Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice

Agriculture / Social Movements / Environment Crisis and the Hunger for Justice The real story behind the world food crisis and what we can do about it. In this very timely book, two of the most prominent critics of the global food system dissect the causes of hunger and the food price crisis, locating them in a political economy of capitalist industrial production dominated by corporations and driven by the search for proits for the few instead of the welfare of the many. The picture that emerges is a political economy of global production that is failing badly to feed the world and is itself contributing to the spread of inequalities that promote hunger. Food Rebellions! Food Rebellions! Professor Walden Bello, University of the Philippines Professor Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Challenge for Africa (Heinemann, 2009) At long last, a book which confronts the real issues. It is vital reading for all concerned with the right to food. Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Food Rebellions! provides an analysis that is clear, documented and searing in its challenge to the powers that be. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, president of the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations Cover photos Top: EPA/Kena Betancur Bottom: Leonor Hurtado Holt-Giménez and Patel At a time of economic crisis, sustainable agriculture and the economic empowerment it can generate will be key to the survival of the many African families headed by women. Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel With Annie Shattuck Foreword by Walden Bello Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel With Annie Shattuck Foreword by Walden Bello Praise for Food Rebellions! In this very timely book, two of the world’s most prominent critics of the global food system, Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel, dissect the causes of hunger and the food price crisis, locating them in a political economy of capitalist industrial production dominated by corporations and driven by the search for proits for the few instead of the welfare of the many. The picture that emerges is a political economy of global production that is failing badly in terms of feeding the world and is itself contributing to the spread of inequalities that promote hunger. Walden Bello, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines The small-scale farming systems spread widely across Africa are a social and ecological asset. As Food Rebellions! demonstrates, planting indigenous trees and using traditional farming methods enhances environmental conservation and preserves local biodiversity. At a time of economic crisis, sustainable agriculture and the economic empowerment it can generate will be key to the survival of the many African families headed by women. Professor Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Challenge for Africa (Heinemann, 2009) The 20th century was the century of technological revolutions. This century is that of the knowledge revolution, and Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel are in its vanguard. At long last, a book which confronts the real issues: How do we reform our food systems to avoid environmental disaster? How do we recapture the production and distribution of food from the tyranny of unchecked markets? This book is vital reading for all concerned with the right to food. Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Food Rebellions! demonstrates the imperative to protect and enhance the multifaceted knowledges, practices, and lands of sustainable farmers. Contrary to some views, sustainable food systems are most helpful to the poor, especially the rural poor, who sufer the most from the dire social and ecological efects of industrial agriculture. Absent perverse subsidies to agrifood industries, what is good for farmers is also good for eaters and citizens. Holt-Giménez and Patel contribute to an urgent awakening— supported by practical experiments and expert reports—to the necessity and possibility for transforming food systems. “Like cracks in the asphalt,” solutions to the global food crisis can restore resilient food systems across the world. Harriet Friedmann, professor of sociology, University of Toronto Food Rebellions! is a tour de force! Not only does it describe the corporate assault on the human right to food in all of its political, economic, cultural and environmental dimensions, it also documents the many ways rural and urban people are actively building alternative food systems to defend their land, water, seeds and livelihoods. These social movements and this inspiring book could not have come at a beter time. In the face of multiple global crises, the growing local and international trends toward food sovereignty provide us with the hope we need to build a just and sustainable future. Paul Nicholson, Ehne (Basque Farmers Union) and Via Campesina Food Rebellions! situates with accuracy and precision the true meaning, causes and dynamics of what is commonly referred to as the “global food crisis.” It shows how skewed and dysfunctional the global food system is, and how the concentration of market power by a handful of transnational corporations translates to power over land, water, food and, indeed, life itself. In Part One, the authors trace with startling clarity the history of hunger and poverty to North–South politics of domination and gender and class inequalities. They compel us to confront the questions: Who is hungry, and why? But all is not gloom and doom. In Part Two, the authors inspire us with examples of creative and constructive resistance by food producers and workers against the capitalist driven food system and propose strategies for transforming the food system—strategies that are practical and well within the reach of anyone concerned with social and political justice. If Food Rebellions! does not make food rights activist of its readers, I don’t know what will. This is a truly remarkable book. Shalmali Guttal, senior associate of Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, Thailand Hunger is a global scandal. I would call it a global structure of sin! Claiming to solve world hunger with the industrial age’s solutions the corporations of the world really only structure the world for more hunger, poverty and misery. Food Rebellions! provides an analysis that is clear, documented and searing in its challenge to the powers that be. It provides solutions appropriate to our ecological age and to a new era of food democracy and food sovereignty. It relects the vision of those most afected by the food crisis. I strongly endorse this book and I hope that it gets a wide readership. More importantly, though, I hope that it gets the support of the nations of the world sufering from hunger and poverty. It provides insights from those directly sufering from hunger and poverty, who have a right to be heard. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, president of the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations The high and mighty proponents of free trade speak for the interests of multinational corporations when they try to stile the economic policies that empower peasants, family farmers, and farm workers to grow healthy supplies of food while protecting Mother Earth. Rather than continue down the path that led to today’s economic, environmental, and social catastrophe, Food Rebellions! calls on us to raise our voices in rebellion, join together, and place sustainable production and rural economic opportunity at the base of our recovery eforts. George Naylor, former president of the National Family Farm Coalition—USA Pambazuka Press – www.pambazukapress.org Formerly known as Fahamu Books, we are a pan-African publisher of progressive books that aim to stimulate debate, discussion, analysis and engagement on human rights and social justice in Africa and the global South. We have published books and CD-ROMs on Africa, the African Union, capacity building for civil society organizations, China and Africa, conlict, human rights, media, trade, aid & development, and women’s rights. Pambazuka News – www.pambazuka.org With over 1,500 contributors and an estimated 500,000 readers, Pambazuka News is the authoritative pan-African electronic weekly newsleter and platform for social justice in Africa, providing cuting-edge commentary and in-depth analysis on politics and current afairs, development, human rights, refugees, gender issues and culture in Africa. Food First – www.foodfirst.org Called one of the country’s “most established food think tanks” by the New York Times, the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, is a “people’s” think tank. Our work informs and ampliies the voices of social movements ighting for food sovereignty: people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. Grassroots International – www.grassrootsonline.org Grassroots International works to create a just and sustainable world by building alliances with progressive movements. We provide grants to our global South partners and join them in advocating for social change. Our primary focus is on land, water and food as human rights and nourishing the political struggle necessary to achieve these rights. Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel with Annie Shattuck A publication of Pambazuka Press, Food First Books and Grassroots International Published 2009 by Pambazuka Press Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi and Oxford www.pambazukapress.org and www.pambazuka.org Food First Books Oakland CA www.foodfirst.org and Grassroots International Boston MA www.grassrootsonline.org Pambazuka Press, Fahamu Ltd, 2nd floor, 51 Cornmarket Street, Oxford OX1 3HA, UK Pambazuka Press, c/o Fahamu Kenya, PO Box 47158, 00100 GPO, Nairobi, Kenya Pambazuka Press, c/o Fahamu Senegal, 9 Cité Sonatel 2, POB 25021, Dakar-Fann, Dakar, Senegal Pambazuka Press, c/o Fahamu South Africa, c/o 27A Esher St, Claremont, 7708, Cape Town, South Africa Food First Books, 398 60th Street, Oakland, CA 94618, USA Grassroots International, 179 Boylston Street, 4th floor Boston, MA 02130, USA First published 2009 Copyright © 2009 Institute for Food and Development Policy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright holder, except in accordance with the provisions of the UK Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Application for the copyright holders’ written permission to reproduce or transmit any part of this publication should be addressed to the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library US Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with Food First Books UK ISBN: 978-1-906387-30-3 (paperback) UK ISBN: 978-1-906387-42-6 (ebook) US ISBN-13: 978-0-935028-34-8 US ISBN-10: 0-935028-34-X Printed in Canada Contents Foreword by Walden Bello ix 1 1 Introduction to the Global Food Crisis Part One – The Real Story Behind The World Food Crisis 5 2 Hunger, Harvests and Profits: The Tragic Records of the Global Food Crisis 3 Root Causes: How the Industrial Agrifoods Complex Ate the Global South 23 4 The Overproduction of Hunger: Uncle Sam’s Farm and Food Bill 60 5 Agrofuels: A Bad Idea at the Worst Possible Time 68 6 Summing Up the Crisis 81 6 Part Two – What We Can Do About It 83 7 Overcoming the Crisis: Transforming the Food System 84 8 Africa and the End of Hunger 130 9 The Challenge of Food Sovereignty in Northern Countries 159 10 Epilogue 178 Appendix 1: Civil Society Statement on the World Food Emergency 185 Appendix 2: Land, Territory and Dignity Forum, Porto Alegre, March 6–9, 2006 Appendix 3: ROPPA—Pan-African Farmers’ Platform 194 201 Appendix 4: Declarations of the African Organizations— Planet Diversity, May 12–16, 2008 204 Appendix 5: Africa: 25th FAO Africa Conference— African Women’s Statement 206 Appendix 6: High-Level Meeting on Food Security, Madrid, January 26–27, 2009 Appendix 8: Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture 211 214 216 Acknowledgments 218 Notes 219 Acronyms 223 Glossary 225 Annotated Bibliography 230 References 236 Index 253 Appendix 7: US Call to Action Boxes Box 1 Hunger’s Timeline Box 2 Policy Versus Practice: The World Bank’s CAFOs 12 9 Box 3 Speculation 101: Gambling with the World’s Food 16 Box 4 The Monopolies Controlling our Food Systems 18 Box 5 The Green Revolution in Mexico 28 Box 6 Sub-Saharan Africa’s Population Factor 30 Box 7 As You Sow: Farmer Suicides and Structural Violence in the Green Revolution’s Breadbasket 32 Box 8 Haiti: Showcase for Free Trade 38 Box 9 Ghana’s Import Surge 41 Box 10 Philippines: The Death of Rice 42 Box 11 The Geneva Doha Package: Third World Pushback 54 Box 12 NAFTA: Effects on Agriculture 56 Box 13 The Perils of the Unregulated Market 61 Box 14 The US: The Food Crisis Comes Home 62 Box 15 The RFS Targets: The Obligatory Market Driving the Agrofuels Boom 74 Box 16 Yes, We Have No Tortillas 76 Box 17 Biotechnology: “Stacking” Agrofuels’ Market Power 78 Box 18 The Politics of Food Aid 88 Box 19 Land Grabs! Box 20 The Right to Food 96 100 Box 21 Agroecology—Some Definitions 102 Box 22 The MST and Agroecology 104 Box 23 Ecological Agriculture 108 Box 24 Campesino a Campesino: Latin America’s Farmers’ Movement for Sustainable Agriculture 114 Box 25 Las Chinampas: Testament to Indigenous Science 118 Box 26 Back to the Future: From Frijol Tapado to Green Manures 120 Box 27 A Return to the Roots? Or Fertilizing the Money Tree? 134 Box 28 Like Living Software: AGRA’s Strategy for Agricultural Development 138 Box 29 Gates’ Gene Revolution 140 Box 30 Opening Africa to the Biotech Industry 142 Box 31 Organic Agriculture in Africa 148 Box 32 The Tigray Project 152 Box 33 Cuba’s Urban Agricultural Transformation 156 Box 34 Structural Racism in the US Food System 160 Box 35 The Next Generation of the Food Justice Movement 162 Box 36 Food Crisis Solutions: Urban Food Gardens 166 Box 37 Food Policy Councils 170 Box 38 Fighting for Fair Food: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers 172 Foreword By Walden Bello The world is now plunged into a deep recession—indeed, into what many are beginning to call a depression. In the North, the current crisis initially took the form of a inancial collapse that then brought down the real economy. The inancial crisis in the North, however, was preceded by the food price crisis which rolled through the South beginning in 2006. In 2006–08, food shortages became a global reality, with the prices of commodities spiraling beyond the reach of vast numbers of people. International agencies were caught latfooted, with the World Food Program warning that its rapidly diminishing food stocks might not be able to deal with the emergency. Owing to surging prices of rice, wheat and vegetable oils, the food import bills of the least developed countries (LDCs) climbed by 37% in 2008, from $17.9 million in 2007 to $24.6 million in 2008, ater having risen by 30% in 2006. By the end of 2008, the United Nations reported, “the annual food import basket in LDCs cost more than three times that of 2000, not because of the increased volume of food imports, but as the result of rising food prices.” These tumultuous developments added 75 million people to the ranks of the hungry and drove an estimated 125 million people in developing countries into extreme poverty. For some countries, the food crisis was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Some 30 countries experienced violent popular actions against rising prices in 2007 and 2008, among them Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte’d’Ivoire, Egypt, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Across the continents, people came out in their thousands against the uncontrolled rises in the price of staple goods, which their countries had to import because of insuicient domestic production. Scores of people died in these demonstrations of popular anger. The most dramatic events transpired in Haiti. With 80% of the x FOOD REBELLIONS! population subsisting on less than two dollars a day, the doubling of the price of rice in the irst four months of 2008 led to “hunger so tortuous that it felt like [people’s] stomachs were being eaten away by bleach or batery acid,” according to one account. Widespread rioting broke out that only ended when the Senate ired the prime minister. In their intensity, the Haiti riots reminded observers of the antiInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) riots in Venezuela—the so-called Caracazo—almost two decades ago, which reshaped the contours of that country’s politics. In this very timely book, two of the world’s most prominent critics of the global food system, Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel, dissect the causes of hunger and the food price crisis, locating them in a political economy of capitalist industrial production dominated by corporations and driven by the search for proits for the few instead of the welfare of the many. Here, greed has played just as destructive a role as in the inancial sector. Holt-Giménez and Patel discuss the contributions of, among other factors, the Green Revolution, export-oriented agriculture, structural adjustment, genetically modiied seeds, speculation, and biofuel production. The picture that emerges is a political economy of global production that is failing badly in terms of feeding the world and is itself contributing to the spread of inequalities that promote hunger. This is not, however, simply a critique of capitalist industrial agriculture. Drawing on the rich experiences of small farmers, peasant communities, indigenous nations, and cooperatives, Holt-Giménez and Patel show that even as the old system unravels, alternative modes of agricultural production are alive and ofer the prospect of suicient food for people along with equity and ecological sustainability. The many people’s organizations at the forefront of the struggle for more efective ways of organizing the production and distribution of food, such as Via Campesina, the Landless Movement (MST) in Brazil, and small-scale urban agriculture in the North, are showcased. And an important lesson they are learning—and which this book stresses—is the inseparability of economic organization, technology, equity, sustainability, and democracy. The aim of the organization of food production, Holt-Giménez and Patel remind us, is to enable people not simply to exist but to live and enjoy the lourishing of the spirit—to eat so they may live in the fullest sense. This is where the capitalist organization of food production has failed so miserably; it has condemned hundreds of millions FOREWORD xi of people to purely subsisting and millions of others to below subsistence. This is why people throughout the world are, in a multitude of ways, actively organizing to supplant it. Walden Bello is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award in 2003, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkokbased research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South, and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. 1 Introduction to the Global Food Crisis A “Silent Tsunami”? The World Food Program’s description of the global food crisis raises the specter of a natural disaster surging over an unaware populace that is helpless in the face of massive destruction. With half of the world’s population at risk of hunger, the current food crisis is certainly massive and destructive. But the reasons so many people have limited access to food are anything but natural. On the contrary, decades of skewed agricultural policies, inequitable trade, and unsustainable development have thrown the world’s food systems into a state of chronic malaise, in which crises are all the more severe. Though hunger comes in waves, not everyone will “drown” in famine. In fact, the planet’s food crises are making a handful of investors and multinational corporations very rich—even as they devastate the livelihoods of the poor and put the rest of the world at severe environmental and economic risk. The surge of food “riots” not only in poor countries like Haiti, but in resource-rich countries like Brazil—and even in the industrialized nations of Europe and in the United States—relects the fact that people are not just hungry, they are rebelling against an unjust global food system. The food crisis is anything but silent—and as long as we are aware of its true causes, we are not helpless. The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the US Department of Agriculture all carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. Accepting the paradigm of the dominant industrial food system, the “solutions” they prescribe are simply more of the same approaches that brought about the crisis in the irst place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic ixes. These measures do nothing to challenge the status quo of corporate control 2 FOOD REBELLIONS! over the world’s food, and there has been litle efective leadership in the face of the crisis. Nor has there been any informed public debate about the real reasons the numbers of hungry people are growing, or what we can do about it. The future of our food systems is being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, speculators, and global monopolies. For decades, family farmers, rural women, and communities around the world have resisted the destruction of their native seeds and worked hard to diversify their crops, protect their soil, conserve their water and forests, and establish local gardens, markets, businesses and community-based food systems. There are many highly productive, equitable and sustainable alternatives to the present industrial practices and corporate monopolies holding the world’s food hostage, and literally millions of people working to advance these productive methods now. What is missing is the political will on the part of governments, industry and inance to support these solutions. In 1996 Via Campesina, a world-wide peasant, pastoralist, and ishers federation, launched a global call for food sovereignty—the human right of all people to healthy, culturally appropriate, sustainably grown food, and the right of communities to determine their own food systems. The call both echoed and ampliied the voices of social movements everywhere that are struggling for land reform, control over local resources, fair markets, neighborhood food systems and sustainable agriculture. In Europe, smallholder movements, organic farmers, and campaigners from GMO-free (free of genetically modiied organisms), anti-hypermarket, and fair trade movements have been ighting to counter the dominance of monocultures and monopolies with local, agroecologically produced and fairly traded food. In the United States, family farmers, students, and neighborhood activists, along with many professionals and socially conscious entrepreneurs have been advocating for fresh and healthy food, and higher incomes to aford it. From the growing food justice movement in underserved communities in the industrial North, to the long-standing agroecological alternatives in Latin America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, people are organizing to establish productive, equitable food systems. These movements combine livelihood struggles with activism, and agroecological practice with food advocacy. The spectrum of activities of these movements runs from the INTRODUCTION 3 informed engagement of local citizens in food policy councils and the direct advocacy of civil society in international institutions, to the constructive resistance of community supported agriculture, GMOfree territories, and peasant land invasions. A convergence of wideranging and oten surprising alliances between farmers, businesses, community organizations, local health departments, food workers, farm laborers, agroecologists, environmentalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous movements are steadily building these sustainable and equitable practices and political will for the democratization of our food systems. They are racing against time. Agriculture—primarily industrial, petroleum-guzzling, chemical-heavy agriculture—contributes 13%–18% of the world’s greenhouse gases (Steinfeld et al. 2006; FAO 2008a) and uses 60%–70% of the planet’s diminishing fresh water supplies (FAO 2008b; Paciic Institute 2008). As a sector, agriculture both induces and sufers the most from climate-related hazards. One-sixth of the world’s population is desperately hungry—just as many people sufer from obesity (Patel 2007). Cheap, bad food (highly processed and brimming with salt, sugar, fat and high-fructose corn syrup) has become a public health blight on poor and middle-income people alike. Increases in obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes and other dietrelated diseases—primarily in lower-income sectors—account for 12% of the increase in health spending in the United States alone (Thorpe et al. 2004). This patern is taking hold in Europe and is increasingly appearing in the emerging economies of the global South. Ater decades of policies designed to replace family farms with agribusiness, the light of farmers from the countryside is massive. In the United States, there are more people in prison than on the land. In addition, huge, for-proit detention centers hold thousands of undocumented immigrants—many of whom let economically devastated farming communities in Mexico and Central America in desperate search of work. As a result of recent food price inlation, many producing countries placed export bans on basic grains—an unsurprising reaction to an unreliable global market, but a disaster for importing countries that have lost the capacity to produce their own food. The industrial agrifoods system has become the bane of the poor and the pork barrel of multinational corporations. A inancial cornucopia producing over $6 trillion a year in wealth, industrial agrifood is tragically one of the planet’s major drivers of global poverty and environmental destruction. 