http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/radical_un_report_promotes_democratic_control_of_food_20140320
[I think "Radical" is an adjective best left to the reader to decide.
Multiple links in the on-line article.]
Posted on Mar 20, 2014
By Sonali Kolhatkar
A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on the
“Right to Food” took aim at the entire basis on which food is produced
and distributed on a global scale. Reflecting the type of progressive
analysis of our food system from experts like Vandana Shiva and Michael
Pollan, report author Olivier De Schutter called for an undermining of
large agribusinesses and an infusion of democratic control.
Although the report’s recommendations are revolutionary, news of its
release went largely unreported in the major U.S. media.
De Schutter, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, spent six
years visiting more than a dozen countries and concluded that the
world’s entire food system should be rebuilt, starting with the
promotion of local, sustainable farming so that ordinary people have
control over what they can grow and eat. This certainly does not sound
radical to those of us in U.S. cities where there has been a rapid
expansion of farmers markets and an explosion in backyard farming. But
in poor American communities and in poor countries as a whole, it is a
radical notion for food to be grown locally, sustainably and
democratically.
The world’s food system is controlled by a handful of giant
corporations, the majority of which are based in the U.S., such as
ConAgra, Cargill and PepsiCo. These companies are a bottleneck through
which most of the world’s food is forced, in order to feed most of the
world’s people. Not only is this method environmentally unsustainable
given its overreliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and fossil
fuels, but it is also inefficient at actually feeding people. The World
Food Programme estimates that there are 842 million hungry people worldwide.
How did it get this way? The “Green Revolution” starting in the 1940s
was a promise that a technological fix of high-yielding grains
cultivated for mass planting, used in combination with newly developed
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, would eliminate world hunger. By
some measures the Green Revolution was indeed successful in producing
vast amounts of cereal grains that feed a large chunk of the earth’s
population. But how did so few companies end up at the top? And why are
so many people still hungry today?
In an interview on Uprising, I asked food justice activist Raj Patel to
explain what went wrong with the Green Revolution and why De Schutter’s
report may provide a panacea. Patel is a writer, activist and academic,
and he wrote the book “Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the
Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System” as well as the New York Times
best-seller “The Value of Nothing.” He teaches a class at UC Berkeley
with Pollan called Edible Education and is an adviser to De Schutter.
According to him, “the food system is carved out of a history of
colonialism, of slavery, of empire.”
Today, Patel told me, the Green Revolution has resulted in “substituting
chemicals for workers and that means you have displaced people who end
up moving to cities. And these are the people who are most likely to be
going hungry.” Patel conceded that, “yes, there is more food produced if
you measure just the big commodity crops.” But, he noted, “you sacrifice
the other kinds of more nutritious crops that were growing alongside the
cereals.” Pointing to Latin America as an example, Patel told me that
during the peak of the Green Revolution, “food production went up by 9
percent, but so did hunger.”
Patel maintained that “there is enough food,” but “the way in which we
distribute the food is unjust.” In other words, corporate control of
these vast monocultured farms grew even as more people were pushed off
land slated for cultivation, until all that is left are a handful of
wealthy businesses producing more food than ever and a hungry population
of landless poor that cannot afford to feed itself.
It is not just food corporations that control our food system, but also
large chemical and seed companies such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical. For
decades, Monsanto has benefited from a monopoly it created through its
genetically engineered corn and soy seeds that are impervious to its own
brand of pesticide called Roundup. The Roundup Ready seed-pesticide
system was easy and efficient for farmers to use—except that the seeds
are also engineered to be sterile so farmers cannot save seeds for next
year’s harvest and are thus dependent on Monsanto year after year. Not
only has this method resulted in crops that rely on heavy use of
poisonous chemicals, it has also given rise to dangerous “super weeds”
that are resistant to pesticides.
Eager to jump into the game, Dow Chemical is awaiting approval of a
similar genetically engineered seed and pesticide duo called Enlist. The
Enlist pesticide contains a chemical that was part of the cocktail of
toxins used in the Vietnam War called Agent Orange. Patel lamented how
“the power over fertilizers and seeds is concentrated in the hands of
very few companies,” and that “they are able to bend the market to their
will.”
In his report for the United Nations, De Schutter suggested as a
solution the idea of “agroecology,” which he described as “a way to
improve the resilience and sustainability of food systems.” Agroecology,
according to Patel, is “a system where instead of supplanting nature,
you work with it. So instead of relying on pesticides, for example, you
would [rely on] plants that attract beneficial predatory insects that
will take care of the pests, so that the management of pests is
integrated into a diverse and complex ecosystem.” Patel said this method
of food production would replace monocultures of corn, soy and wheat
with polycultures of lots of different plants that have a variety of
benefits such as soil improvement, pest control and shade. Most
importantly, an agroecological food system would be, Patel said, one
that is the most “climate-change ready” and “much more robust in terms
of external climate shocks.”
Agroecology is also consistent with the idea of “food sovereignty,” a
term embraced by food justice activists and groups like the
200-million-strong peasant farmer movement La Via Campesina to demand
local and democratic control of food. So it is no surprise that the
corporate-dominated industry is extremely wary when the words “food
sovereignty” are bandied about. Yet, in his report to the U.N. Human
Rights Council, De Schutter boldly wrote, “Food sovereignty is a
condition for the full realization of the right to food.” He explicitly
took aim at big corporations, warning that “the current food systems are
efficient only from the point of view of maximizing agribusiness
profits,” and added that “[a]t the local, national and international
levels, the policy environment must urgently accommodate alternative,
democratically-mandated visions.”
Patel concurred that this notion of democracy “is the real heart of
what’s radical in this report.” He told me that rather than “food
sovereignty,” corporations and governments like the term “food
security.” But “technically,” Patel said, “you can be food secure in
prison and be given sufficient food to survive. But you have no say in
that process, in how that food is grown or how society has decided how
to end hunger.” In other words, democratic control of our food system is
the only thing that can break corporate control of what we eat and how
and where we grow our food, and that is exactly what De Schutter has
reported to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Like other basic human needs such as water, shelter and health care, our
food shouldn’t be subject to the drive for profit. In calling for
democratic control of our food, De Schutter and Patel are threatening
the business interests of some of the world’s largest and wealthiest
corporations. Given that De Schutter’s report has been submitted to the
highest international representatives of civil society, it has the
potential to effect change, but only if there is enough pressure from below.
Patel told me the report is “only as good as the mobilization that is
able to use it.” Although it provides “ammunition to groups like La Via
Campesina in their ongoing fight to be able to democratize the food
system,” he warned that there is much work to be done, saying, “we do
need to keep organizing and to keep the pressure up and in fact to be
dreaming much bigger than we’re allowed to be dreaming by the
governments that purport to represent us.”
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
