Food Riots or Food Rebellions?

Eric Holt-Giménez Looks at the World Food Crisis

Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food and
Development Policy
recently partnered with Raj Patel and Annie
Shattuck to bring us Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for
Justice
. Recently, Holt-Gimenez spent a weekend in New York to
introduce his new book and open a conversation about these rebellions.

Perhaps you've heard the stats: between 2007 and 2008 approximately
40 food riots occurred around the world. In Mexico, corn prices made
tortilla, a staple of the country's diet, prohibitively expensive for
the nation's poor. In Haiti, soaring food prices led people to the
streets, and eventually to overthrow the Prime Minister.

Yet were these riots or rebellions? For some, the distinction may
seem small. These were not spontaneous anger outbursts fueled by mob
mentality. They were not riots. Rather, they were conscious, political
acts. They were rebellions. The objectives of a rebellion-agency and
intention-are the essential implications of the word itself. They are
not just a reaction to food prices-they are a protest.

But a protest against what, exactly? The simple answer: against the
causes of the food crisis. But Holt-Gimenez draws an important
distinction between what he calls the "proximate" and "root" causes of
the global food crisis. It is the difference between symptoms and
sickness.

Proximate causes are the commonly-cited reasons for hikes in food
prices. These include grain speculation, increased use of land for
agro-fuel production (as opposed to edible crops), increased meat
consumption and a particularly poor harvest season in the US, Australia
and Turkey. While in 2007-2008 these forces were certainly at work, a
deeper look reveals that the food crisis was actually a long time in the
making.

A more discerning analysis of the upheaval of 2007-2008 points to
what Holt-Gimenez calls the root causes of our food crisis. We have a
vulnerable food system, one in which 91% of our crops are maize, cotton,
wheat, rice and soy. A lack of diversity in our agricultural repertoire
leaves our crops open to environmental (not to mention economic) shock.

Think Irish potato famine.

Holt-Gimenez sees our vulnerable food system as part of the
"agri-foods industrial complex." The agri-foods industrial complex
actually refers to any and all corporate business involved in the
production, processing, storing and transporting of food. It is a
powerful force to reckon with. Follow its track record, Holt-Gimenez
urges, and one will see that the Green Revolution combined with the
destruction of tariff barriers in the ensuing decades, and the
free-trade trends of the 90s, were all results of a corporation-driven
food system. These phases increased developing nations' dependency on
imported grain and seed, in countries that had been largely
self-sufficient before. Production went down, diversity shrunk
dramatically, local producers lost their market and were forced
migrate-often emigrate. One million bankrupt Mexican growers, for
example, headed for the United States.

There is a danger in conflating the proximate and root causes of the
food crisis in searching for solutions, warns Holt-Gimenez. When we
focus only on the symptoms of the problem (grain speculation, increased
agri-fuel production, lower crop yields) we easily reach the conclusion
that genetically modified food and industrial agriculture present a
"solution," or an immediate fix to world hunger. Not so fast. Looking at
the root causes, we see that loss of crop diversity, market flooding
and farmer bankruptcy are actually all part of the quick fix that fuels
the agri-foods industrial complex. It is the consolidation of land and
power.

We need our seeds and we need our small farmers. We need them not
just for biodiversity, not just for distribution of power, but for the
pure know-how they possess. There can be a place for small farmers and
an alternative food system. As long as our planet has a smallholder
population, we have a chance, Holt-Gimenez argues, citing La Via Campesina as a hopeful
example. Low-input, small operations can indeed be high-yielding. They
needn't be reinvented, just supported. We can't use a corporate food
system to fix symptoms of the corporate food system itself.

At the end of Holt-Gimenez's talk, he reminded his audience that we
are political beings, even in the toughest circumstances. Our challenge
now is to recognize sickness, not symptoms-and revolution, not riot.

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