4 FOOD REBELLIONS! The global inancial crisis, following on the heels of the food crisis, is its decidedly less-silent “tsunami twin,” a child of the same deregulated expansion of global capital. The inancial crisis deepens the food crisis by restricting production credit and consolidating even more power in the hands of those few corporations inluential enough to obtain taxpayer-funded bailouts for their reckless investments. The tsunami twins are reshaping our food and inancial systems, and provoking a lurry of high-level agreements between governments and inancial houses, even as both farmers and consumers sufer under the squeeze of market volatility and disappearing credit. This book is an analytical resource for anyone interested in understanding the food crisis. It is also an informational manual for those who wish to do something about it. In Part One, we give a succinct and straightforward analysis of both the proximate and root causes of the food crisis. We provide speciic examples of how the people of the global South and underserved communities of the industrial North lost control over their food systems and how this led to the systemic vulnerability that underlies today’s crisis. In Part Two, the solutions advanced by the world’s main inancial, aid, and development institutions are analyzed and critiqued, and the unexamined assumptions and unstated agendas behind these initiatives are exposed. We follow with examples of the “struggle for spaces and places” between these projects and the grassroots eforts advancing equitable, agroecological and locally controlled food production and distribution from around the world. The conclusion of Food Rebellions! sets out concrete steps, policies and actions to solve the food crisis and put the world’s food systems on the road to food sovereignty. PART ONE THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS 2 Hunger, Harvests and Profits: The Tragic Records of the Global Food Crisis The year 2008 saw record levels of hunger for the world’s poor at a time of record global harvests and record proits for the world’s major agrifoods corporations. The contradiction of increasing hunger in the midst of wealth and abundance unleashed a lurry of worldwide “food riots” not seen for many decades. Protests were sparked by skyrocketing food prices. In June of 2008, the World Bank reported that global food prices had risen 83% over the previous three years and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cited a 45% increase in their world food price index in just nine months (Wiggins and Levy 2008). The Economist’s comparable index stood at its highest point since it was originally formulated (USDA 2008a). In March 2008, average world wheat prices were 130% above their level a year earlier, soy prices were 87% higher, rice had climbed 74%, and maize was up 31% (BBC 2008). The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicted that at least 90% of the increase in grain prices would persist during the next decade (USDA 2008a). Because they spend as much as 70%–80% of their income on food, the world’s poor—particularly women—were hit the hardest. Not surprisingly, people took to the streets in Mexico, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Egypt, Haiti and over 20 other countries. Scores of people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. In Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, food prices increased by 50%–100%, driving the poor to eat biscuits made of mud and vegetable oil. Angry protestors forced the Haitian prime minister out of oice. Street rebellions continued to lare in Haiti as successive hurricanes pummeled the island, destroying livelihoods and puting food farther and farther out of people’s reach. The World Bank warned that without massive, immediate injec- HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 7 Figure 1 World Population Growth Rates 1950–2050 2.0 1.5 1.0 2050 2040 2030 2020 2010 2000 1990 1980 1970 0.0 1960 0.5 1950 Growt h rat e % 2.5 Source: US Census Bureau, International Data Base, June 2008 Update tions of food aid, 100 million people in the global South would join the swelling ranks of the word’s hungry (World Bank 2008a). But the protests were not simply crazed “riots” by hungry masses. Rather, they were angry demonstrations against high food prices in countries that formerly had food surpluses, and where government and industry were unresponsive to people’s plight. Painfully prophetic, they signaled the onset of the global inancial crisis and economic recession now gripping the world economy. The food crisis appeared to explode overnight, reinforcing fears that there are just too many people in the world. But according to the FAO, with record grain harvests in 2007, there was more than enough food in the world to feed everyone—at least 1.5 times current demand. In fact, over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2% a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.14% a year (Hansen-Kuhn 2007; Rossi and Lambrou 2008). Globally, population is not outstripping food supply. According to the World Food Program, over 90% of the world’s hungry are too poor to buy enough food. “We’re seeing more people hungry and at greater numbers than before,” says executive director Josete Sheeran, “There is food on the shelves but people are priced out of the market” (Lean 2008a). Sheeran’s comments were signiicant, not only because they conirmed that hunger is due to poverty and not a lack of food, but also because they remind us that widespread world hunger is nothing 8 FOOD REBELLIONS! Figure 2 World Food Production 1979–2004 Million metric tons of grain, veg., and meat Increasing at 2% a year (from FAO 2006) 4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 79-81 89-91 99-01 2003 2004 Source: FAO 2006, Table B.1 new. Despite the ot-cited production gains of the Green Revolution, and despite repeated development campaigns over the last halfcentury—most recently, the Millennium Development Goals—the number of desperately hungry people on the planet has grown steadily from 700 million in 1986, to 800 million in 1998, to over 982 million today (Lappé et al. 1986; Lappé et al. 1998; Mathews 2008). Before the media picked up on the present food crisis there were already 852 million hungry people in the world (De Schuter 2008). Of these, nearly 600 million were women and girls (UNIFEM 2005). Even in the United States—the richest country in the world—35 million people were “food insecure” in 2006: unsure of their next meal or unable to procure suicient daily calories. Ironically, most of the US’s hungry people live in its rural “breadbaskets” working low-wage jobs in the “food industry.” Others live in the “food deserts” of its inner cities where low-income residents must travel for miles to ind fresh food. While seen as a serious problem, this situation was not generally referred to as a “global food crisis” by governments, the international aid institutions or the mainstream media. For over 30 years, thanks to market oversupply from Northern grain-producing countries, food HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 9 BOx 1 Hunger’s Timeline • 1974—500 million hungry people in t he developing world. The World Food Conference pledges t o eradicat e child hunger in 10 years. • 1996—830 million hungry people. The World Food Summit pledges t o reduce t he number of hungry people by half by 2015. — 12% of t he US populat ion is hungry. US Farm Bill increases food nut rit ion programs (Food St amps, Women, Infant s and Children in Need) and food banks augment donat ions of government surplus wit h locally and indust ry-donat ed food. • 2000 Millennium Summit —World leaders pledge t o reduce ext reme povert y and hunger by half by 2015. • 2002—850 million hungry people. The World Food Summit +5 admit s t o poor progress on t he Millennium Development Goals. • 2009—1 billion hungry people. The FAO High-Level Conference on World Food Securit y announces t hat inst ead of reducing t he ranks of t he hungry t o 400 million, hunger has increased. The World Bank recalculat es it s proj ect ions for ext reme povert y upwards from 1 billion t o 1.4 billion. Over 3 billion people live on about $2–$5 a day. (These proj ect ions were made before t he financial crisis engulfed t he world, driving down income and ushering in t he global recession.) — 12% of t he US populat ion is st ill hungry. Despit e $60 billion yearly in government food nut rit ion programs and t he explosion of over 50,000 food banks and food pant ries across t he nat ion, one in six children in t he US go hungry each mont h and 35 million people cannot ensure minimum daily caloric requirement s. prices had been on a steady downward trend. It was widely assumed that eventually—as the promised beneits from liberalized global trade began to kick in—the poor would be able to buy the food they needed. Not until the dramatic displacement of food crops by fuel crops began in 2006 did the FAO begin to warn of impending food shortages. But in the winter of 2007, instead of shortages, food price inlation exploded on world markets—in spite of that year’s record harvests. As a result, the number of hungry people jumped dramatically to 982 million in just one year (USDA 2008a). The riots that quickly spread across the globe took place not in areas where war or displacement made food unavailable (e.g., Darfur), but where available food was too expensive for the poor to buy. 10 FOOD REBELLIONS! The overnight reversal of a 30-year global trend in cheap food quickly became known as the “global food crisis.” The immediate reasons for food price inlation were easily identiied: droughts in major wheat-producing countries in 2005–06; less than 54 days in global grain reserves; high oil prices; the diversion of 5% of the world’s cereals to agrofuels and 70% to grain-fed beef; and, as prices began to rise, inancial speculation. Though grain futures and oil prices have recently dropped and an increase in agricultural growth is projected for 2009, retail food prices remain high in much of the global South, and most experts agree they will not drop back to pre-2007 levels. And what if they did? Even at those prices nearly a billion people on the planet were food insecure. The global economic recession will lower real incomes for millions, if not billions, of people, likely ofseting any gains from cheaper oil and grain. Unmanaged supply, unregulated markets and tight credit will continue to provoke chronic price volatility—boom and bust markets that do nothing to stabilize food production or ensure food security. If we focus only on food and oil prices, we are a long way from solving the food crisis. Why? Because, drought, low reserves, agrofuels, oil prices and speculation are only the proximate causes of the food crisis. By themselves, these factors do not explain why—in a dazzlingly aluent global food system—in 2010 up to three billion people will be food insecure. The food crisis has a distinctly feminine face: seven in ten of the world’s hungry are women and girls and fully two-thirds of the planet’s female population may be at risk. These proximate factors tipped us over the precipice, but to understand how and why we got there in the irst place, we need to address the root causes of the global food crisis as well. In this book, we’ll do both. Proximate Causes: The Multiple Triggers of Food Price Inflation The current food price spike is a combination of ive distinct factors: the high price of oil, the spread of agrofuels, the consumption of grain-fed meat, weather-related crop failures, and then—ater the initial prices increases—market speculation. HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 11 The volatile price of oil Fluctuating wildly between $40 and $140 a barrel, the price of oil exercises a ratchet efect of intermitent, but upward, pressure on food prices. High oil prices increase food production and distribution costs that then drive up food prices. Low oil prices take some of this pressure of, but rather than bring the shelf price of food down, these savings show up as windfall proits on the balance sheets of grain traders and retailers. The net efect is that though consumer food prices may have periods of leveling, they tend to “stick,” not fall. Modern industrial food requires many more calories of fossil fuel to produce than the calories people consume. This energy is required not only to transport food considerable distances (an average of 1,200–1,800 miles worldwide), but also for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides, and to operate machinery. The United States Department of Agriculture’s price index for nitrogen fertilizers was 118 in 2000, but reached 204 by 2006 (Wiggins and Levy 2008). The USDA projects that over the next decade cereals will cost 15% more per ton to produce (USDA 2008b). The upward production cost trend will continue. Rising meat consumption The Northern media has been quick to blame China and India for driving up cereal prices because of increasing consumption of grain-fed meat among growing middle classes. In this view, economic progress in developing economies puts a strain on the world’s food supply. But the fact is that both China and India are practically self-suicient in grain and meat. Some analysts insist that neither country will become a major meat or grain importer (Thompson 2007). (Actually, while less signiicant in absolute amounts, per capita grain consumption rates in the US are increasing over twice as fast as India’s.)1 The impact of meat diets on the world’s food systems has as much to do with how meat is produced and who is making a proit as it does with increasing incomes. True, meat and dairy consumption rose an average of 5% a year in China and other Asian countries over the last two decades—ive times faster than in the developed world. The socalled ‘nutrition transition’ has meant that increasing numbers of people in developing countries aspire to the unsustainable diets found in the United States and Western Europe, where consumers currently eat three times more meat than people in the developing world.2 12 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 2 Policy Versus Practice: The World Bank’s CAFOs Various World Bank publicat ions address confined animal feedlot operat ions (CAFOs), point ing t o t heir harmful effect s on animals, humans, and t he environment . Even t he Int ernat ional Finance Corporat ion (IFC), t he privat e sect or lending arm at t he World Bank Group published a Good Pract ice Not e st at ing t hat “ Animal welfare is j ust as import ant t o humans (as t o animals) for reasons of food securit y and nut rit ion. Bet t er management of and care for livest ock can…address nut rit ional deficiencies and food short ages as well as ensuring food safet y” (IFC 2006). Moreover, a book writ t en for t he World Bank t it led Livest ock Development : Implicat ions f or Rural Povert y, t he Environment , and Global Food Securit y offered a crit ical view of t he current feedlot product ion of cat t le, pigs, and poult ry. The document declared t hat “ A sea change will be required from t he int ernat ional livest ock communit y t o make people, rat her t han animals, t he focus of livest ock development . Focusing on t he mult iple funct ions of livest ock and including poor non-livest ock keepers as pot ent ial beneficiaries of livest ock development deserve a higher priorit y t han t he former exclusive focus on increasing milk and meat out put for urban consumers” (de Haan 1999). However, t he livest ock proj ect s financed by t he World Bank and ot her development banks (e.g., ADB—Asian Development Bank; IADB—Int erAmerican Development Bank) conflict direct ly wit h t hese policy recommendat ions. Numerous inst ances, past and present , demonst rat e flagrant violat ions of t heir own st at ed best pract ices. Cameroon, People’s Republic of China, Croat ia, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and Uruguay all have World Bank proj ect s t hat work t o develop CAFOs. One of t he most egregious cases involved a $93.45 million loan t o China in 1999 t o finance it s sixyear “ Smallholder Cat t le Development Proj ect .” According t o t he World Bank, “ t he proj ect has… accelerat ed t he indust rializat ion process of cat t le product ion, [and has] effect ively int egrat ed t he dispersed breeding unit s (feedlot s and breeding/ fat t ening households) wit h t he large market , and t he big-scale-sequent ial indust rial chain… has come int o being” (World Bank 2006). Indeed, t he proj ect t opped it s st at ed goal of const ruct ing 130 feedlot s by act ually creat ing 144 such facilit ies. Ot her similar examples involving beef, pork, and poult ry include: However, meat production in the global South has grown just as rapidly, and developing countries now supply over half of the world’s meat. The increase in global meat production is primarily due to the expansion of industrial feedlots that now produce 40% of all meat—at great social and environmental cost (Delgado et al. HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS Name of Project* Lender Country Year $ Product millions Animal Feed Proj ect WB China 1996 150 feed, pork, poult ry Mironovsky Khleboprodukt CJSC I and II IFC Ukraine 2003 110 poult ry Procesadora Nacional de Aliment os C.A. PRONACA I and II IFC Ecuador 2004, 2008 50 poult ry Support New Livest ock Product s in Uruguay IADB Uruguay 2005 15.8 beef Wadi Holdings I and II IFC Egypt 2005, 2007 40 poult ry Agrokor Proj ect I and II IFC Croat ia 2006, 2008 112 beef, pork Bert in Lt d. IFC Brazil 2006 90 beef Weishi Int egrat ed Feedlot and Beef Processing ADB China 2006 64.3 beef 13 *All proj ect s can be found at t he World Bank, IFC, IADB, and ADB websit es. These cases represent only a port ion of proj ect s t hat cont rast sharply wit h t he policy recommendat ions made t o t he World Bank t hat explicit ly warn of t he negat ive effect s of indust rial livest ock product ion. The gap bet ween what t he World Bank says and t he proj ect s it act ually finances appears meat y, indeed. de Haan, Cornelius. 1999. Livest ock Development : Implicat ions f or Rural Povert y, t he Environment , and Global Food Securit y. Washingt on DC: The World Bank. IFC. 2006. Animal Welfare in Livest ock Operat ions. In Good Pract ice Not e 6. World Bank Group. World Bank. 2006. Implement at ion complet ion report on a loan in t he amount of US$93.5 million t o t he People’s Republic of China for a smallholder cat t le development proj ect . In Report 35962. World Bank. 1999; Nierenberg 2004). According to Henning Steinfeld, senior oicer of Animal Production and Health of the FAO, the tremendous growth in industrial feedlots is due to the fact that policies, subsidies and economies of scale all favor large-scale livestock production (Steinfeld et al. 2006). 