair shake ... or a fair fight."
They are proposing a real solution. If you can't afford their price for food; starve. It's self limiting.
Malthus was right; a limited amount of farmland cannot support unlimited population growth. Short of widespread and rapid adaption of birth control measures along with a massive number of elderly shoving off for the river styx cruise (only two silver pennies) famine appears to be in the cards.
And no, the whole world is not suddenly going to go altruistic and vegetarian.
Obama and his handlers have a "real" solution. Pump bio fuels by legislating their development: as more airable land transitions to higher paying crop yields for bio fuels; food prices will thus soar, and world wide starvation increase. In fact, in years to come, only the wealthy will be able to eat thanks to Obama and company.
Great declaration. Maybe the G8 will use it to wipe their ass with after crapping their 18 course meal.
G8's response: Can we talk this over a 18 course meal?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1032909/Summit-thats-hard-swallow--world-leaders-enj...
I wonder how Charles Dickens would pen this debacle? Our corporations, each for the most part a non-living embodiment of Scrooge, counting their pennies as they satisfy every imaginable desire for self/wealth, while literally leaving MILLIONS to starve, millions who OWN via their proximity to the land, the great MOTHER'S legacy, a capacity to feed themselves.
Laws like these enslave the world and turn law on its bearings. If there is no WW III what we will see is a global revolution (hello Marx) by the workers who are fed up with being screwed for nothing in return, while their so-called elite "betters" just play golf. This is far more than Rome burning. The lords of karma have so much to keep up with these days...
Last night when I went to sleep I thought of the world being turned over to beautiful beings like my 2 year old Grandson... pharmaceuticals in the water supply, the nation's treasure devoted to radiation/bombs/war supplies, the media awash in the cultural equivalent of raw sewage, and in so many places, nature burning, flooding, washing away the legacy of eons (in terms of species loss). I felt such sorrow for what the direction of this earth under those who have climbed to power, frequently USE the words of Masters to essentially do all they can do to slay Creation.
At times it must be too much for the very Gods & Goddesses to bear...
...and the G8 says, after their multicourse feast, 'Food short-age?' Here, eat our shorts!