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TechnoratiFood Rebellions: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis
Resistance to the trade and “aid” policies that displace farmers and increase hunger.
The World Food Program describes the current global food crisis as a silent tsunami, with billions of people going hungry. Hunger is, indeed, coming in waves, but not everyone will drown in famine. The recurrent food crises are making a handful of corporations very rich-even as they put the rest of the planet at risk.
Built over half a century, largely with public grain subsidies and foreign aid, the global food-industrial complex is made up of large corporations that sell grain, seed, chemicals, and fertilizer, along with global supermarket chains and food processors.
When these players first came on the scene, world agriculture was different. Forty years ago, the global South had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion. After three "Development Decades," they were importing $11 billion a year in food. Immediately following de-colonization in the 1960s, Africa exported $1.3 billion in food a year. Today it imports 25 percent of its food.
International trade agreements and pressure from the global North opened up entire continents to cheap, subsidized grain from the North. This put local farmers out of business, devastated local crop diversity, and consolidated control of the world's food system in the hands of multinational corporations. Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, and Bunge control 90 percent of the world's grain trade.
The official prescriptions for solving the world food crisis call for more subsidies for industrialized nations, more food aid, and more so-called Green (or Gene) Revolutions. Expecting the institutions that built the current flawed food system to solve the food crisis is like asking an arsonist to put out a forest fire. When the world food crisis exploded in early 2008, ADM's profits increased by 38 percent, Cargill's by 128 percent, and Mosaic Fertilizer (a Cargill subsidiary) by a whopping 1,615 percent!
For decades, family farmers the world over have resisted this corporate control. They have worked to diversify crops, protect soil and native seeds, and conserve nature. They have established local gardens, businesses, and community-based food systems. These strategies are effective. They need to be given a chance to work.
The solutions to the food crisis are those that make the lives of family farmers easier: re-regulate the market, reduce the power of the agri-foods industrial complex, and build ecologically resilient family agriculture. Here are some of the needed steps:
- Support domestic food production.
- Stabilize and guarantee fair prices to farmers and consumers by re-establishing floor prices and publicly owned national grain reserves. Establish living wages for workers on farms, in processing facilities, and in supermarkets.
- Halt agrofuels expansion.
- Curb speculation in food.
- Promote a return to smallholder farming. On a pound-per-acre basis, family farms are more productive than large-scale industrial farms. And they use less oil. Because 75 percent of the world's poor are farmers, this will address poverty, too.
- Support agro-ecological production.
- Food sovereignty: Recognize the right of all people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound methods and their own food systems.
The political will to take these steps must come from informed social movements. These movements already exist, and are gaining strength in the face of the food crisis. Together we can fix the food system and solve the food crisis once and for all.
12 Comments so far
Show All"Immediately following de-colonization in the 1960s, Africa exported $1.3 billion in food a year. Today it imports 25 percent of its food."
Maybe what's happened in Zimbabwe, for example, is a contributing factor to the African food problem. The confiscation and destruction of most productive farms and their transfer to political favorites who know nothing about agriculture has transformed that country, and many others, from being a breadbasket into a basket case.
One of the most important factors in development is access to credit - Small farmers in the west can use their land as collateral for loans which help them develop their business/land.
In many underdeveloped countries, there is no clear titl to land. Their is no valuation system for land. There is no credit facility to make loans to small farmers.
Developing countries must provide clear tile to land.
They must have instutitutons that can put a value on land.
They must have insitutions, private or government, that will make loans against the new land value.
There must be a micro loan system. Small loans may equal small inputs, but in many cases are the catalyst for sustained development.
We do not need development experts like Jeffrey Sachs who is now an expert on third world development (look at his farce in northern Kenya) He is the same Jeffrey Sachs who bankrupted the government of Poland and Russia (see Naomi Klein). Unfortunately Obama views him as an expert - not as a criminal.
There is a growing goup of Africans and other third world citizens who are just beginning to understand how the west underdeveloped thier countries and economies. Countries must free themselves from the same companies that are holding the American people at ransom.
Maybe we should be thankful there are a few large agribusiness corporations that do not have to be bailed out to keep them out of bankruptcy. It would be nice if General Motors and Chrysler were in that good shape, instead of being a drag on the whole economy. Be careful what you wish for, as it could be worse than what we have now.
Um, Big Agri is oversubsidized by gubbmint. As for Big Auto, let them collapse.
MONSANTO...a major problem ! But if you criticize them, you might wind up being sued.
How, I wonder, do we push for regulations against agro-chemical corporations when this is pretty much the ONLY global economic sector still dominated by the U.S.?
We are asked to support changes that would "reduce the power of the agri-foods industrial complex," yet no high raking politician in the country is in their seat without having already to sold out to said complex.
That, I am afraid, is why we have gotten ourselves into a situation that truly is only capable of a revolutionary fix. And how to make that happen... I have no idea.
Maybe lessons from big tobacco would be helpful. Only after these corporations were exposed for what they truly were -- which is parasites who knowingly physically endanger the public for a profit -- were they reigned into a little bit of accountability. AMD is no different. And, like smoking, it will probably be decades before we can amass enough "proof" of their environmental and human-health consequences (and moreover, that they were aware of them the whole time) to make them stand accountable.
Seems to be good thoughts. Whats missing is who will pay for the seven steps.
What is missing from your post is that industrial food production, not just in the US, but all over the world, is already being paid for and supported by government and taxpayers.
1. How? The farm bill is a colossal waste of money and resources. Do we pay farmers even more to farm? How do we do this?
2. How does that help the poor? We already have huge price floors on many products, all they do is make it so that food is more expensive. Floor prices also hurt the third world. The only reason we have floor prices now is so that American farmers don't have to compete with growers in the third world.
3. I agree. It doesn't have to be done with any laws, just stop the perverse subsidies.
locally-, family-grown food availability, along with water and shelter, is absolutely vital to being able to move beyond our current industrial\ecological dilemma...a brief 2-3 year period of planting and growing all over, to be followed by a Global Start Date, when we, globally, begin to use those local foodstuffs to sustain ourselves, and turn off the switch on our current electrified, petroleumized, industrial way of living...
Sioux Rose
Good article. # 4 is particularly important to implement. I wonder how the executives of these 3 huge mega "industrial" food corporations can sleep at night knowing that speculation drives up the cost of grains that millions of impoverished 3rd world persons can no longer afford. As if hunger wasn't a serious problem prior to gambling not only America's fiscal future, but the actual survival of populations on Wall St's holy temple tables. Pretty soon they'll do hedge funds on who is given the pass to live or die if the insurers get to "cover" us all in the next boondangle. Societies become sick, unjust and imbalanced when they must lay homage primarily to Mammon and Mars, an unholy marriage that is felt everywhere America does "business."
It isn't just the executives that the 3 huge mega food corporations that are doing the speculating on food such as grain, milk etc.
The bankers do it too. The investment managers. The brokers.