14 FOOD REBELLIONS! Industrial meat production is growing in China, thanks to US-based Tyson and Smithield corporations’ rapidly expanding Asian operations. Already China represents 9% of Tyson’s international sales (Tyson Foods Inc. 2008). Larry Pope, president and chief executive oicer of Smithield stated, “China is experiencing rapid growth in pork consumption and consumes more pork than the rest of the world combined. COFCO (Smithield’s Chinese ailiate) has introduced Smithield to many opportunities in China and we look forward to continue working together” (Smithield Foods 2008). The World Bank is eagerly inancing the expansion of feedlots in China through its private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Not only do feedlots contaminate air and groundwater, they have displaced hundreds of thousands of integrated, mixed farming systems and concentrated control of the world’s meat supply in fewer and fewer corporate hands. Feedlots are steadily depleting the world’s grain supply. It takes seven to eight kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef. As more and more resources are dedicated to producing feed for large-scale feedlot production, less land, water and resources are available for food: the grains, tubers, and pulses that keep over half the world’s population alive. Therefore, it is not China and India’s increased meat consumption per se that is puting a strain on the food system, it is the Northern model of industrial meat production that has pushed into the global South over the last two decades. Ironically, the growth of feedlots is encouraged by the very countries and development institutions— like the US and the World Bank—that now chastise China and India for eating too much meat! Unfavorable climate Poor harvests have been caused by climatic events, like the multiple, devastating hurricanes in 2008 in Burma, Cuba and Haiti. Extreme weather has been responsible for poor harvests, particularly in South East Asia and in Australia. An average of 500 weather-related disasters are now taking place each year, compared with 120 in the 1980s; the number of loods has increased six-fold over the same period (Oxfam 2007). This has at least as much to do with the increasing vulnerability of the environment and human populations as to weatherrelated hazards. Disasters are as much a function of poverty as climate (Blaikie et al. 1994; O’Keefe 1976). Current climate models predict that the worst agricultural losses HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 15 from climate change will be at lower latitudes and tropical climes (IPCC 2007). Small farmers in the developing world will likely suffer much more than their wealthier counterparts in the global North (Cline 2007). In fact, some scientists even predict a windfall for Northern farmers under certain climate change scenarios. This disproportionate efect stands to exacerbate the food crisis enormously. A 2°C–5°C rise in global temperatures stands to make water resources much more scarce and expand the reach of deserts in mid-latitudes (IPCC 2007). Combined with more extreme weather events, climate change is predicted to have “potentially severe” impacts on agriculture in the global South (Cline 2007). Ironically, it is the small-scale farmers, also largely in the global South, who are doing the most to cool the planet. Agriculture is responsible for at least 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC 2007)—largely from synthetic fertilizers and large animal feedlots. Greenhouse gas emissions—soil carbon loss, methane, and nitrous oxide—are all largely results of industrial-scale agricultural operations. In small-scale organic systems, carbon is actually stored in the soil at a rate of about four tons per hectare (La Salle and Hepperley 2008). Organic, sustainable agriculture that localizes food systems has the potential to mitigate nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and save one-sixth of global energy use (Ho et al. 2007). Agrofuels The agrofuels “boom” touched of a frenzy of venture capital investment in fuel crops, initially driving up the price of grains and food. This atracted further speculation with food. The use of arable land to grow industrial fuel crops is increasingly recognized as a net negative in terms of climate change, water and energy use (Fargione et al. 2008). The World Bank deemed the shit towards agrofuel crop production to be a signiicant contributor to food price rises (World Bank 2008a). Agrofuels have been criticized for their discriminatory efects against women, who disproportionately shoulder the consequences of the current food crisis (Rossi and Lambrou 2008). While the European Union appears to be retreating somewhat from its bullish agrofuels policy, the US continues to strongly support expansion. By establishing mandatory targets, protective tarifs, and blender’s credits, the US provides the agrofuels industry with a guaranteed market for global expansion. However, as we will see, the longterm impact of agrofuels on the food system goes beyond food price 16 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 3 Speculation 101: Gambling with the World’s Food Commodit ies f ut ures market s have exist ed in t he Unit ed St at es since 1865. Fut ures are st andardized legal agreement s t o t ransact in a physical commodit y at some designat ed fut ure t ime. Commodit ies fut ures cont ract s have provided producers and consumers wit h a mechanism t o offset t he risk of an asset ’s changing price, known as hedging. A farmer able t o sell fut ures cont ract s for t he expect ed harvest can lock in a price for his or her crop. Hedging allows t hose act ually t rading mat erial goods some prot ect ion from price fluct uat ions and allows t hem t o plan t heir businesses effect ively (Mast ers and Whit e 2008). In cont rast t o hedgers, speculat ors bet on t he probabilit y t hat t he price of a commodit y will rise or fall in order t o profit from changes in prices. Normally, t hey invest in t he debt , equit y and real est at e market s. However, aft er t he t echnology and housing bubbles burst , invest ors sunk t heir money int o commodit y fut ures. While a t radit ional speculat or looks for short -t erm price shift s from which t hey can profit , anot her t ype of speculat or called an index invest or seeks long-t erm invest ment s by hoarding commodit ies fut ures cont ract s for ext ended periods and bet t ing on t he cont inued rise of commodit y prices. There comes a t ime when index invest ors must “ roll” t heir commodit ies fut ures posit ion in order t o avoid delivery of physical commodit ies (t hey don’ t act ually want t he product —j ust t he change in value). “ Rolling” inlation and the “food versus fuel” debate, and concerns the transformation and corporate centralization of key aspects of the world’s food and fuel systems under one giant industrial roof. While the agrofuels “boom” may be a proximate cause of the food crisis, the industry itself is structurally one of the root causes of hunger. We’ll address agrofuels again later in the book. Speculation As the combination of drought, agrofuels and oil prices drove food prices upwards, speculators locked to the commodities market, eager to take advantage of rising prices. Perceived as safe bets (ater the US’s sub-prime mortgage meltdown), international investors sunk money into commodity futures in rice, wheat, corn and soy. This drove prices up even further, which in turn atracted more futures investment— HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 17 means a t rader simult aneously buys a more dist ant fut ure and sells t heir closer-t o-expirat ion fut ure. “ By periodically rolling over commodit y fut ures cont ract s, t he funds allow invest ors t o gain invest ment ret urns equivalent t o t he change in price of a single commodit y, or an ’ index’ of several commodit ies” (Collins 2008). The flooding of t he commodit ies fut ures market by index invest ors has t hrown off t he balance bet ween hedgers and speculat ors, leading t o higher prices and creat ing great er price volat ilit y. “ When hedgers dominat e t he commodit ies fut ures market place, prices accurat ely reflect t he supply and demand realit ies t hat physical consumers and producers are experiencing in t heir businesses” (Mast ers and Whit e 2008, 12). But in a market t hat is dominat ed by speculat ors, t rading is not necessarily disciplined by t radit ional supply and demand considerat ions. Remember, speculat ors don’ t have any int erest in physical t rading, but in making a profit . When all index speculat ors roll t heir posit ions in unison, it impact s t he market s significant ly by creat ing “ art ificial demand.” As money flows int o commodit ies fut ures market s, t he market price goes up. Who init iat es a buy order and why it is init iat ed are irrelevant when it comes t o an order’s impact on market prices. Since almost all t rading is anonymous, an order from a hedger will have t he exact same price impact as an index invest or. “ Today, commodit y prices have risen dramat ically but t here are f ew short ages…” It is prices, not supply, t hat has led t o food riot s around t he globe (Mast ers and Whit e 2008). Collins, B. 2008. Hot commodit ies, st uffed market s, and empt y bellies. Dollars & Sense 9:70. Mast ers, M.W., and A.K. Whit e. 2008. The Accident al Hunt Brot hers. Special Report . www.loe.org/ images/ 080919/ Act 1.pdf (accessed May 4, 2009). with litle or no oversight or controls coming from governments. Ater banking deregulation in the 1980s and the Commodities and Futures Modernization Act 2000, banks began to “cross over” into other inancial instruments, such as commodities. Commodities traders also began crossing over into inancial markets, traditional agribusinesses like Cargill and ADM grew investment arms, and traditional venture capital irms like Goldman Sachs even became importers of physical goods. All these crossovers make it diicult to control food speculation, or to prevent a crisis in one sector of the economy (such as the sub-prime mortgage disaster) from spreading through all sectors. Though rising commodity prices and inancial speculation with food have happened before, the “quantity… of money lowing through today’s markets is unprecedented in human history” (Collins 2008). The total holdings of commodity index investors on regulated US exchanges increased nearly 25 fold in ive years, from $13 billion in 18 FOOD REBELLIONS! 2003 to $317 billion. In the same time frame, commodity prices tripled (Masters and White 2008). As of April 2008, index investors owned approximately 35% of all regulated corn futures contracts in the US, 42% of all soybean contracts, and 64% of all wheat contracts, compared to minimal holdings in 2001. These holdings are immense: the wheat holdings alone could account for the delivery of two times US annual wheat consumption (Collins 2008). Index speculators are now the single most dominant force in the commodities futures markets, even though their buying and trading has nothing to do with the supply and demand fundamentals of any single commodity. BOx 4 The Monopolies Controlling our Food Systems Food indust ry concent rat ion, t hrough waves of mergers and buyout s, has increased dramat ically in t he past t wo decades. Up and down t he value chain and across sect ors, no area has been immune t o t his t rend. Economist s measure t he concent rat ion rat io of an indust ry as t he t ot al size of t he given market divided by t he market share of t he t op four firms in t hat market —a measure commonly known as t he CR4. In t he global food syst em, each link in t he indust rial food chain, from product ion fact ors t o ret ail, is now in t he hands of j ust a few players: • 83.5% of all of t he beef packing in t he Unit ed St at es is in t he hands of four firms (Tyson, Cargill, Swift & Co., and Nat ional Beef Packing Co.) (Hendrickson 2007). • Five firms (WalMart , Kroger, Albert son’s, Safeway, and Ahold) cont rol 48% of US food ret ailing (Hendrickson 2007). • Smit hfield, Tyson, Swift & Co., and Cargill pack 66% of all pork in t he US (Hendrickson 2007). • 71% of all soybean crushing is done by t hree firms—ADM, Bunge, and Cargill (Hendrickson 2007). • Three firms cont rol nearly 90% of global t rade in grains (ADM, Bunge, and Cargill). i • Just t wo firms, DuPont and Monsant o, cont rol nearly 60% of t he Unit ed St at es corn seed market (Hendrickson 2007). • Monsant o and Dupont t oget her cont rol 65% of t he maize seed market and 44% of t he soy market (Act ion Aid Int ernat ional 2005). HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 19 Behind the Proximate Causes: Food Systems in Crisis The proximate causes leading to the food crisis are only the immediate reasons why protests around food are so prevalent. High food prices are only a problem because nearly 3 billion people—half of the world’s population—are poor and near-poor. Half of these people—1.4 billion—earn less than $2 a day (of these, the “extremely poor” earn less than $1 a day). Many of those oicially classiied as poor are subsistence farmers who have limited access to land and water and cannot compete in rigged global markets. Something is Just a quick glance at t he list is a who’s who of t he t it ans of t he indust rial agrifoods complex—Bunge, ADM, Monsant o, DuPont , Cargill, WalMart , and ot hers. Not by coincidence, firms in t he food indust ry have seen sky-high profit s (De La Torre Ugart e 2008). Cont rol of t he global food syst em by a few powerful corporat ions is ext remely dangerous. Free market dogma st at es t hat market compet it ion will lead t o overall efficiency and t herefore lower prices for consumers. In fact , what t he numbers indicat e is t hat t he increase in market concent rat ion has led t o ext reme volat ilit y. Unless we want t he world food syst em t o end up like t he world financial syst em, t hese monopolies must be dismant led. i. In a speech by Dr. Bill Heffernan at t he AAI meet ing of agrifood indust ry researchers, Paris. January 15, 2005. Quot ed in O’ Driscoll 2005. Act ion Aid Int ernat ional. 2005. Power Hungry: Six Reasons t o Regulat e Global Food Corporat ions. Johannesburg: Act ion Aid Int ernat ional. www.act ionaid. org.uk/ _cont ent / document s/ power_hungry.pdf (accessed April 9, 2009). De La Torre Ugart e, Daniel G. and Sophia Murphy. 2008. The global food crisis: Creat ing an opport unit y for fairer and more sust ainable food and agricult ure syst ems worldwide. In Eco-Fair Trade Dialogue 11. Heinrich Boell Foundat ion and MISEREOR. ht t p:/ / www.ecofair-t rade.org/ pics/ de/ EcoFair_ Trade_Paper_No11_Ugart e__Murphy_1.pdf (accessed April 9, 2009). Hendrickson, Mary and William Heffernan. 2007. Concent rat ion of Agricult ural Market s. Nat ional Farmers’ Union. www.nfu.org/ wp-cont ent / 2007-heffernanreport .pdf (accessed April 9, 2009). O’ Driscoll, Pet er. 2005. Part of t he Problem: Trade, Transnat ional Corporat ions and Hunger. In Cent er Focus. Washingt on DC: Cent er of Concern. 20 FOOD REBELLIONS! deeply dysfunctional when the majority of the world’s farmers go hungry. In this sense, high food prices do not constitute a crisis in and of themselves—high food prices combined with widespread poverty are symptoms of a global food system in crisis. The root causes of the food crisis lie in a skewed global food system that has made Southern countries and poor people everywhere highly vulnerable to economic and environmental shock. This vulnerability springs from the risks, inequities and externalities inherent in food systems that are dominated by a globalized, highly centralized, industrial agrifoods complex. Built over the past half-century— largely with public funds for grain subsidies, foreign aid, and international agricultural research—the industrial agrifoods complex is made up of multinational grain traders, giant seed, chemical and fertilizer corporations, global processors and supermarket chains. These global companies dominate local markets and increasingly control the world’s food-producing resources: land, labor, water, inputs, genes, and investments. While many activists assert that the global food system is “broken,” for these companies, it works extraordinarily well. Today two companies, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill capture three-quarters of the world grain trade (Vorley 2003). Chemical giant Monsanto controls 41% of maize seed and 25% of soy production (GRAIN 2007). Monopolization of the world’s food provides these companies with unprecedented market power. This translates into proits in the midst of crisis. In the last quarter of 2007 as the world food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s earnings jumped 42%, Monsanto’s by 45%, and Cargill’s by 86%. Mosaic Fertilizer, a subsidiary of Cargill, saw proits rise by 1,200% (Lean 2008b). Even the livestock sector in the US—supposedly hard hit by soaring grain prices—saw proit increases in the irst and second quarters of 2008 up 429% compared to a year earlier. The trend towards monopoly control over our food systems is particularly visible from within the US, where a handful of transnational corporations in the industrial agrifoods complex mediate the relationship between three million farm operators and 300 million consumers and gobble up the lion’s share of the food dollar. Over the last 60 years, the companies that buy, sell, and process farm products, and the chains that distribute and sell food, have steadily eroded farmers’ proits. While in the 1950s US farmers received 40%–50% of the food dollar, today they receive around 20% (National Farmers Union 2008; University of Georgia College of Agriculture HUNGER, HARVESTS AND PROFITS 21 Figure 3 The Hourglass: The Concentration of Power and Players in the Food System United States Farm operat ors 3,054,000 Farm propriet ors 2,188,957 Farm product raw wholesale 7,563 Food manufact urers 27,915 Grocery and relat ed product s wholesale 35,650 Food and beverage st ores 148,804 Consumers 300,000,000 Not to scale and Environmental Sciences 2008). With this, farmers must still pay for inputs and labor. The erosion of the farmer’s share of the food dollar has been accompanied by the steady disappearance of farmers. From a high of seven million farms in 1935, the US now has less than two million. Agricultural land area—around a billion acres— has changed litle. This means that tremendous concentration has taken place. Over the last 70 years, the average farm size doubled. US direct payment subsidies amount to billions of dollars a year. Even the US Department of Agriculture concedes that these direct subsidies have the efect of further concentrating land ownership in agriculture (Roberts and Key 2008). The proits and concentration of market power in the industrial North mirror the import dependence, food deicits and the loss of control over food systems in the global South.3 Fity years ago, developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of US$1 billion. Today, ater decades of development and the global expansion of the industrial agrifoods complex, the Southern food deicit has ballooned to US$11 billion/year (FAO 2004). The cereal import bill for low income food deicit countries reaching over US$ 38 billion in 2007/2008 (De Schuter 2008). The FAO predicts it will grow to US$50 billion by 2030. 22 FOOD REBELLIONS! The rise of food dependency and hunger in the global South is not the result of overpopulation, a conspiracy, or the “invisible hand” of the market. As we shall see, it is the result of the systematic destruction of Southern food systems through a series of economic development projects imposed by the Northern institutions. 3 Root Causes: How the Industrial Agrifoods Complex Ate the Global South The destruction of Southern food systems occurred over time, with starts and stops, and was very uneven, geographically and across social sectors. Moments of breathtaking yield increases in parts of Asia and the Americas were paralleled by lat productivity gains elsewhere on the same continents (even within the same regions), and followed by long periods of grinding stagnation. The lowering of agribusiness was accompanied by the impoverishment of many farming communities; the decline in the dominance of the “dessert” commodities (bananas, sugar, cacao, cofee) was accompanied by the growth in non-traditional exports (cut lowers, winter vegetables). The expansion of agricultural land came at the expense of forests, prairies and wetlands. Cheap, abundant food was dogged by persistent hunger, diet-related diseases and an obesity epidemic. In the process, global forms of industrial production, processing and distribution steadily undermined local, national and regional food systems. The emergence of the global food system parallels the rise of the industrial agrifoods complex that controls and proits from it. Its history is complicated and oten violent, one that stitches the livelihoods, diets, environments and economies of producers and consumers in the industrial North to those in the global South—oten to the detriment of both. It was not the result of chance or a “natural” progression of events. There are four key threads to the story that will help us understand how the global system emerged, how the industrial agrifoods complex became dominant, and why both are failing people and the planet: 24 FOOD REBELLIONS! Development and the Green Revolution (1960–90) Agriculture was a key component of “development”—the extension of the industrial North’s economic model to the “lesser developed countries” of the global South. The modernization of agriculture, based on the industrialization of farm inputs, was deemed the “Green Revolution.”4 Though credited for saving the world from hunger, the Green Revolution led to the monopolization of seed and chemical inputs by Northern companies, the loss of 90% of the South’s agricultural biodiversity, the global shit to an oil-based agricultural economy, and the displacement of millions of peasants to fragile hillsides, shrinking forests and urban slums. Contrary to popular belief, the Green Revolution also produced as many hungry people as it saved (Lappé et al., 1998). Overproduction and food aid Following the Great Depression, the US created a farm price support system to manage supply and make sure farmers’ production costs were more or less commensurate with the prices they received for their grain. Surplus production was held in reserves that were used in lean years and sent abroad to allies during World War II. Following the war, the US stepped up agricultural production, illing up the reserves and sending surplus to Europe during reconstruction. European agriculture recovered because governments bought all of farmers’ grains at a good price, stimulating supply. With the spread of new technologies like fertilizer, pesticides, and mechanization, Europe and the US began chronically producing more than they could consume. Instead of cuting back on production, Northern governments used combinations of subsidies, tarifs, price supports, and quotas to ensure a continuous oversupply. Why? On the one hand this lowered the price of grains to Northern agro-industries and traders. On the other, these cheap surpluses could be channeled into food aid and “dumped” into overseas markets. Overproduction in the North was used as a batering ram to open up markets in the global South for the beneit of those same agro-industries—to the detriment of farmers in the South who could not compete. In the US price supports were lowered yearly, overproduction increased year ater year, and farmers were steadily forced to leave the land. Because it is designed to ensure overproduction, most of the beneits of government support to agriculture are captured by large ROOT CAUSES 25 corporations who revel in the cheap grain. While the concept of public support for the food system is vital, the way that subsidies and market-price supports have been used in the US and Europe simply exacerbate oversupply, drive farmers from the land, and lead to international dumping and corporate concentration in the food system. Structural adjustment programs The structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s and 1990s broke down tarifs, dismantled national marketing boards, eliminated price guarantees and destroyed research and extension systems in the global South. By deregulating agricultural markets, the SAPs cleared the way for the “dumping” of agricultural commodities by multinational grain companies into local markets with subsidized grain from the US and Europe. These grains were sold at prices below the costs of production. This tied Southern food security to global markets dominated by multinational agribusinesses from the industrial North instead of encouraging developing countries to increase self-suiciency through local farm production. Regional free trade agreements and the World Trade Organization The rules of the free trade agreements (FTAs) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) then cemented the SAPs into international treaties that overrode national labor and environmental laws and legally prevented countries from protecting their food systems from foreign dominance. While these policies were sold under the banner of “free trade,” under WTO rules the US and EU can heavily subsidize their agribusinesses, but other countries are prohibited from doing the same. The overlapping histories of development, the Green Revolution, Northern subsidies, structural adjustment and free trade agreements constitute an agrarian saga of global proportions and helps to explain why poverty and overproduction—not scarcity and overpopulation—are the main cause of hunger in the world. The tragic story of the world food crisis begins with the introduction of “development,” the North’s modernization project for the global South. 26 FOOD REBELLIONS! Development and the Green Revolution During the Cold War (1950–90) Western countries claimed they could pull underdeveloped nations out of poverty if they followed the industrialized world’s path of economic growth. Policymakers in the US and Western Europe were anxious to bring the “third world” into the Western bloc and away from China and the Soviet Union. The problem of underdevelopment was framed as a lack of technology, investment, and entrepreneurial culture. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto was the technocratic cookbook used by development planners (Rostow 1960). The IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), originally designed to create a luid and stable trading environment, and provide for the reconstruction of Western Europe, were recruited to develop Western capitalism in the third world (Preston 1996; Rapley 1996). Agriculture was to mobilize a signiicant social and economic surplus—in the form of low-wage labor and cheap food—from the countryside to the cities for urban industrial growth. At that time state-led development policies created a favorable inancial and institutional climate for the Green Revolution, the blueprint for agricultural modernization (Jennings 1988). But there were also macroeconomic reasons for its success. Through the 1960s, food aid for developing countries was becoming increasingly expensive. In the 1970s OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) raised the price of oil, creating a shortage. The US responded by trading wheat for oil with the Soviet Union. To do this, US food aid that had previously been shipped to governments to prevent them from developing economic relationships with the Soviet Union was shipped to… the Soviet Union! The US–Soviet food-for-oil program meant that there was less food available for food aid. A new food program was required for the global South so as to keep communism at bay. The Green Revolution it the bill perfectly. Led from the 1960s on by scientist Norman Borlaug (who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work), and initially inanced by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Green Revolution was supported by Western governments through a well-inanced campaign that established a massive global research and extension system. Scientists working at the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico, and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, developed high-yielding ROOT CAUSES 27 hybrid varieties of grain (HYVs). These hybrids were then adapted to local conditions at national agricultural research stations and disseminated through national agricultural extension programs. Rural banks provided credit with government inancing. The HYVs’ yields were dependent on “packages” of credit, fertilizers, and timely irrigation. They favored the use of modern agricultural machinery. In Mexico, Asia and India, the Green Revolution raised agricultural productivity on the medium-to-large mechanized farms that had access to agricultural extension, irrigation, and the production credit needed to buy the technological packages. Production increases were dramatic. From 1970 to 1990, the two decades of major Green Revolution expansion, the total food available per person in the world rose by 11%, while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, a 16% drop. But, in South America, where per capita food supplies rose almost 8%, the number of hungry people went up by 19%. In South Asia there was a 9% increase in food per capita by 1990, but there were also 9% more hungry people. Eliminate China from the global equation—where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million—and the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually increased by more than 11%—from 536 to 597 million (Lappé et al. 1986). When the Green Revolution stagnated in the 1990s, cereal yield increases dropped by half and the number of hungry people ballooned to 800 million (World Bank 2003). The main problem was that poor people couldn’t aford all the food being produced and went hungry, despite grain surpluses. The millions of peasant farmers forced of the land to make way for larger, more capital-eicient farms joined the ranks of the hungry. The social and environmental drawbacks of the Green Revolution were widely documented, including: increased inequality in rural incomes; concentration of land and resources (Frankel 1973; Hewit de Alcántara 1976; Rosegrant and Pingali 1994); increasing pest problems; loss of agrobiodiversity; massive farm worker poisonings; salinization; depleted and contaminated aquifers; and the erosion of fragile tropical soils (Altieri 2000; Gliessman 1998; Pearse 1980; Pimentel and Pimentel 1990; Shiva 1991; Singh 2000; The Ecologist 1996). Initially, the Green Revolution failed to incorporate poor and middle peasants and rural women. This accentuated existing gender and socioeconomic disparities in the countryside. The high cost of its purchased inputs deepened the divide between large farmers 28 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 5 The Green Revolution in Mexico The root s of t he Green Revolut ion are found in Mexico during t he 1940s, wit h t he policies of President Ávila Camacho and sponsorship from t he Rockefeller Foundat ion, a US philant hropic organizat ion based on t he profit s from John D. Rockefeller’s St andard Oil Company. Rockefeller had already run a public healt h proj ect in Mexico for decades when in 1941 t hey sent a survey t eam of t hree US scient ist s t o invest igat e t he pot ent ial for an agricult ure proj ect as well. These scient ist s recommended a program t o t rain Mexican agronomist s, improve weed and pest cont rol, and breed higher-yielding variet ies of maize, wheat , and beans. They suggest ed an init ial focus on large commercial growers, wit h lat er expansion t o reach small-scale peasant agricult ure (Merrill and Miró 1996). Such recommendat ions cont radict ed t hose of Carl Sauer, a respect ed geography professor at t he Universit y of California, Berkeley, who had a great deal of knowledge of t he Mexican count ryside, and whom t he foundat ion had also sent t o evaluat e Mexican agricult ure (Hewit t de Alcánt ara 1976). Sauer recommended a primary focus on peasant s’ act ual needs, not ing t hat t heir agricult ural and nut rit ional pract ices were “ excellent ” and t hat t he main problems were economic (e.g. isolat ion from market s and lack of access t o credit ) rat her t han t echnical. Sauer’s suggest ions generat ed lit t le discussion or ent husiasm wit hin t he foundat ion (Merrill and Miró 1996; Jennings 1988). In 1941, t wo foundat ion officials met wit h US Vice President Henry A. Wallace and st at ed t hat one of Mexico’s most import ant problems was t he need for great er agricult ural product ion. Wallace t oo expressed concern about low product ivit y in t he face of a high birt h rat e, and encouraged t he creat ion of t he Mexican Agricult ure Program (MAP) as a j oint effort bet ween t he Rockefeller Foundat ion and Mexican government (Merrill and Miró 1996). The MAP est ablished crop research st at ions t hroughout Mexico, where scient ist s began collect ing t he highest -yielding st rains of corn and wheat (from wit hin Mexico and abroad) and cross-breeding t hem t o creat e new variet ies wit h great er disease resist ance and higher yield. Over t ime, t he scient ist s bred new variet ies capable of responding t o high doses of fert ilizer t hat when grown on irrigat ed land under favorable condit ions yielded far more t han t radit ional variet ies (Merrill and Miró 1996; Hewit t de Alcánt ara 1976). Over t he following t wo decades, Mexican agricult ural product ion grew t remendously and t he count ry became self-sufficient in it s grain supply (Hewit t de Alcánt ara 1976; Wright 2005). However, t his success was not solely due t o chemicals and higher-yielding crop variet ies, but t o government policies support ing domest ic agricult ure and ensuring affordable food for t he ent ire populat ion (Barry 1995). Self-sufficiency was not simply t he result of ROOT CAUSES 29 great er quant it ies of food being produced, but of government int ervent ion and programs making sure everyone had access t o food (Barry 1995). This changed during t he 1970s. In response t o a growing demand for meat by t he urban middle and upper class, t he government priorit ized t he product ion of feed grains (for livest ock) over t hat of food grains (for human consumpt ion), and t he availabilit y of basic grains as a food source began t o decline. Even t hough agricult ural growt h had made it possible t o provide 2,623 calories and 80 grams of prot ein per day t o t he ent ire populat ion, an est imat ed one-t hird of Mexicans in 1970 (mainly in t he count ryside or in migrant set t lement s j ust out side cit ies) st ill could not obt ain an adequat e diet and suffered from malnut rit ion. This illust rat ed t he proj ect ’s failure, in spit e of increased product ivit y, t o act ually reach t he poorest segment s of societ y (Barry 1995; Jennings 1988). Today, crit ics of t he Green Revolut ion argue t hat t he “ food short age” of t he early 1940s was also t he result of inadequat e policies and dist ribut ion rat her t han low product ivit y. It ’s clear t hat urban demand for food in t he early 1940s was growing fast er t han t ot al out put , prices were rising, and a short crop of corn in 1943 led t o public prot est s and riot s t hroughout t he count ry (Barry 1995; Merrill and Miró 1996). But according t o Cynt hia Hewit t de Alcánt ara of t he UN Research Inst it ut e for Social Development , t his was not t he result of a lack of agricult ural capacit y so much as a “ sudden shift in consumpt ion priorit ies at t he t urn of t he decade.” Hewit t de Alcánt ara assert s t hat product ion in t he count ryside had act ually been increasing and t hat food was plent iful, but t hat it would have t aken t ime and invest ment t o build t he infrast ruct ure for channeling t hat product ion t o urban consumers. The proponent s of indust rializat ion, however, were unwilling t o provide such invest ment t o smallholder agricult ure. As a result , t he maj orit y of food ent ering t he nat ional market during t he 1940s came from large commercial farms, while vast numbers of smaller growers remained isolat ed from market s t hey might have supplied (Barry 1995). Adapt ed from Dori St one, Beyond t he Fence: A Journey t o t he Root s of t he Migrat ion Crisis, Food First Books, 2009 Barry, Tom. 1995. Zapat a’s Revenge: Free Trade and t he Farm Crisis in Mexico. Bost on: Int erhemispheric Resource Cent er. Hewit t de Alcánt ara, Cynt hia. 1976. Modernizing Mexican Agricul t ure: Socioeconomic Implicat ions of Technological Change 1940–1970. Geneva: Unit ed Nat ions Research Inst it ut e for Social Development . Jennings, Bruce H. 1988. Foundat ions of Int ernat ional Agricult ural Research: Sciences and Polit ics in Mexican Agricult ure. Boulder: West view Press, Inc. Merrill, Tim and Ramón Miró. 1996. Government Agricultural Policy. In Mexico: A Count ry St udy. Washington DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. Wright , Angus. 2005. The Deat h of Ramón González: The Modern Agricult ural Dilemma. 2nd ed. Aust in: Universit y of Texas Press. 30 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 6 Sub-Saharan Africa’s Population Factor The populat ion of sub-Saharan African has grown from 230 million in 1961 t o 673 million in 2000—a 292%increase over 39 years (WRI 2007). Domest ic food product ion has not kept pace. Agricult ural export s have fallen and import s are up t enfold. Why? Poor soils, poor seeds, and poor people are t he st ock answers. These explanat ions do not look at why African family farmers have t o farm poor soils, why t heir access t o seeds is limit ed, or why so many people on such a resource-rich cont inent are poor. Through it s st ruct ural adj ust ment policies, t he World Bank and t he IMF pressured African count ries t o abandon small-farm agricult ure, which was seen by t hese inst it ut ions as unproduct ive. Development policies pushed people t o t he cit ies, where t hey were t o provide labor t o manufact uring and indust ry. African indust rial agricult ure would produce export crops (e.g., coffee, cacao, cot t on) t o pay off t heir foreign debt and Africans would use revenues from indust ry t o import t heir food. The bank insist ed t hat t his development st rat egy would result in increased family incomes and economic securit y, t hus leading t o lower populat ion growt h rat es. This st rat egy failed miserably. The urban populat ion increased seven-fold, swelling from 18% t o 33% of t he populat ion. Millions of poor and unemployed workers crowded int o t he cit ies—wit h t wo-t hirds of t hem living in slums (WRI 2007). The manufact uring and indust rial sect or did not “ t ake off” in African count ries; t he percent age of t he GDP coming from indust ry was 30% in 1961 and 32% in 2000 (WRI 2007). In t he count ryside, as plant at ions for agro-export s expanded, food product ion for local consumpt ion plummet ed and povert y grew. Wit hin t he rural populat ion, densit y increased by 180%as more farmers were crowded ont o smaller plot s. While t he rest of t he developing world lowered t he amount of export earnings t hey spent on food import s from 42% t o 24%, African count ries increased t he share t hey spent on food import s from 42% t o 54% (Azarnert 2004). The indust rial t ransit ion did not slow populat ion growt h because it act ually increased povert y and insecurit y in bot h rural and urban areas. This rise in populat ion was not t he cause of hunger, per se, but t he result of povert y—brought on by t he programmed dest ruct ion of African food syst ems. Azarnert , L. 2004. Foreign Aid and Popul at ion Growt h: Evidence f rom Af r i ca. ht t p: / / www. commerce. uct . ac. za/ Research_Unit s/ DPRU/ DPRUConf erence2004/ Papers/ Forei gn_Ai d_and_Popul at i on_Growt h_Leoni d_ Azarnert .pdf (accessed January 3, 2009). WRI. 2007. World Resource Inst it ut e. Eart ht rends 2007. ht t p:/ / eart ht rends.wri. org/ searchable_db/ index.php?t heme=8 (accessed Oct ober 1, 2008). ROOT CAUSES 31 and smallholders because the later could not aford the technology. Women also had less access to credit, inputs and extension services than their male counterparts, placing the Green Revolution’s economies of scale largely out of reach for rural women (IFPRI 2000). In both Mexico and India, seminal studies revealed that the Green Revolution’s expensive “packages” favored a minority of economically privileged farmers, put the majority smallholders at a disadvantage, and led to the concentration of land and resources (Hewit de Alcántara 1976; Frankel 1973; Jennings 1988; Pearse 1980). In fact, a study reviewing every research report published on the Green Revolution over a 30-year period all over the world—more than 300 in all—showed that 80% of those with conclusions on equity found that inequality increased (Freebairn 1995). With the help of development institutions, governments implemented integrated rural development projects (IRDPs) in an atempt to address these social problems. Strikingly similar to Jefrey Sachs’ high-proile “Millennium Villages” in Africa today, IRDPs atempted to improve agriculture by addressing all aspects of rural development on a village scale. The IRDPs failed as a development strategy because they were too expensive, logistically complicated and institutionally cumbersome. Because of this, in the few instances where IRDPs had partial successes, the actual factors of success were diicult to identify and the results were impossible to reproduce on a large scale. Nevertheless, they were good vehicles for introducing what became known as the “second” Green Revolution, in which smallholders were ofered credit and agricultural extension in order to facilitate widespread adoption of commercial hybrids. It was assumed that early adopters would “make it” in modern agriculture. Non-adopters and late adopters would be forced out of production and into the labor market. Higher eiciencies would make basic grains cheap and bring down urban food prices for industrial expansion. An unspoken objective of the Green Revolution was to avoid implementing agrarian reform. In this sense, the Green Revolution was less a campaign to feed the urban poor than a strategy to prevent the rural poor from seizing land to feed themselves. Rather than raise production through redistribution of land to smallholders, the Green Revolution favored raising production through technological intensiication. This strategy, a thinly veiled atempt to eliminate the “surplus” peasantry, forced millions of smallholders to migrate to the misery 32 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 7 As You Sow: Farmer Suicides and Structural Violence in the Green Revolution’s Breadbasket No great er misfort une could perhaps befall t he people of India t han t hat t heir land should be poisoned wit h art ificial fert ilizers. M.K. Gandhi, 1947 Never before in t he hist ory of agricult ure has a t ransplant at ion of highyielding variet ies coupled wit h an ent irely new t echnology and st rat egy been achieved on such a massive scale, in so short a period of t ime, and wit h such great success. N. Borlaug, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1970 A farmer allegedly commit t ed suicide aft er failing t o sell off his paddy crop in t he Nadala Mandi premises in Kapurt hala dist rict on Sunday night . Heavily indebt ed, Kulj it Singh killed his wife and t eenage son wit h a machet e and t hen commit t ed suicide by consuming a poisonous fumigant . Kulj it Singh… could not t ake t he humiliat ion, t ension and t he pressure of t he money lender and found escape only in suicide. (Newman 2007) Alongside India’s t remendous middle class growt h and t he much-celebrat ed boom of it s IT sect or, a quiet emergency of debt -driven suicide has t aken hold in t he count ryside. Since 1993, as many as 150,000 indebt ed Indian farmers have t aken t heir own lives (Mishra 2006). Many of t hese farmers died consuming t he very same pest icides t hey had bought t o use on t heir fields. The government of Punj ab concedes t hat 2,116 indebt ed Punj abi farmers commit t ed suicide bet ween 1988 and 2004 (Adit i 2006). Many farmers’ right s act ivist s claim t his figure may be a severe underest imat ion. Suicides are ripping t he count ryside apart , but so is hunger and povert y. In 2001, wit h granaries so full of surplus t hat Indian aut horit ies proposed dumping t hem int o t he sea, hunger deat hs were report ed in 12 Indian st at es—deat hs unheard of since t he 1960s. In 2008 India ranked 66t h out of 88 count ries on t he Int ernat ional Food Policy Research Inst it ut e’s Hunger Index (IFPRI 2008). Unemployment , especially among yout h, is rampant (Singh et al. 2003). Once credit ed wit h t ransforming India from t he world’s “ begging bowl t o a bread basket ,” (Agarwal 1979) t he seemingly endless abundance of Punj ab was t he post er child for t he Green Revolut ion. So what failed India’s miracle st at e? The int roduct ion of Green Revolut ion t echnologies int o Punj ab—India’s hist orical bread basket —while succeeding in growing significant ly more food for t he rest of India, has brought about economic, environment al and ROOT CAUSES 33 social disast ers t o Punj abi farmers. Punj ab’s agrarian crisis consist s of t hree int erconnect ed fact ors: • Rampant and widespread debt among farmers due to shrinking markets, flat support prices, stagnating crop yields, and increasing production costs • Social inequalit ies exacerbat ed by t he exclusionary policies of t he Green Revolut ion and it s aft ermat h • Ecological breakdown in bot h soil and wat er syst ems. Small and marginal Punj abi farmers, t he rural maj orit y, are t he most indebt ed, unable t o st ay afloat amid liberalizing economic reforms geared t oward t heir larger count erpart s and t ransnat ional agribusiness. Yet even t he largest farmers in Punj ab have not been complet ely immune t o t he environment al and economic damage caused by 40 years of indust rial agricult ure. Punj abi agricult ure as a whole appears t o be crashing. In 1961 t he Ford and Rockefeller Foundat ions launched an Int ensive Agricult ural Development Program in India, bringing t he Green Revolut ion t hat had been rolled out in Mexico and t he Philippines t o t he nort h Indian st at e of Punj ab. The program set out t o feed India’s angry masses t hrough chemical int ensive farming—and in t he process t o avert t he possibilit y of a “ Red India.” As early as 1969, nearly 70% of Punj ab’s wheat and 20% of it s rice were from Green Revolut ion seeds. Only t hree years lat er, over 75% of rice, and almost 80% of wheat grown in Punj ab were of t he new variet ies. Bet ween 1960 and 1979, t ot al st at ewide yields in wheat increased by 124%, while rice yields shot up by 175% (McGuirk and Mundlak 1991). However, t ot al st at ewide yield does lit t le t o indicat e t he yields of t he maj orit y of Punj ab’s farmers. For t hose wit h marginal, small and mediumsized land holdings, t he cost ly new input s—fert ilizers, pest icides, t ubewell irrigat ion, et c.—priced t he Green Revolut ion far beyond t heir means. While t he maj orit y of Punj ab’s farmers worked only t en acres or less, t he economics of t he Green Revolut ion were such t hat only t hose farmers owning at least 20 acres were in a posit ion t o purchase t he new input s (Frankel 1973). As t he Green Revolut ion progressed (1970–90), land holdings of small farmers decreased by almost 40%, while t hose of large and “ ext ra-large” farmers increased by over 50% (UNDP 2004). Today, a significant number of cult ivat ors st ill work small and marginal pieces of land in t he Punj ab; nearly 400,000 holdings of t wo hect ares or less were recorded in a 1996 st at e agricult ural census (UNDP 2004). These small farmers have almost no abilit y t o secure credit t hrough convent ional banks and must t urn t o money lenders. The high int erest rat es t hat t hese agent s charge, combined wit h t he low annual income of t he small farmer, has creat ed a “ debt t rap.” Once caught in t he debt t rap, t here is almost no alt ernat ive for t he small farmer 34 FOOD REBELLIONS! but t o sell or mort gage t heir land—a st ep t aken by about 14% of small farmers as well as a few ent ire villages. The new seeds int roduced int o Punj ab since t he 1960s have been complet ely dependent on int ensive irrigat ion. The combined force of one million t ubewells, while propelling forward t he crops of t he Green Revolut ion, has devast at ed Punj ab’s fragile ecosyst em. Sixt y-one percent of Punj ab is now an official “ black zone,” an area where irrigat ion use—which has increased 200 t imes over t he last t hree decades—is great er t han it s rat e of recharge (Agnihot ri 2004). Punj ab’s wat er t able has been est imat ed by R.S. Narang and M.S. Gill of t he normally conservat ive Punj ab Agricult ural Universit y t o be ret reat ing by t wo met ers annually over t wo-t hirds of t he st at e, leading t hem t o conclude t hat , “ t his [sit uat ion] has now reached such alarming proport ions t hat quest ions are now being asked as t o what ext ent rice cult ivat ion should be permit t ed in t he irrigat ed Indo-Ganget ic Plains” (Agnihot ri 2004). If t he Green Revolut ion was a success, what are we t o make of t he dying soils, shrinking wat er t ables, increased inequalit y and skyrocket ing debt t hat have become part and parcel of it s legacy in rural Punj ab? Can a program be described as economically “ successful” if it dest roys t he wealt h and livelihoods upon which it rest s? In 1986 a resolut ion was passed at t he all-Sikh convent ion condemning t he inequalit ies of t he Green Revolut ion. It read: If t he hard-earned income of t he people or t he nat ural resources of any nat ion or t he region are forcibly plundered; if t he goods produced by t hem are paid for at arbit rarily det ermined prices while t he goods bought are sold at higher prices and if, in order t o carry t his process of economic exploit at ion t o it s logical conclusion, t he human right s of a nat ion, region or people are lost t hen t he people will be like t he Sikhs t oday—shackled by t he chains of slavery. (Shiva 1992) The Indian scholar Vandana Shiva sees increased inequalit y in t he Punj ab not only as inj ust ice, but a t ype of violence. In her 1992 book she says t he Green Revolut ion in t he Punj ab: changed t he st ruct ure of social and polit ical relat ionships, from t hose based on mut ual (t hough asymmet ric) obligat ions—wit hin t he village t o relat ions of each cult ivat or direct ly wit h banks, seed and fert ilizer agencies, food procurement agencies, and elect ricit y and irrigat ion organizat ions. Furt her, since all t he ext ernally supplied input s were scarce, it set up conflict and compet it ion over scarce resources, bet ween classes, and bet ween regions… t his generat ed on t he one hand, an erosion of cult ural norms and pract ices and on t he ot her hand, it sowed t he seeds of violence and conflict . (Shiva 1992) ROOT CAUSES 35 Shiva blames t he Green Revolut ion for t he out break of Sikh-on-Sikh violence in t he lat e 1980s t hat left 550 people dead in four mont hs (Weismann 1987), for t he disast er at t he Union Carbide pest icide plant in 1984 t hat killed over 30,000 people in Bhopal and most recent ly for t he rash of farmer suicides (Shiva n.d.). But aside from manifest at ions of physical violence, t he legacy of t he Green Revolut ion in Punj ab is a quiet er kind of dest ruct ion—a st ruct ural violence t hat enforces hunger in t imes of plent y, ext ract s wat er and soil from an ever-shrinking resource base, dispossesses small-farm families, and forges an expensive dependency on mult inat ionals t hat has cost many farmers t heir lives. Part ially adapt ed from Bryan Newman, A Bit t er Harvest : Farmer Suicide in India, Food First Development Report , no. 15, January 2007. Adit i, Tandon. 2006. The Kin of Indebt ed Farmers Finally Get t o Speak. The Tribune. April 2. Agarwal, Anil. 1979. From Begging Bowl t o Bread Basket . Nat ure 281:250–51. Agnihot ri, Peeyush. 2004. Tubewells, Drilling for Deep Trouble. The Tribune, February 16. Frankel, Francine R. 1973. Polit ics of t he Green Revolut ion: Shift ing Peasant Part icipat ion in India and Pakist an. In Food, Populat ion, Employment : The Impact of t he Green Revolut ion. Edit ed by Thomas T. Poleman and Donald K. Freebairn. New York: Praeger Publishers. IFPRI. 2008. India Faces Urgent Hunger Sit uat ion. Press release. Delhi: Int ernat ional Food Policy Research Inst it ut e. McGuirk, Anya and Yair Mundlak. 1991. Incent ives and Const raint s in t he Transformat ion of Punj ab Agricult ure. Research Report 87. Int ernat ional Food Policy Research Inst it ut e. Mishra, Pankaj . 2006. The Myt h of t he New India. The New York Times. July 6. Newman, Bryan. 2007. A Bit t er Harvest : Farmer Suicide in India. Food First Development Report 15. Quot ing from Gruesome Tale of Sikh Farmer Who Could Not Pay t he Int erest on His Loan t o t he Bania (Moneylender). Washingt on DC: Khalist an Affairs Cent er. August 26, 1998. www.khalist an-affairs.org. Shiva, Vandana. n.d. In The Pract ice of Eart h Democracy. Research Cent er for Science, Technology, and Ecology. ht t p:/ / www.navdanya.org/ about / pract ice_eart h_dem.ht m (accessed January 30, 2009). Shiva, Vandana. 1992. The Violence of t he Green Revolut ion: Third World Agricult ure, Ecology, and Polit ics. London: Zed Books. Singh, Baldev, Sukhwinder Singh and Jaswinder Singh Brar. 2003. Ext ent of Unemployment in t he Border Dist rict s of Punj ab: A Case St udy of Rural Ferozepur Dist rict . Pat iala: Cent er for Research of Economic Change, Punj abi Universit y. UNDP. 2004. Human Development Report . Punj ab: Unit ed Nat ions Development Program wit h t he Government of Punj ab. Weismann, St even. 1987. Sikh Violence in Punj ab a Threat t o Indian Unit y. The New York Times. Oct ober 5. 36 FOOD REBELLIONS! belts around the larger cities where they provided an endless supply of cheap and part-time labor to the industrial, construction, and manufacturing sectors. When labor supply outstripped demand, the former peasants did not go back to farming but joined the growing “informal sector” of the underemployed. Another part of the peasantry moved to the fragile hillsides and forest perimeters of the global South, opening up new but highly vulnerable areas to subsistence agriculture. Here, the seeds and fertilizers of the Green Revolution provided only a few years worth of good harvest, which steadily declined as soil degraded, then eroded and disappeared altogether. Pesticides killed of beneicial insects, leading to pest outbreaks that became too severe and expensive to control. This initial increase in overall food production (due in part to the increase in land area) was claimed by Green Revolution advocates as proof of its success. However, they had litle to say and even less to ofer when yields crashed and production stagnated. As the Green Revolution was being implemented, several key geopolitical events were taking place. In the wake of the oil crisis, Middle Eastern countries found themselves lush with cash. Unable to spend it all, they invested in Northern banks. With these so-called ‘petrodollars,’ Northern banks were happy to lend to all comers, including Northern farmers and Southern governments. In the US, farmers were showered with cheap credit and directed to save the world from hunger by planting “fencerow to fencerow.” The World Bank helped prepare the investment terrain in the global South, disbursing billions in public funds for massive infrastructure projects and bold colonization schemes. The oil price shocks in the late 1970s and the global North’s economic recession sent the global South into a severe economic crisis in the 1980s. Northern banks raised their interest rates and began to call in their loans. Unfortunately, debtor countries were asked to pay up precisely at the time their products had lost their value and their market share, sending the global South into a profound economic crisis that resulted in negative economic growth and an unprecedented— and unpayable—foreign debt (Sonntag et al. 2000). In this context, with commercial banks unwilling and unable to extend further credit, institutions like the World Bank moved to ill the gap. But the bank used this opportunity to foist structural adjustment policies (SAPs) on the global South and, with no other alternative, the governments of the global South were forced to comply. ROOT CAUSES 37 Neoliberal economics came to the fore in this period, signifying a dramatic reversal in strategy away from planned, state-led development to “spontaneous” market order. This ideology embraced the neoclassical economic model of a pure market system at the center of human development, with minimal interference from the state (Balassa 1971; Bauer 1981; Friedman 1968). Neoliberals focused on trade as the engine for growth and prescribed trade liberalization, privatization, currency devaluation, deregulation, and iscal austerity. The new neoliberal development paradigm was soon enshrined in what became known as the “Washington Consensus,” implemented through the structural adjustment policies applied in the 1980s to the global South by the World Bank and the IMF. Under the guise of macroeconomic stability, the IMF and the World Bank forced countries of the South to open up their economies to foreign investment and their markets to foreign products by making debt relief and foreign aid contingent upon the liberalization of markets, the deregulation of controls on international inance capital, the privatization of stateheld industries and services, and the deregulation of labor (Gore 2000; Pieterse 1998). Structural Adjustment and the Sins of the World Bank The World Bank began its institutional life by more or less ignoring agriculture. It needed to prove its creditworthiness to a skeptical bond market, and did so by investing in projects with guaranteed high rates of return. As a result, early on it heavily favored industrial projects over agricultural ones. In 1961 there were only 12 staf charged with agricultural programming at the bank. Funding for agriculture received a boost under bank President Robert McNamara, who pledged himself to support agriculture, “the stepchild of development” (Kapur et al. 2007). Under his tenure, the bank invested in and supported the creation of grain marketing boards, agricultural extension services and food storage and distribution services, particularly in Africa. The debt crisis in the early 1980s ushered in a political transformation of the World Bank’s economic policies. Previously, the bank had relied on the state to advance development. Suddenly, the state was considered an obstacle to development. Development would come about by unleashing the market and “geting the prices right.” This 38 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 8 Haiti: Showcase for Free Trade “ Basket case” rat her t han “ showcase” is t he word most consist ent ly used t o describe t he Caribbean half-island nat ion of Hait i. Sevent y-six percent of t he Hait ian populat ion subsist s on less t han US$2 per day, t he maj orit y of which lives below t he ext reme povert y level of US$1 per person, per day (IMF 2008). The count ry’s high level of dependence on import s of maj or grains such as rice, wheat and corn earned Hait i a place on t he FAO’s list of t he 22 count ries most vulnerable t o increases in food and fuel prices. Hait i has not always been so highly dependent on import s. Hait i’s int egrat ion int o t he global economy began in earnest in 1986, aft er t he fall of dict at or Jean-Claude “ Baby Doc” Duvalier (who inherit ed power from his fat her, t he rut hless Francois “ Papa Doc” Duvalier). Under US t ut elage, t he milit ary j unt a t hat replaced Baby Doc—t he Nat ional Governing Council (CNG)—implement ed a radical neoliberal program which included slashing t ariffs, closing st at e-owned indust ries, opening t he agricult ural market t o US producers and cut t ing spending on agricult ure by 30%in t he fert ile, riceproducing Art ibonit e Valley. The policies were designed t o meet condit ions required by t he Int ernat ional Monet ary Fund (IMF) for acquiring a $24.6 million loan, desperat ely needed aft er t he Duvalier dynast y had plunged t he count ry int o debt . Rice and ot her import s, part icularly highly subsidized US agricult ural product s, immediat ely flooded t he Hait ian market . In 1987, Hait i met t hree-quart ers of it s rice needs t hrough domest ic product ion (Hait i Info 1995). Today, of t he 400,000 t ons of rice consumed in Hait i each year, t hree-quart ers consist s of “ Miami Rice” —t he Hait ian nickname for t he cheap US rice sold at half t he price of local grain (Williams 2008). This is t he root of t he current crisis, acknowledged current president René Préval: “ In 1987 when we allowed cheap rice t o ent er t he count ry a lot of people applauded ‘ Bravo’ … But cheap import ed rice dest royed t he Art ibonit e rice. Today, import ed rice has become expensive, and our nat ional product ion is in ruins” (Lindsay 2008). The second wave of Hait ian economic liberalizat ion occurred in t he mid-1990s. Hait i’s first democrat ically elect ed president , Jean-Bert rand Arist ide, had been removed in a milit ary coup in 1991. As a condit ion for his ret urn, t he US, IMF and World Bank required t hat he furt her open up t he Hait ian economy. If t he radical priest want ed help, he had t o play by neoliberal rules. In 1995, under Arist ide, t ariffs on rice were reduced from 35%t o 3%, t he lowest in t he Caribbean region, and government funding was divert ed from agricult ural development t o servicing t he nat ion’s foreign debt . Wit hout ROOT CAUSES 39 government support or prot ect ion, Hait ian farmers were in no posit ion t o compet e wit h t heir highly subsidized US count erpart s. According t o a 2004 Oxfam report , subsidies for rice producers in t he US t ot aled approximat ely $1.3 billion in 2003 alone, amount ing t o more t han double Hait i’s ent ire budget for t hat year (Oxfam Int ernat ional 2004). In fact , Hait ian farmers were never meant t o compet e wit h US farmers. Rat her, Hait i’s economic growt h was t o be predicat ed on a shift from agricult ure t o manufact uring. Since t he 1980s, t he economic st rat egy pursued by USAID and t he int ernat ional financial inst it ut ions has been t o capit alize on Hait i’s primary compet it ive advant age—cheap labor—t o increase export s in manufact ured goods and in agricult ural product s such as mangoes and coffee t o Nort hern market s. Inst ead, Hait i experienced massive rural t o urban migrat ion, compounding povert y, unemployment and crime in urban slums. Hait i’s food “ riot s” are food rebellions, challenging t he very logic of free t rade. Frant z Thelusma, a communit y organizer, art iculat es t he prot est ers’ demands: “ First , we demand t he government get rid of it s neoliberal plan. We will not accept t his deat h plan. Second, t he government needs t o regulat e t he market and lower t he price of basic goods” (Carlsen 2008). Alt hough President Préval, an agronomist by t raining, announced subsidies t o cut t he cost of rice by 15% in an at t empt t o appease prot est ers, t he government has shown no signs of reversing t he t ide of liberalizat ion t hat has left Hait ians so vulnerable t o t he global food crisis. Hait i, t he most impoverished nat ion in t he West ern hemisphere is one of t he most open economies in t he world. Carlsen, Laura. 2008. Behind Lat in America’s Food Crisis. Hungry f or Just ice: How t he World Food Syst em Failed t he Poor 11. Americas Policy Program, Cent er for Int ernat ional Policy. Hait i Info. 1995. Neoliberalism in Hait i: t he Case of Rice. Hait i Inf o 3 (24). IMF. 2008. Hait i: Joint St aff Advisory Not e of t he Povert y Reduct ion St rat egy Paper. IMF Count ry Report 08/ 114. Washingt on DC: Int ernat ional Monet ary Fund. Lindsay, Reed. 2008. Hait i on t he Deat h Plan. The Nat ion. ht t p:/ / www.t henat ion.com/ doc/ 20080602/ lindsay (accessed Oct ober 14, 2008). Oxfam Int ernat ional. 2004. Kicking Down t he Door: How Upcoming WTO Talks Threat en Farmers in Poor Count ries. Oxf am Brief ing Paper 72. Oxfam Int ernat ional. Williams, Carol J. 2008. Hait i’s Food Crisis Root ed in Rice. Seat t l e Ti mes. May 15. 40 FOOD REBELLIONS! new free market doctrine demanded a complete reversal of policy. Instead of building domestic industries, developing countries were forced to open their markets to the world. The bank’s approach ignored the real economic trajectory of the irst world (which developed both agriculture and industry behind protective tarifs), and plunged developing countries straight into the cauldron of international competition (Chang 2007). This approach had some very speciic consequences for agriculture. For this food regime to work, existing marketing boards and support structures in the global South needed to be dismantled. The World Bank set of around the world, destroying the very state bodies it formerly supported (McMichael 2004). These new policies were based on the unproven assumption that the private sector would be more eicient and less wasteful than the public sector. Not only did this assumption turn out to be wrong, but mass privatization in agriculture had serious drawbacks. As one report observed: “Farmers sufered negative consequences because key products and marketing costs rose rapidly, fertilizer prices and transport costs soared and labor costs declined. [For example] producer prices showed greater volatility in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria—countries that dismantled their marketing boards—than in Ghana (which kept its marketing boards)” (Alexander 2005). Even the World Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Group notes two key failures in the bank’s operations in agriculture. First, the bank has neglected agriculture to the detriment of many developing countries: “Underperformance of agriculture has been a major limitation of Africa’s development. For most of the past two decades, both governments and donors, including the World Bank, have neglected the sector. The Bank’s limited and—until recently—declining support to agriculture has not been strategically used to meet the diverse needs of a sector that requires coordinated interventions across a range of activities” (World Bank 2007). Second, the dismantling of agriculture was intended to create opportunities for the private sector, but invariably, “the invisible hand of the market” was nowhere to be seen. The Blair Commission for Africa concurs with the Independent Evaluation Group’s evaluation. In its report, the commission states, “Domestic stabilization schemes and associated institutions have been dismantled under the banner of market eiciency, and this has created an institutional void with adverse consequences for the livelihood of millions of African farmers” (Alexander 2005). ROOT CAUSES 41 BOx 9 Ghana’s Import Surge In 1998, Ghana’s local rice product ion account ed for over 80% of domest ic consumpt ion. By 2003, t hat figure was less t han 20%(Act ionAid Int ernat ional Ghana 2006). Nor is t his t he only commodit y in which Ghana has suffered an erosion in domest ic product ion. As one report not es: “ Unt il t he early 1990s, local indust ry supplied all t he chicken and eggs consumed in Ghana, and in 1992, 95% of t he domest ic poult ry requirement was met t hrough local product ion…t his t rend did not cont inue t hrough t he 1990s, as import s of poult ry product s such as legs, wings and t highs from Europe at t ract ed consumers. The consumpt ion pat t ern of Ghanaians gradually changed from whole chicken t o chicken part s, part icularly t he t highs. Thus, from 2000 onwards t he share of local poult ry had dropped t o 11 percent ” (Monsalve et al. 2007). This out come was predict ed in advance by Ghanaian civil societ y and members of t he Ghanaian Depart ment of Agricult ure, but it was t aken t o be an accept able consequence of liberalizat ion policies t hat farmers in t omat oes, rice and poult ry should compet e unprot ect ed against billions of dollars of annual subsidy in t he European Union and Nort h America. The consequence is t hat public monopolies have been t ransformed int o privat e ones, wit hout any of t he benefit s of compet it ion and, now, wit hout even t he benefit of recourse t o elect ed officials. Act ionAid Int ernat ional Ghana. 2006. Agro-Import Surge St udy: The Case of Rice in Ghana. Johannesburg: Act ionAid Int ernat ional. Monsalve, Sofia, M. Issah, B. Ilge, A. Paasch, K. Lanj e and Pat rick Mulvany. 2007. Right t o Food of Tomat o and Poult ry Farmers: Report of an Invest igat ive Mission t o Ghana. Heidelberg: FoodFirst Informat ion Act ion Net work (FIAN). Over the years, the banks’ combination of strategic neglect of agriculture and the active dismantling of agricultural supports went hand in hand with further eforts to liberalize economies, a prerequisite to receive loans from the bank. For example, the World Bank forced the Nicaraguan legislature to approve the controversial Central American Free Trade Agreement as part of its Poverty Reduction Support Credit (IDA 2006a). In accepting these conditions, however, countries were efectively forced to abandon domestic policies and institutions that might have been bargaining tools in multilateral trade negotiations. Broadly, the adoption of these structural adjustment policies kept Southern countries from negotiating trade outcomes favorable to agriculture and the rural poor (Paasch et al. 2007). 42 FOOD REBELLIONS! The result of these interventions and conditions was to accelerate the decline of agriculture in the global South. One of the most striking consequences of liberalization has been the phenomenon of “import surges” (FAO 2003). These happen when tarifs on cheaper (and oten subsidized) agricultural products are lowered, and a host country is then looded with those goods. There is oten a correspond- BOx 10 Philippines: The Death of Rice As t he world’s largest rice import er, t he Philippines has been hit hard by t he skyrocket ing price of rice on t he global market —a 76%increase bet ween December 2007 and April 2008 (FAO 2008). Two of t he most commonly cit ed culprit s are t he rising price of oil and farm input s, and climat ic event s such as Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis and Aust ralia’s drought , which devast at ed rice product ion. As a result , rice-export ing count ries, including India and Viet nam, imposed export rest rict ions t o ensure t heir domest ic consumpt ion, while rice-import ing count ries (including t he Philippines) scrambled t o meet t heir import requirement s at inflat ed cost s. The Philippines’ rush on t he market t o fill a 500,000-t on rice t ender in May was blamed for sparking even higher prices. Filipinos t ook t o t he st reet s t o prot est t he upsurge in t he cost of rice, t he count ry’s primary food st aple. The government of Gloria MacapagalArroyo responded wit h measures ranging from appeals t o fast food chains t o reduce t heir rice port ions t o pledges of support for biot echnology. But how did t he Philippines, at t he heart of t he world’s rice bowl, lose t he abilit y t o produce enough t o feed it self? The Green Revolut ion, launched in Asia in t he 1960s, succeeded in increasing rice yields in t he Philippines. However, t his increase came at t he cost of significant use of chemical input s and hybrid seeds. Bet ween 1976 and 1988, t ot al fert ilizer consumpt ion rose from 668 t ons t o 1,222 t ons—an increase of over 80%(Dolan 1991). These resource-int ensive farming pract ices generat ed long-t erm soil degradat ion and cont aminat ion, t hreat ening fut ure product ivit y (Rosegrant and Pingali 1994). Worse, st art ing wit h 1,400 rice variet ies, Filipino agrobiodiversit y was reduced t o j ust four variet ies of rice because farm credit was condit ioned on plant ing only Green Revolut ion hybrids. By t he 1980s, t he rat e of increase in input use was great er t han t he rat e of increase in yields. In Cent ral Luzon, for example, a 13% yield increase bet ween 1980 and 1989 was achieved wit h a 21%increase in fert ilizers and a 34%increase in seeds (Rosegrant and Pingali 1994). As t he cost of t hese input s rose and t he price t o rice farmers decreased, smallholders found t hemselves mired in debt . Many abandoned farming. Consequent ly, t he Philippines ROOT CAUSES 43 ing decline in domestic production. In Senegal, for example, tarif reduction led to an import surge in tomato paste, with a iteen-fold increase in imports, and a halving of domestic production. Similarly, Chile experienced a three-fold surge in imports of vegetable oil, and a halving of domestic production. The World Bank has never been held accountable for these policy reached one of t he highest rat es of urban populat ion growt h in t he developing world, at an annual rat e of 5.1% bet ween 1960 and 1995 (World Bank 2009). Meanwhile, t he amount of land devot ed t o rice product ion fell an average of 2.4%per year during t he first half of t he 1980s (Dolan 1991). Farmers were not t he only ones facing an economic squeeze. By t he 1980s, t he Philippine government faced mount ing debt , rising inflat ion and det eriorat ing t erms of t rade. In 1982 t he Ferdinand Marcos regime borrowed $200 million condit ioned upon an IMF st ruct ural adj ust ment program t hat lift ed import rest rict ions, cut government funding for agricult ure and abolished price st abilizat ion mechanisms. In following years, debt repayment remained a nat ional priorit y and spending on agricult ure plummet ed. The count ry’s ent rance int o t he WTO in 1995 delivered yet anot her blow t o agricult ure. Under t he Agreement on Agricult ure, t he Philippines was required t o eliminat e quot as on all agricult ural import s except rice. In fact , rice product ion was already so weakened t hat t he grain was massively import ed t o meet demand, t hus furt her discouraging domest ic product ion. From 1996 t o 1998 rice product ion dropped by 24% (Bernardino-Yabut 2000). Similarly, a flood of cheap corn import s—cost ing one-t hird t he price of t he locally produced grain—devast at ed corn product ion, which dropped by 20% from 1993 t o 1998 (Bernardino-Yabut 2000). Meanwhile, from 1993 t o 2003, t he nat ional food import bill increased from $714 million t o $2.38 billion (Chavez et al. 2004). Bernardino-Yabut , Nat ividad. 2000. An Impact St udy of Agricult ural Trade Liberalizat ion in t he Philippines. Quezon Cit y: ISGN. Chavez, Jenina Joy, Mary Ann Manahan and Joseph Purugganan. 2004. Hunger on t he Rise in t he Philippines. Bangkok: Focus on t he Global Sout h. Dolan, Ronald E. 1991. Philippines: A Count ry St udy. Washingt on DC: GPO for t he Library of Congress. FAO. 2008. FAO Rice Market Monit or 11 (1). Rosegrant , M. W., and Prabhu L. Pingali. 1994. Conf ront ing t he Environment al Consequences of t he Green Revolut ion in Asia “ Urban Development in t he Philippines” . Washingt on DC and Philippines: World Bank and Int ernat ional Food Policy Research Inst it ut e. World Bank. 2009. Urban Development and t he Philippines. ht t p:/ / go.worldbank. org/ GLZOIMN160 (accessed January 30, 2009). 44 FOOD REBELLIONS! decisions. By conditioning their loans on the economic restructuring, it exercises enormous control over food systems in developing countries. The bank’s conditions continue to be enforced. In the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs), for instance, loans are contingent on speciic policy demands. To take four agricultural examples among dozens of economic transformations in areas as diverse as water, housing, government procurement and labor law: four crop boards were prepared for sale in Tanzania; Benin’s cotton sector is being privatized; all agricultural support programs are being liberalized in Moldova; and Yemen is being forced into a land reform policy that has failed everywhere else it has been atempted (IDA 2006b, 2007a, 2007b). If these conditions resulted in alleviating poverty and hunger, the bank would have a case for its infamous “conditionality.” But these loans are failing. In an assessment by the OECD none of these loans received an A grade and the majority received C or D grades (OECD 2007). A main consequence of the combination of market liberalization, government subsidy programs in developed countries, and the capital advantage of multinational agribusiness was a dramatic increase in the “dumping” of commodities: the sale of goods at prices below the cost of their production. Import surges, in which local producers are swamped by cheaper imports, have destroyed local production capacity in countries like Haiti and Mexico. As a result, by 2005, 72% of countries in the global South had become net food importers (Ng 2008). The steady increase in developing countries’ hunger relects the loss of national food producing capacity as international inance institutions continue to pressure developing countries to purchase on the global market rather than grow their own food (World Bank 2008a). In its 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture (the irst of the bank’s World Reports to deal with agriculture in decades) the bank admits to the need for broader policies. But instead of following a well-proven and successful path of state-led land reform—a path that the bank acknowledges as key to the ongoing economic success of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan—the bank is keen to turn its back on the lessons of history, let markets loose, distort the reporting on the success of these experiments, and ofer instead to remedy this by siphoning “excess” rural people out of agriculture completely. This is perhaps the most controversial recommendation in its 2008 report, in which the bank takes the view that smallholder agriculture is not an economically viable activity. This is evinced by the market’s ROOT CAUSES 45 tendency to move land from the hands of poor farmers to richer ones, leading to the current situation where the majority of export agriculture is carried out on a few large farms while the majority of poor farmers live on relatively small plots. The bank suggests in the report that this land concentration is a sign that land is being transferred to ‘more eicient’ farmers—with the concomitant recommendation that the rural poor should be helped to leave agriculture and switch to non-agricultural labor. That smallholder agriculture has, for the irst time in human history, ceased to be a viable economic activity has much to do with the policies instituted by the bank itself. Yet the emptying of the countryside is now the only option that the bank can see to solve the problem of agriculture and development. In reality, this policy ofers economic cover for the political expropriation of the rural poor. Nowhere is this clearer than Colombia—where the countryside has been emptied through political violence, smallholders expropriated, and where large landowners are able to take over land through a process which commentator Hector Mondragón calls “fake agrarian reform.” To suggest that the processes at work here are those of eiciency is, at best, disingenuous. And while Colombia presents an extreme example, the bank’s policy is explicitly aimed at removing the poorest people from agriculture, a policy that has been called “de-peasantization.” These rural workers, already disenfranchised from property, are cast of under this policy, to face uncertain futures either in the rural non-agricultural employment market, or in the swelling shantytowns of the cities. It is a strong-arm policy that shrugs of evidence suggesting that comprehensive agrarian reform, as demanded by the world’s poorest farmers, can ofer alternatives within agriculture. The Dismantling of African Agriculture5 De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. The World Bank Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the peasant-based agriculture of the continent into large-scale commercial farming (Havnevik et al. 2007). At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just selfsuicient in food; it was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966 and 1970 (BBC 2006). 46 FOOD REBELLIONS! Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer (Green Revolution 2008). Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa. While much agricultural work was traditionally women’s domain, poverty, conlict, and migration have let women with an ever greater share of agricultural labor as male heads of households migrate to cities or follow seasonal wage jobs. Globally, women are responsible for 50% of food production. In sub-Saharan Africa, women make up 60%–80% of the farm labor force yet are still disproportionately afected by hunger and malnutrition (FAO 2008c). Our broken food system leaves rural women and their children doubly vulnerable: once as consumers with disproportionately fewer resources with which to buy food, and again as producers vulnerable to volatile price swings. Agriculture is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of productivity-enhancing agricultural technology, and the spread of HIV-AIDS. However, a very important contribution to the crisis is the bank’s structural adjustment policies. Instead of triggering a virtuous spiral of growth and prosperity, structural adjustment has imprisoned Africa in a low-level trap in which low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output interact to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline. Liting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cuting back on agricultural credit systems is reducing fertilizer applications, lowering yields, and reducing investment. Moreover, reality refuses to conform to the doctrinal expectation that the withdrawal of the state will pave the way for the market and private sector to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector has seen reduced state expenditures as creating more risk and failed to step into the breach. In country ater country, the opposite of that predicted by neoliberal doctrine occurred: the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. In those instances where private traders did come in to replace the state, an Oxfam report noted, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable aid lows” (Oxfam 2006). The usually proprivate sector Economist agreed, admiting that “many of the private ROOT CAUSES 47 irms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rentseeking monopolists” (The Economist 2008). What support the government has been allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank to export agriculture in order to generate the foreign exchange earnings that the state needed to service its debt to the bank and the IMF. But, as in Ethiopia during the famine of the early 1980s, this has led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into more and more unsuitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the bank’s encouragement of several economies undergoing adjustment to focus on export production of the same crops simultaneously oten led to overproduction that then triggered a price collapse in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s program to expand cocoa production triggered a 48% drop in the international price of cocoa between 1986 and 1989, threatening, as one account put it, “to increase the vulnerability of the entire economy to the vagaries of the cocoa market” (Abugre 1993). In 2002–03, a collapse in cofee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia (Oxfam 2006). As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major diference. In the Philippines and Mexico, the World Bank and IMF conined themselves to macromanagement, or supervising the dismantling of the state’s economic role from above, leaving the dirty details of implementation to the bureaucracy. In Africa, where they dealt with much weaker governments, the bank and fund micromanaged, reaching down to make decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be ired, or even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom. In other words, bank and IMF resident proconsuls reached to the very innards of the state’s involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up. Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair trade practices on the part of the EU and the United States. Trade liberalization simply allowed low-priced, subsidized EU beef to enter and drive many West African and South African catle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, US coton growers oloaded their coton on world markets at 20%–55% of the cost of production, bankrupting West African and Central African coton farmers in the process (Business World 2003). 48 FOOD REBELLIONS! According to Oxfam, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million between 1981 and 2001—or 46% of the whole continent (Oxfam 2006). The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admited, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming” (Miller 1991). That was, however, a rare moment of candor. What was especially disturbing was that, as Oxford University political economist Ngaire Woods pointed out, the “seeming blindness of the Fund and Bank to the failure of their approach to sub-Saharan Africa persisted even as internal studies by the IMF and the World Bank failed to elicit positive investment efects” (Woods 2006). Owing to the absence of any clear case of success, structural adjustment has been widely discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the bank, the most prominent case being the oicial British aid agency DFID, which cofunded the latest subsidized fertilizer program in Malawi (DFID 2007). Unable to deny the obvious, the bank has inally acknowledged that the whole structural adjustment enterprise was a mistake, though it buried this admission in the middle of the 2008 World Development Report, perhaps in the hope that it would not atract too much atention. Nevertheless, it was a damning admission: Structural adjustment in the 1980’s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance, inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private actors to take over these functions—reducing their costs, improving their quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. Too often, that didn’t happen. In some places, the state’s withdrawal was tentative at best, limiting private entry. Elsewhere, the private sector emerged only slowly and partially—mainly serving commercial farmers but leaving smallholders exposed to extensive market failures, high transaction costs and risks, and service gaps. Incomplete markets and institutional gaps impose huge costs in forgone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness and, in many cases, their survival. (World Bank 2008b) ROOT CAUSES 49 Had the World Bank listened to the growing chorus of civil society organizations, progressive think tanks, hundreds of peasant and farm organizations (and even its own reports) that began criticizing the bank’s policies as early as two decades ago, this admission—still far from an apology—would not ring so hollow. Global Trade: A Free Straitjacket for the Poor Free trade is credited with providing everything from abundance to democracy. In fact, what is called “free” trade today is not free but rather forced, and has yet to demonstrate any positive correlation with either reducing hunger or ensuring democratic practice. On the contrary, the ideology and discourse of free trade has been used to establish global institutions, regional agreements and sets of rules that favor strong over weak trading partners. While certain sectors and business interests within a particular country may beneit, and while GDP may rise as the result of increased trade, even in the “emerging markets” of countries like India, Mexico, and Brazil, this increase in wealth has been accompanied by an even larger increase in poverty and hunger. Researcher-activist Vandana Shiva (2008) notes that even while India’s economy is growing at the astonishing rate of 9%, over the last 17 years the per capita availability of food has declined by 14%. Today’s global trade regime rests on the institutional pillars of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and North–South free trade agreements (FTAs). The World Trade Organization [The] idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases, at much lower cost. John Block, US Secretary for Agriculture, Uruguay Round, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 1986 While the World Bank and the IMF act as the North’s inancial henchmen, the WTO, formed in 1995, has tried to play the role of chief trade enforcer. Built on the principles of free market fundamentalism and dominated by rich countries, the WTO is a permanent negotiating forum for global trade policy. While the WTO is the prized creation of the Northern countries, Southern countries participate because they feel they cannot aford to be let out of negotiations. 50 FOOD REBELLIONS! Following World War II, in 1948 Western powers formed the General Agreement on Tarifs and Trade (GATT) to facilitate international trade among non-socialist countries. At the time, because of food security concerns, agriculture was not included in the agreement. In 1995, following the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations (1986–94), the WTO was formed and agriculture, services, and intellectual property rights were oicially added to the trade agenda. The stated purpose of the WTO was to reduce trade barriers and establish non-discriminatory mechanisms to enforce global trade rules. This market-led approach to development would “lit all boats.” In its 13 years of existence the WTO has not established the “level playing ield” that would ensure beneits for all its members, and has favored the proits of Northern corporations much more than the economies of the global South. Proponents claim the WTO exists to iron out these problems. Critics claim favoring Northern corporations was the unstated purpose of the WTO all along. In WTO ministerial meetings, held biannually, trade and inance ministers from around the world negotiate world trade policies. These meetings have produced only a few new agreements. The repeated failures of the ministerial meetings are usually due to a combination of disagreements between developed and developing countries, combined with massive public protests from labor, farmer, environmentalist, food justice and fair trade activists opposed to corporate globalization. Market access, domestic subsidies, dumping, and special safeguards are among the major issues that have broken down negotiations in the past. The WTO has a comprehensive Agreement on Agriculture (AoA)—an agreement that was largely writen between the US and Europe. (The WTO’s founding talks, the Uruguay Round, looked like they were going to fail until Europe and the US worked out a way to keep their agricultural interests protected. Under a separate negotiation called the Blair House agreement, the EU and US agreed to continue to subsidize their respective agricultural sectors, while also agreeing that such protection be denied developing countries.) Though developing countries were successfully strong-armed into signing the AoA in 1995, it quickly became clear they were receiving a raw deal. The WTO talks collapsed in Seatle in 1999 in part because of a rebellion from these countries and in part from massive civil protests (the “Batle of Seatle”) by farmers, unions, environmentalists and food activists. ROOT CAUSES 51 Doha: the death round To avoid any civil protest, the next round of talks in 2001 was held in bunker-like conditions in Doha, Qatar, an expensive destination that put the WTO safely beyond the reach of most international public protest. Christened the “Development Round” the ministerial meeting’s title relected the concern on the part of the industrialized world that unless they were able to convince the global South of the economic merits of free trade, the WTO might never move forward. In Qatar, the Northern countries agreed to address the possibility of special treatment for Southern countries, if they agreed to consider new, less trade-related issues as part of the WTO (Rosset 2007). However, the next ministerial meeting in Cancún, Mexico in 2003 was the site of massive public protests, profound disillusionment on the part of Southern countries, and a weak agreement to “continue negotiating.” The sixth ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in 2005 also let the WTO in limbo. In July of 2008, an emergency mini-ministerial meeting was held in Geneva as a “stepping stone” to conclude Doha in 2008. Ater a week of intensive negotiations, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy reported that the meeting had failed to reach agreement on the “modalities” to be used to cut Southern tarifs and Northern agricultural subsidies. Despite the deadlock, the director general insisted that “no one is throwing in the towel” (Lamy 2008). True to his word, Lamy atempted to revive Doha at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan in August 2008. Leaders at the summit linked the Doha agenda to the world food crisis. In their Statement on Food Security they insisted, Food security also requires a robust world market and trade system for food and agriculture. Rising food prices are adding inflationary pressures and generating macroeconomic imbalances, especially for some low-income countries. In this regard, we will work toward the urgent and successful conclusion of an ambitious, comprehensive and balanced Doha Round. (G8 2008) The ministers did not say aloud what everyone at Hokkaido knew: that the WTO’s “free” market was actually undermining food security by making poor countries dependent on a volatile world market for their food. Agreements were not forthcoming. Developing countries atempted to get the US and the EU to curb their tarifs and 52 FOOD REBELLIONS! subsidies, and to allow Southern countries to protect themselves against import surges from the North. The lead countries on either side of the negotiations, the US and India, were both facing elections and neither was willing to risk losing the political support of their agricultural sector by making concessions. (Granted, the South had litle let to concede.) Yet again, WTO negotiations ground to a halt. Southern countries are not the only ones fed up with the WTO. Smallholders in the global North have not beneited from corporate globalization either. Montana farmer Dena Hof (US), North American co-chair of Via Campesina states latly: We have a food crisis, water crisis, climate crisis, but the WTO continues to promote export-oriented agriculture that only leads to increased deforestation, land concentration, soil erosion, biodiversity destruction and water contamination. Farmers producing food for local domestic markets have now been replaced by agroexport industries such as cut-rate flowers in Kenya and Colombia and devastating agrofuel plantations in Brazil and Indonesia producing sugar, soya and palm oil instead of actual food to feed their citizens. Here in the U.S., this has led to monoculture production of corn and soybeans and factory farms instead of diversified farms producing healthy food for local markets. (NFFC 2008) Some observers think the failure of the Doha rounds spells the end of the WTO. Its successful conclusion, however, could be the last straw for smallholder farmers around the world. At the explosive Cancun ministerial meeting in Mexico, on September 16, 2003, Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean farm leader, commited suicide on the fence separating thousands of farmers and protestors from government negotiators. His last, desperate words were both chilling and prophetic: My warning goes out to all citizens that human beings are in an endangered situation. That uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO members are leading an undesirable globalization that is inhumane, environmentally degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic. It should be stopped immediately. Otherwise, the false logic of neoliberalism will wipe out the diversity of global agriculture and be disastrous to all human beings. WTO kills farmers! ROOT CAUSES 53 What’s next? Protecting family farmers from the goliath of global trade is literally a mater of life and death for over a billion smallholders trying to compete with subsidized industrial agriculture. In an ideal world, the function of the WTO would be to prevent unfair trading practices like dumping and monopoly control over markets. Instead the WTO agreements have cemented corporate control over the world’s food systems. George Naylor, a corn and soybean farmer from Churdan, Iowa, US, asserts: The deregulation of agriculture as advocated by the WTO has decimated family farms both here and abroad. The U.S. commodity farm groups, backed by agribusiness, have propagandized for years that export markets would help family farmers when in reality it just fattens agribusiness’s profits. Farmers don’t export. Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill do… The WTO promotes a globalized market where all farmers in different countries are pitted in a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ that only benefits agribusinesses that get access to the cheapest commodities possible. We need domestic farm and food policies that respond to the needs of local communities. (NFFC 2008) The evidence from 30 years of these policies is in: farmers, peasants, ishers, migrant workers, urban poor, women, and indigenous people around the world are worse of than they were 40 years ago, and the countries of the global South as a whole are less food secure. Though the food crisis seems to G8 leaders as an opportunity to push the WTO agenda, the world peasant federation, Via Campesina, sees it as a chance to take agriculture out of the WTO altogether: In Geneva the talks collapsed on a very big and fundamental issue: the protection of the livelihoods of billions of peasants worldwide against the aggressive pressure by the U.S.A. and the EU to open markets for more food dumping by their multinationals. The… WTO should get out of agriculture! [We] urge the governments not to waste time and resources to find compromises to finalize the Doha round anymore. (La Via Campesina 2008) 54 FOOD REBELLIONS! The intractability of the Northern countries in the Doha round succeeded in unifying developing countries against the WTO, with the broad support of smallholders around the world. In this sense, the food crisis and the failing WTO talks may have a positive efect by spurring resolve for real change in the way agriculture is treated in global markets, and by demonstrating that the global South can speak with one voice. But the WTO is not the only way Northern governments control trade in favor of agribusiness. In fact, whenever the WTO has actually come close to leveling the trading ield between Northern and Southern countries, Northern countries have fallen back on bilateral and regional free trade agreements to ensure their market dominance. BOx 11 The Geneva Doha Package: Third World Pushback The first wave of st ories about t he collapse of t he t alks had t o do wit h China’s and India’s unreasonable demands. The US daily The Washingt on Post paint ed a pict ure of t hese int ransigent upst art s: High-level delegat ions from t he Unit ed St at es and t he European Union showed fresh willingness at t he World Trade Organizat ion t alks t o make concessions t hat would have gradually curbed t he subsidies and t ariffs t hey have long employed t o prot ect First -World farmers. But India and China dug in t heir heels, insist ing on t he right t o keep prot ect ing t heir farmers while accusing t he Unit ed St at es and ot her rich count ries of exaggerat ing t he generosit y of t heir concessions. (Faiola 2008) India and China maint ained t hat fragile economies should be allowed t o prot ect t heir agricult ure wit h a special safeguard mechanism (SSM). Broadly speaking, t he SSM allows count ries t o impose dut ies higher t han t he agreed ceiling level on farm import s if import volumes rise above t heir t hree-year average by an agreed percent age. The goal is t o prot ect poor farmers against import surges. US Trade Represent at ive Susan Schwab proposed an ast ronomical 150% volume surge t rigger before dut ies could be imposed. WTO Direct or General Pascal Lamy offered a 140%t rigger. According t o hist orical models t he 140% figure means t hat t he SSM would only be invoked in one half of t he cases of import surges (ICTSD 2008a). This would cause t remendous harm t o poor farmers in t he global Sout h. Bot h of t hese figures would allow significant commodit ies dumping from wealt hy indust rial count ries wit h no legal ROOT CAUSES 55 The Tyranny of the FTAs In 1994, just before the formation of the WTO, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the US, entered into efect. This was the irst FTA that would be enforced by the WTO, and it became the model for more FTAs to come. NAFTA evolved from the Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, which was designed by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 to investigate the causes of immigration into the US. In 1990, a report was issued to President George Bush, Sr. and Congress saying that remedy (which may be t he point ). Speaking on behalf of t he G33 and ot her developing count ries, India proposed a 110% volume t rigger, leaving t he sides far apart . The US represent at ive lat er “ compromised” by endorsing Lamy’s posit ion (ICTSD 2008b). When India proposed compromise posit ions, t he US refused t o budge from t he 140%figure. The US used China and India as t he scapegoat s, but in realit y t he t wo represent ed a coalit ion of nearly 100 count ries. Ben Burket t , president of t he Nat ional Family Farm Coalit ion in t he US had lit t le sympat hy for t he US posit ion: “ The WTO bears much responsibilit y for dismant ling domest ic and t ariff prot ect ions and leaving count ries at t he mercy of volat ile, speculat ive market s for t heir food securit y. As a U.S. farmer, I fully support t he right of India and t he G33 count ries t o implement a special safeguard mechanism (SSM) t o prot ect t heir farmers and consumers from below-cost import s flooding t heir market s” (NFFC 2008). Adapt ed from Rick Jonasse, The Doha Collapse: Time t o Get Agricult ure out of t he WTO, Food First Policy Brief , no. 15, August 2008, ht t p:/ / www. foodfirst .org/ en/ node/ 2224. Faiola, Ant hony and Rama Lakshmi. 2008. Bit t er Rift Halt s Free-Trade Talks: Emerging Nat ions India, China Insist on Right t o Tariffs. The Washingt on Post . July 30. ICTSD. 2008a. Agricult ural Saf eguard Cont roversy Triggers Breakdown in Doha Round Talks. Int ernat ional Cent re for Trade and Sust ainable Development . ht t p:/ / ict sd.net / i/ news/ bridgesweekly/ 18034/ (accessed August 7, 2008). ICTSD. 2008b. G7 Talks on Special Saf eguard Mechanism Inconclusive as Blame Game Heat s Up. Int ernat ional Cent re for Trade and Sust ainable Development . ht t p:/ / ict sd.net / i/ wt o/ englishupdat es/ 15018/ (accessed August 15, 2008). NFFC. 2008. Press Release: U.S. Family Farmers Applaud Demise of Doha Negot iat ions. Nat ional Family Farm Coalit ion. ht t p:/ / www.foodfirst .org/ en/ node/ 2208 (accessed August 14, 2008). 56 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 12 NAFTA: Effects on Agriculture The Nort h American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) required t he immediat e removal of all non-t ariff barriers for agricult ural goods, and a gradual five-year phase-out of t ariffs for “ sensit ive” crops such as corn, beans, and milk. However, t he Mexican government eliminat ed t ariffs much sooner t han required, and agricult ural t rade—part icularly export s of US grain and Mexican fruit s and veget ables—grew very rapidly (Carlsen 2007; de It a 2008; Henriques 2004). The USDA Foreign Agricult ure Service describes t his as “ one of t he most successful t rade agreement s in hist ory” (Carlsen 2007). Opponent s maint ain t hat NAFTA has only benefit ed a few large-scale growers and food processing corporat ions, while devast at ing smaller producers. In Mexico, small farmers (who st ill comprised 25%of t he populat ion prior t o NAFTA) had hist orically grown corn as a st aple for home consumpt ion as well as for t he domest ic market , supplying up t o a quart er of t ot al nat ional product ion in some years. But as import s of cheaper US corn ent ered t he market , t hese farmers could no longer find buyers for t heir crops (de It a 2008; Scot t 2006). The archit ect s of NAFTA predict ed t hat market signals would prompt farmers t o swit ch t o ot her crops such as fruit s and veget ables, in which Mexico—due t o it s cheap labor force and wint er growing season—has a comparat ive advant age over t he US (de It a 2008). But only large landholders in t he nort h—locat ed on flat , fert ile, irrigat ed land wit h access t o credit , t echnology, and est ablished market ing channels—were able t o make such a shift . These farms are t ypically cont ract ed out by US produce companies t hat prefer t o deal wit h large commercial growers rat her t han peasant farmers. Meanwhile, t he vast maj orit y of producers live in cent ral and sout hern Mexico, on small rain-fed plot s t hat are generally unsuit able for hort icult ure due t o st eep slopes, poor soil, and irregular rainfall. These farmers are also unable t o afford t he high init ial st art -up cost s of shift ing t o agro-export product ion, and are t herefore excluded from t he new export market . In addit ion, t hose who assumed t hat farmers would readily shift away from basic grain failed t o consider t he diet ary and cult ural significance of corn in rural Mexico. The success of a few largescale growers masks t he plight of small farmers t hroughout t he count ry, j ust as higher overall GDP can mask t he declining incomes of t he poor (de It a 2008; Scot t 2006). Throughout t he course of NAFTA, rural Mexico has faced ever-increasing povert y, environment al degradat ion, social unrest , and out -migrat ion (de It a 2008). Over t wo million farmers have fled t he count ryside (St iglit z and ROOT CAUSES 57 Charlt on 2005), and each year hundreds of t housands more risk t heir lives t o cross t he border in search of work (Barry 1995). Rat her t han profit ing from new market s, t hese displaced farmers have become t he labor force for large agro-export farms, picking t omat oes and peppers for US market s under some of t he worst living and working condit ions in Nort h America (Wright 2005). While t heir incomes may have increased (cont ribut ing t o higher overall GDP), t hese workers also face declining nut rit ion, separat ion from t heir families, j ob inst abilit y, and higher living cost s due t o t he loss of self-provisioning (de It a 2008). Advocat es of NAFTA point t o Mexico’s increased GDP as an indicat or of success, arguing t hat povert y and uneven dist ribut ion of wealt h are t he failure of domest ic policies rat her t han free t rade. Opponent s reply t hat NAFTA has prevent ed t he government s from enact ing bet t er policies, and has increased corporat e influence over nat ional polit ics (Meléndez Salinas 2007). Many also point out t hat t he impact s of NAFTA have been unevenly dist ribut ed among nat ions, as t he US import s mainly nonessent ial product s like coffee and fruit , while Mexico import s vast quant it ies of basic st aple foods. Such t rade has a great er impact on food securit y in Mexico, where a large percent age of t he populat ion is involved in agricult ure and depends upon it for bot h income and daily sust enance (de It a 2008). Adapt ed from Dori St one, Beyond t he Fence: A Journey t o t he Root s of t he Migrat ion Crisis, Food First Books, 2009. Barry, Tom. 1995. Zapat a’s Revenge: Free Trade and t he Farm Crisis in Mexico. Bost on: Int erhemispheric Resource Cent er. Carlsen, Laura. 2007. NAFTA Inequalit y and Immigrat ion: Americas Policy Program. Mexico Cit y: Int erhemispheric Resources Cent er. de It a, Ana. 2008. Fourt een Years of NAFTA and t he Tort illa Crisis: Americas Policy Program. Mexico Cit y: Int erhemispheric Resources Cent er. Henriques, Gisele and Raj Pat el. 2004. NAFTA, Corn, and Mexico’s Agricult ural Trade Liberalizat ion: IRC Americas Program Special Report . Mexico Cit y: Int erhemispheric Resources Cent er. Meléndez Salinas, Claudia. 2007. Mexican Farmers St ruggle t o Survive: NAFTA, Farm Bill, Lack of Ot her Economic Opport unit ies Force Subsist ence Producers t o Find Work Elsewhere. Mont erey Count y Herald. December 5. Scot t , Robert E. et al. 2006. Revisit ing NAFTA: St ill Not Working f or Nort h America’s Workers. Economic Policy Inst it ut e. ht t p:/ / www.epi.org/ cont ent . cfm/ bp173 (accessed July 23 2008). St iglit z, Joseph E. and Andrew Charlt on. 2005. Fair Trade f or All: How Trade Can Promot e Development . New York: Oxford Universit y Press. Wright , Angus. 2005. The Deat h of Ramón González: The Modern Agricult ural Dilemma. 2 ed. Aust in: Universit y of Texas Press. 58 FOOD REBELLIONS! the main incentive for immigration was economic need. The report prescribed more economic integration through free trade to stall this low, speciically suggesting that the US encourage the development of a free trade area for all of North America (Bacon 2008). What NAFTA actually did was to force Mexican farmers, especially corn farmers, to compete with the cheap prices of subsidized commodities being dumped in Mexico from the US. Thanks to NAFTA, by the late 1990s Mexico had gone from being self-suicient in corn to becoming a corn importer. NAFTA outlawed price supports for Mexican farmers, which made it impossible to sell their products at prices covering the costs of production. According to the Mexican government, one million Mexicans became unemployed in NAFTA’s irst year alone, creating larger—not smaller—waves of immigration to the US (Bacon 2008). NAFTA addresses both trade-related issues, such as import tarifs and quotas and non-trade-related issues, such as investment and competition between domestic and foreign companies. Reductions in tarifs and quotas, cuts in agricultural subsidies and price supports, privatization of government-sponsored marketing mechanisms, and the evaporation of accessible credit for small farmers under NAFTA have created more poverty and malnutrition, and led to the separation of families through migration (Rosset 2006). NAFTA has also allowed many US factories and other transnational companies to move to Mexico, where they regularly abuse labor laws and threaten to relocate overseas if laborers demand better treatment (Scot 2003). Furthermore, corporations are allowed to sue a government if its laws or policies limit their proits under NAFTA’s ‘investor protection’ provisions (Brown 2004). This includes situations where a government implements public health, labor, and environmental protections mandated by voters. In 2004 the Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA–DR) was put into efect. This agreement was modeled ater NAFTA and includes Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, in addition to the Dominican Republic and the US. The signing of CAFTA provoked mass protests throughout Central America. CAFTA hits the poor even harder than NAFTA because Central America is less industrialized, has lower skill levels, and fewer major national irms than does Mexico (Moore 2005). The US has FTAs with 14 countries and is aggressively negotiat- ROOT CAUSES 59 ing with Colombia, Korea, Oman, Panama, and Peru. Agreements in Latin America are part of a strategy to establish a continentwide free trade agreement for the Americas. According to the US Department of Commerce’s oicial website for free trade agreements, “Free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved to be one of the best ways to open up foreign markets to U.S. exporters.” Free trade agreements now account for over 42% of US exports (International Trade Administration 2008). 4 The Overproduction of Hunger: Uncle Sam’s Farm and Food Bill The US Farm Bill is a mammoth piece of legislation passed by the US Congress every ive to seven years. It funds a wide range of government programs including food stamps and nutrition, agricultural research, animal welfare, forestry, rural electricity and water supply, foreign food aid, and—importantly—subsidy payments to commodity crop producers. Year-to-year luctuation in crop yields and prices makes farming inancially risky. Farmers are also caught in a perennial cost–price squeeze because they use expensive industrial inputs to produce cheap raw materials. Further, farmers must invest heavily up front in inputs and labor and then hope that the weather cooperates. When they take their crops to market months later, they oten ind crop prices have fallen. Subsidy payments, price guarantees, crop insurance, set-asides, grain reserves and other measures have historically been used to provide more stability to farmers under agriculture’s inherently adverse conditions. Food crises and farm crises are never far apart. In the 1970s, the US government had been managing grain supply and market luctuations by maintaining national reserves and paying farmers to idle their land. But when oil shortages and inlation pushed up food prices—provoking widespread hunger abroad—the US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told US farmers to save the world from hunger by planting “fence row to fence row” and puting their entire harvest on the market. Prior policies that curbed overproduction and protected farmers from price swings were replaced by ones that encouraged maximum production and low prices. When it turned out the hungry people of the world were too poor to buy all the food US farmers produced, markets became gluted with grain and prices crashed. Secretary Butz then told farmers to grow their way out of the crisis. The only option was to “get big or THE OVERPRODUCTION OF HUNGER 61 BOx 13 The Perils of the Unregulated Market by George Naylor, Nat ional Family Farm Coalit ion—USA Farmers produce commodit ies (especially grains) because t hey are not perishable, can be st ored, and act virt ually as money t hroughout t he year. The boom and bust cycle is inherent in an unregulat ed agricult ural economy. In years of abundance and low prices, individual farmers will increase product ion in an at t empt t o maint ain t heir income. This only drives t he market price even lower, leading t o wast eful consumpt ion—such as feedlot s or et hanol plant s. In years of scarcit y, t he increased demand t hat grew in t he abundant years will push prices ever upwards. Bot h farmers and poor consumers suffer under t his unregulat ed market . The solut ion is t o first recognize t he nat ural t endency of t he market t o discount t he environment al cost s and social cost s t hat are inevit able wit h unregulat ed commodit y product ion. A price floor has t o be set t o int ernalize t hese cost s and adj ust it t o inflat ion (t his higher price would discourage t heir use as livest ock feed and as a feedst ock for et hanol). Then t he government needs t o implement conservat ion and supply management programs t o limit wast eful overproduct ion and encourage biodiversit y. Finally, we need t o provide for a government -held reserve t hat keeps surpluses off t he market in years of bount y so as t o not break t he price floor, and t o release grain in t imes of scarcit y t o ensure food securit y. This needs t o be done int ernat ionally among all count ries able t o produce commodit y surpluses. Every count ry should have t he right t o eliminat e any import s t hat disrupt t he agricult ural policy t hey have chosen which let s t hem respect t heir t radit ions, environment , food securit y and need for economic opport unit y in rural areas. get out.” The result was widespread bankruptcy and the wrenching exodus of over half of the US’s farming families from the countryside. The average farm size went from 200 to 400 acres, relecting a steady shit to megafarms. Large-scale corporate and non-family farms now control 75% of agricultural production in the US (Rosegrant 1994; Banker et al. 2007). Under new agricultural policy, farmers were guaranteed a minimum price for their grain. True to its word, over the next two decades, the government paid out billions of dollars to maintain surpluses of cheap grain. Cheap grain became the bulwark not only of a feedlot explosion, but of US foreign policy as well. This strategy was 62 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 14 The US: The Food Crisis Comes Home Few people t hink of t he Unit ed St at es when t hey t hink of t he food crisis. However, hidden from int ernat ional at t ent ion is t he fact t hat even before t he global food crisis, over 35 million Americans—12% of t he populat ion— were going hungry. Wit h t he crisis, t hey were j oined by people living j ust over t he povert y line, making 50 million people food insecure in t he richest count ry in t he world. In a moderat ely populat ed land of massive wealt h, rich soils, abundant wat er and cut t ing-edge t echnology, t hese numbers fly in t he face of assert ions t hat hunger is due t o “ overpopulat ion,” “ underdevelopment ,” or “ scarce resources.” The food crisis is hit t ing t he US and wit h t he economic crisis, will soon become a domest ic polit ical issue. US ret ail prices of food increased 5.5% bet ween 2007 and 2008. The USDA claims prices will increase anot her t hree t o four percent age point s t hroughout 2009, amount ing t o t he st eepest increase in 19 years. Many food insecure people in t he US live in t he “ food desert s” and must t ravel long dist ances t o buy fresh food. The t riple squeeze of a declining economy and food and energy inflat ion are affect ing t he poor and t he middle class alike. Last year, over 28 million people—a nat ional record—were driven int o t he nat ional food st amp program (Winne 2008). A dozen eggs in 2008 cost 50 cent s more t han in 2007, a loaf of bread, 20 cent s more. Most small ret ailers operat e on a slim margin of 1%–3%, cannot absorb t hese cost increases, and so pass t hem on t o consumers. However, because t hey make t heir money on high volume and low margins—and because t hey can source direct ly from producers—larger chains and big box st ores are post ing sizable crisis profit s. Safeway showed a 15.7%increase in net income bet ween 2006 and 2007. UK-based Tesco’s profit s rose by a record 11.8% last year. Ot her maj or ret ailers, such as WalMart , also say t hat food sales are driving t heir profit increases. Food Banks: Canaries in the Mineshaft Recent t rends in t he nat ion’s food banks are a good indicat or of t he dimensions of t he crisis: t here is less food available, it is more expensive, and t he lines out side t he food banks are growing. A 2008 survey done by Feeding later baked-in to the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that prevented developing countries from raising tarifs to protect their agriculture from cheap US imports. But membership in the WTO also required the US to drop its farm subsidies. The 1996 Farm Bill called for a phase-out by 2001. The socalled, “Freedom to Farm” Act abandoned our national grain reserves THE OVERPRODUCTION OF HUNGER 63 America (t he nat ion’s food bank coordinat ing agency, dist ribut ing t wo billion pounds of food annually) revealed t hat 99% of food banks had significant increases in t he number of people served since last year (America’s Second Harvest 2008). Though t he demand for food has increased, food st ocks are down. USDA surplus has declined by $200 million (Leibt ag 2008) and local food donat ions are down nat ionally about 9% (Fraser 2008). (The USDA dist ribut es surplus when st ocks are high or commodit y prices fall below a cert ain level. Like int ernat ional food aid, t hey respond t o t he needs of t he grain market first , t ending t o decrease dist ribut ion when food is most needed and increase it when it is less needed.) Because many food banks across t he nat ion rely heavily on government surplus, t he decline in USDA bonus commodit ies has pressured t hem t o find alt ernat ive suppliers and sources of food. Food Banks are also suffering due t o decreased monet ary donat ions from middle class Americans who are t ight ening t heir belt s in response t o t he nat ional financial crunch, and decreased food donat ions from food corporat ions due t o t he emergence of lucrat ive “ secondary market s” (e.g., Big Lot s, Dollar Tree, Grocery Out let ). In California—t he richest agricult ural st at e in t he US—t he California Associat ion of Food Banks in t he summer of 2008 assert ed t hat food banks are at t he “ beginning of a crisis” (California Associat ion of Food Banks 2008). Adapt ed from Conner et al., The Food Crisis Comes Home: Empt y Food Banks, Rising Cost s—Sympt oms of a Hungrier Nat ion, Food First Backgrounder, vol.14, no. 3, 2008. America’s Second Harvest . 2008. New Survey Underscores Urgent Need f or Farm Bill as Demands Are Up, Food Down: More Hungry Americans Turn t o Nat ion’s Food Banks f or Help. Chicago: America’s Second Harvest . California Associat ion of Food Banks. 2008. Int ernat ional Food Crisis: Food Bank Client s in Peril. Oakland: California Associat ion of Food Banks. Fraser, R. 2008. Media Relat ions Manger. Telephone int erview wit h H. Conner. in The Food Crisis Comes Home: Empt y Food Banks, Rising Cost s—Sympt oms of a Hungrier Nat ion. Food First Backgrounder 14 (3). June 30. Oakland: Food First . Winne, Mark. 2008. Leading t he Charge, Leading t he Change. Keynot e address given t o t he Nort hwest Harvest Food Bank Annual Meet ing, Seat t le WA. and guted the positive, New Deal aspects of the US Farm Bill (like price loors to rural economies, and conservation and diversiied livestock programs). Counting on unimpeded exports, US farmers borrowed heavily to crank up production—too quickly, as it turned out. When global grain prices crashed, government responded with billions of dollars in “emergency payments” that they claimed were 64 FOOD REBELLIONS! “not technically” subsidies. In 2002 corn and wheat exports from the US were priced at 13% and 43% below the cost of production. It is no surprise that these “non-subsidies” became the foundation of the 2002 Farm Bill. The main beneiciaries of such policies were large farms, multinational grain traders like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, and the feedlot industries (e.g., Tyson and Smithield) that gained access to cheap, abundant grain supplies for their processed foods and animal feed. The 2008 Food, Conservation and Energy Act This act, also known as the Farm Bill, weighed in at $307 billion over ive years. On the food side, 68% of the bill is for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Mitchell 2008). Thanks to years of tireless lobbying on the part of food and farm activists in the US, there is also $100 million a year to be split between programs that rebuild local food systems, increase access to healthy food in underserved communities and support organic, beginning and minority farmers (Banker et al. 2007). Unfortunately, the Farm Bill also includes $74 billion of the same commodity programs that beneit megafarms and corporate agribusiness, and undermine public health, the environment, and farming communities worldwide including: • $12.6 billion in commodity programs with $8.7 billion in direct payments regardless of a grower’s need (CCC 2008) • $300 million a year for agrofuel programs that will continue to push up grain prices (Posey 2008). The boom: are farmers benefiting? While the food crisis sent grain prices on the global market skyrocketing, the family farmers growing the grain didn’t see much of this windfall for long. The spectacular increase in the price of corn (from $2 to $8 a bushel) was quickly followed by a tripling in the price of farm inputs—then a crash in commodity prices when the world inancial crisis hit. Farmers receive less than 20 cents of the food dollar, out of which they must pay for production costs that have increased by 45% over the last six years. The prices of most fertilizers have tripled in a THE OVERPRODUCTION OF HUNGER 65 Leonor Hurt ado Demonst rat ion and rally for food j ust ice in San Francisco, 2008 year and a half. The price of urea, the most common nitrogen fertilizer, rose from an average of US$281 per ton in January 2007 to $402 in January 2008, then to $815 in August, an increase of 300% (IFDC 2008). Diesel prices to farmers have increased 40% in two years (Energy Information Administration 2008). Organic farmers report an increase in their input costs such as organic fertilizer, seeds, and plastics used for irrigation, and general costs such as electricity and water. Many organic milk producers can no longer ind organic feed grains. Some small-scale producers selling at farmers’ markets have seen an increase in customers and in the short run, community supported agriculture (CSA) farmers appear to be the best of (because their consumers help shoulder production costs), but this can shit due to anxiety over next year’s crop or the overall economy. In the Midwest and the South, the crisis has been compounded by looding and hurricanes, forcing replanting and loss of crops to sell at farmers’ markets or to local distributors. The bust Due to the global inancial crisis, grain is siting in freighters overseas because buyers can’t get the leters of credit they need to purchase it. Farmers are having just as much diiculty inding credit to cover their production costs (Weitzman 2008). Market prices for grain ater two years of boom are now crashing by 47% to 62% (CBOT 2008; Cha and 66 FOOD REBELLIONS! McCrummen 2008). Ten-dollar (a bushel) corn was devastating for poor consumers. Three-dollar corn will now devastate producers. The volatility of the world grain market is the bane of today’s globalized food systems. In the boom and bust of the 1970s, the US lost half of its farming population. What will it lose if agriculture goes bust again? Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy6 In Europe, more than a thousand farms disappear every day (Coordinadora Europa de la Via Campesina 2008). The main reason behind this trend is the lack of political will on the part of governments and international institutions to back local, family-scale and smallholder agriculture. Similar to the Farm Bill in the US, in the European Union the Common Agricultural Policy (and the agricultural rules of the WTO) serve the interests of agro-industry, not family farmers. These policies put corporate proit ahead of people’s food needs and local, sustainable production. The current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a combination of poor policies and bad reforms dating back to 1992. The CAP, with its focus on industrial agriculture and subsidies, generated a boom in agricultural production, resulting in falling prices and highly negative ecological and social impacts (Soler 2007). The CAP directs the majority of its assistance to large producers, to the detriment of small family farms. As the report Goliath Against David: Who Wins and Who Loses with the CAP in Spain and in Poor Counties (Intermón Oxfam 2005) states, “The CAP sustains a model of intensive production that rewards those who have the most and causes important distortions in international markets, oten at the expense of developing countries.” The report adds that “behind the legal and technical maze that accompanies the functioning of the system is hidden a simple principle: the more you produce and the more land you own—which is to say, the richer you are—the more public assistance you receive.” According to data from the European Commission, in 2000 some 2.3 million European farmers received only 4% of EU farm subsidies, while 5% of the largest producers took half the subsidies. In Great Britain, families in the wealthiest ranks of society received heavy subsidies from the EU: the Duke of Westminster, €470,000, Sir Adrian Swire, €300,000 for his farm in Oxfordshire, and the Duke of Marlborough, €535,000 for his production of cereals, among others. THE OVERPRODUCTION OF HUNGER 67 The same logic is repeated in France, Germany, and Spain. According to data from the French government, a quarter of its farmers receive no assistance, while 15% of the largest farms take in six of every ten euros in French subsidies (Watkins 2003). In Spain 17% of the proprietors of the largest farms receive much greater than average income, while the 60% of the smallest holdings receive below average income (Intermón Oxfam 2005). The batle over food in Europe is also being fought over genetically modiied organisms. Spain is the only country in Europe that cultivates genetically modiied organisms (GMOs) on a large scale, and as a consequence has become the back door for GMOs’ entry on the continent. Spain imports some nine million tons of soy and maize annually from countries with massive GMO production including the US, Argentina, and Brazil. Importers Cargill, Bunge, Simsa, and ADM do not separate conventional from genetically modiied grain, thus causing massive genetic contamination (Greenpeace España 2004). In Europe there is no systematic protection of conventional and organic seed, and a loose threshold of accidental contamination is legally acceptable. This puts the free choice of farmers and consumers at risk and endangers conventional and organic production. The European Union’s model of industrial agriculture has had profound social and environmental impacts in the region. In Spain between 1999 and 2003, 147,000 family farms disappeared, resulting in the depopulation of rural areas, their impoverishment, and a withdrawal of essential public services (Intermón Oxfam 2005). Environmental degradation has proceeded apace: soil erosion; excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers; soil depletion from the absence of crop rotation and fallow periods; the loss of biodiversity due to the spread of monocultures; desertiication, and the depletion and contamination of water resources through excessive irrigation have all been among the disastrous consequences of the CAP. 5 Agrofuels: A Bad Idea at the Worst Possible Time In 2007 Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute shocked the world by stating latly: “The grain it takes to ill a 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year” (Brown 2007). The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, was just as critical. He called agrofuels a “crime against humanity” and urged governments to implement a ive-year moratorium on production (Ziegler 2007). These statements were the irst fractures in the “agrofuels consensus,” the widely held belief that fuel crops hailed the next transition to a renewable fuel economy, one that would lower greenhouse gas emissions and usher in a new era of rural prosperity. Faith in agrofuels helped unleash an investment boom in research, processing plants, and the conversion of millions of acres of land into sugarcane, corn, oil palm and jatropha plantations worldwide. The desire for an alternative fuel to confront “peak oil” forged an unspoken social agreement on the need for agrofuels, even as scientiic evidence contradicted the claims of energy savings and environmental beneits enthusiastically promoted by the industry (Crutzen 2007; Searchinger et al. 2008). The protests of poor peasants losing land to palm-oil expansion in Colombia, of pastoralists losing land to jatropha plantations in Africa and India, of sugarcane workers living and dying in slave-like conditions in Brazil, or of Malaysian conservationists struggling to preserve forest habitat for endangered orangutans, were drowned out by the “Green Gold Rush.” Politicians of every stripe lined up behind the lush agrofuels lobby, voting for billions of dollars in subsidies, tarifs and tax incentives. Not until the global food crisis burst upon the scene were the world’s governments forced to question the wisdom of using food resources for fuel production. While food price inlation was not caused solely by agrofuels, the explosive expansion of the ethanol market had a direct efect on grain AGROFUELS 69 Leonor Hurt ado Food or fuel? Agrofuels in our food syst em price surges (De La Torre Ugarte and Murphy 2008). Between 2001 and 2006, the amount of corn used in US ethanol distilleries tripled from 18 million tons to an estimated 55 million tons. Between 2006 and 2007, the increase in demand for corn from US ethanol distilleries—from 54 to 81 million tons—was over twice the annual increase in global demand for the world’s grain. By 2008 a quarter of the US corn harvest was being diverted to ethanol production (Financial Times 2008). Despite industry claims to the contrary, agrofuels do raise food prices. Ater all, their original purpose was to add value to cheap, surplus grain. (In this respect, they worked a litle too well…) Because US corn accounts for some 40% of global production, increasing the value of US corn as fuel-stock impacts global markets for corn as 70 FOOD REBELLIONS! food. As market demand for fuel corn increases, not only do all corn prices rise, but more corn is planted, crowding out other food grains such as wheat and soybeans. With less land available for cultivation, the price of these products also increases. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) predicts that depending on rates of agrofuels expansion, by 2020, the global price of corn will increase by 26% to 72% and the price of oilseeds between 18% and 44% (von Braun 2007). With every 1% rise in the cost of food, 16 million people are made food insecure (Runge and Senauer 2007). However, agrofuels don’t just drive up food prices, they concentrate corporate monopoly power and pull our food and fuels systems under one giant industrial roof. How? Overproduction of grains has led to a steady decline in food prices and proit margins over the last 30 years. In the past, corporations ofset this falling rate of proit by increasing productivity through technological improvements (e.g., the Green Revolution), or by adding value to raw commodities by transforming them (e.g., corn into beef), and by vertically integrating—expanding their operations to include production, processing and retail, thus capturing more of the food value chain. Grain companies simply traded and transported larger and larger volumes of grain. Agrofuels accomplish all of these things in one operation. In this way, they are like an industrial “one-stop-shop” to solve agribusiness’ problem with the falling rate of proit. The transformation of food into fuel (a) opens up new market space for overproduced commodities like corn and sugarcane, (b) inlates the value of those commodities in both food and fuel markets, (c) creates more processing steps that allow corporate players to both add and capture more value, and (d) increases the total amount of grain being traded. Litle wonder that agrofuels steam full speed ahead, despite their serious social and environmental drawbacks. Proponents of agrofuels argue that fuel crops planted on ecologically degraded lands will improve rather than destroy the environment. Perhaps the government of Brazil had this in mind when it reclassiied some 200 million hectares of dry tropical forests, grassland, and marshes as “degraded” and apt for cultivation. In reality, these are the biodiverse ecosystems of the Mata Atlantica, the Cerrado and the Pantanal, occupied by indigenous people, subsistence farmers, and extensive catle ranches. The introduction of agrofuel AGROFUELS 71 Figure 4 The Green Gold Rush 16 $billions 14 rl d wo 12 de n t t io en uc d st m o e r i nv sp el in fu e s o r a re ag in i nc e n s o a lli re bi i nc 00 2 5x $ 10 8 6 4 2 0 wi 2005 2006 Invest ment s announced for 2007-2008 5%of global t rans fuel by 2020 Average annual invest ment needed 2007-2020 Source: Compiled from Ren21 and Garten Rothkopf (2007) calculations plantations will simply push these communities to the “agricultural frontier” of the Amazon where the devastating paterns of deforestation are all too well known. Soybeans supply 40% of Brazil’s biodiesel. NASA has positively correlated their market price with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest—currently at nearly 325,000 hectares a year. Called “The Diesel of Deforestation,” palm oil plantations for biodiesel are the primary cause of forest loss in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. By 2020, Indonesia’s oil palm plantations will triple in size to 16.5 million hectares—an area the size of England and Wales combined—resulting in a loss of 98% of forest cover. Neighboring Malaysia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has already lost 87% of its tropical forests and continues deforesting at a rate of 7% a year. The big players in the agrofuels boom are no longer environmentalists or family farmers, but multinational corporations and investors, who have increased their investments in the industry seven-fold in just three years (CNBC 2007). This investment is creating new corporate partnerships between agribusinesses, biotechnology, oil and automotive companies: ADM with both Monsanto and ConocoPhillips; BP with DuPont and Toyota, as well as with Monsanto and Mendel Biotechnology; Royal Dutch Shell with Cargill, Syngenta, 72 FOOD REBELLIONS! and Goldman-Sachs; and DuPont with British Petroleum and Weyerhauser. In June 2007, BP, Associated British Foods, and chemical giant DuPont Co. announced they were investing $400 million to build an agrofuels plant in England (Holt-Giménez and Kenield 2008). Despite bumps and busts within the industry, the targets, subsidies, tarifs, and tax beneits hold agrofuels irmly in place. US subsidies for ethanol are as much as $1.38 per gallon. By early 2009 they accounted for over half its wholesale market price. In 2006, the combined state and federal support for the US ethanol industry was between $5.1 and $6.8 billion (IISD 2006). Do farmers benefit? In the tropics of the global South, 100 hectares dedicated to family farming generates 35 jobs. Oil palm and sugarcane plantations provide 10 jobs, eucalyptus two, and soybeans a scant half-job per 100 hectares, all poorly paid. The establishment of palm oil plantations in Afro-Colombian communities has driven peasants of thousands of hectares of their own land at gunpoint (Zimbalist 2007). The “Jatropha Explosion” in India and Africa, far from occupying idle, unproductive land, or serving as a hedgerow cash crop for peasant farmers, has become a major plantation monocrop, driving herders out of browsing lands and peasants into low-income contract farming. Until recently, agrofuels supplied primarily local and sub-regional markets. Even in the US, most ethanol plants were relatively small, and farmer owned. With the agrofuels boom, big industry is quickly moving in, centralizing operations and creating gargantuan economies of scale. Big Oil, Big Grain, and Big Genetic Engineering are rapidly consolidating control over the entire agrofuel value chain. The market power of these corporations is staggering: Cargill and ADM control 65% of the global grain trade, Monsanto and Syngenta a quarter of the $60 billion genetech industry. This market power allows these companies to extract proits from the most lucrative and low-risk segments of the value chain, e.g., inputs, processing and distribution. Farmers producing fuel crops will be increasingly dependent on a tightly organized cabal of companies for their seed, inputs, services, processing, and sale. They are not likely to receive many beneits. More likely, smallholders will be forced out of the market AGROFUELS 73 and of the land, just as hundreds of thousands have already been displaced by the corporate soybean plantations in the “Republic of Soy,” a 50+ million hectare area covering southern Brazil, northern Argentina, Paraguay, and eastern Bolivia. There is overwhelming support for agrofuels in the corn-growing regions of North America. The US Corn Growers Association, the American Corn Growers Association, and the Canadian Oilseed Association all promote agrofuels. This is because decades of low prices turned many rural communities in North America into economically depressed ghost towns with few jobs, failed businesses, crumbling infrastructure, and painful deicits in basic human services like hospitals, schools, ire departments, banks, and grocery stores. Hunger in the US is actually worse in rural areas than urban centers, making the rural Midwest the largest “food desert” in the world. When the agrofuels industry drove up the price of corn to levels not seen in decades, farmers inally received a price for their grain that not only covered the cost of production, but generated profits. The burgeoning ethanol plants brought in jobs and new investments in hotels, restaurants and other services. Unsurprisingly, farmers unable to get a fair price when their grain was sold for food were ecstatic when grain sold as fuel drove up prices paid to them by 300%. With the global economic recession, oil and grain prices are crashing, agrofuel plants are folding, and the agrofuels industry (now consolidating into the usual corporate hands) is operating on slimmer margins, despite subsidy and tarif supports. Because inlated farm inputs are not coming down in price, Northern farmers can look forward to a cost-price squeeze once again. Many family farm groups are tired of puting their livelihoods at risk in the volatile, unregulated market and want to move away from subsidies, which they consider beneit industry more than farmers. They are calling for something very simple: a fair price. If farmers received a fair price for their crop, they would not need subsidies. Neither would they have to resort to agrofuels. The government has many ways of ensuring a fair market price for farmers, including a guaranteed price loor and supply-side controls to prevent overproduction and price volatility. Grain companies are staunch opponents of these mechanisms. They prefer to buy on the cheap, even though it costs taxpayers and hurts farmers. 74 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 15 The RFS Targets: The Obligatory Market Driving the Agrofuels Boom The Renewable Fuel St andards (RFS) t arget s in t he 2007 US Energy and Securit y Act —36 billion gallons per year by 2022—far exceed t he US’s current capacit y for fuel crop product ion. Of t he mandat e, less t han half—15 billion gallons—will come from corn et hanol. Achieving t his volume will require 45 million acres—nearly 50% of t he count ry’s current corn acreage. Even if all of t he US’s 90 million-acre corn crop were convert ed t o et hanol, j ust 12%–16%of our gasoline would be replaced—barely enough for current 10% et hanol blends (E-10), much less t he 98% blends suggest ed in t he Energy Bill (Hill et al. 2006). The remaining 21 billion gallons in t he RFS are defined as “ advanced biofuels.” This fut urist ic sounding t erm act ually includes any fuel crop ot her t han corn, including soybeans, oil palm, sugarcane and j at ropha. While polit icians have pinned t heir hopes on cellulosic et hanol made from nat ive grasses or genet ically engineered fast -growing t rees, by most account s t hese fuels will need years and billions of dollars in research and infrast ruct ure development t o become commercially viable. The 36-billiongallon mandat e only replaces some 7% of t he US’s current fuel use—about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (Goodell 2007). Regardless of t he t echnology, t he inconvenient t rut h lurking in t he 2007 US Energy Bill is t hat t he Unit ed St at es is geographically incapable of producing enough agrofuel t o meet t he RFS mandat e. This is why in 2006 t he US import ed 13.5% of et hanol used. Count ries t hat export et hanol t o t he US include Cost a Rica, El Salvador, Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, and Brazil. In 2005, t he US import ed 31 million gallons of The corporate concentration in the agrofuels industry is rapidly pushing out the small farmer-owned ethanol cooperatives. According to the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), out of a total of 193 operational ethanol processing plants in the US, 39 are local, farmer owned, accounting for 15% of the nation’s total capacity. Farmers’ share of production dropped 13 points from 28% between 2007 and 2008 (Hasan 2007; RFA 2009). Out of a total of 20 plants now under construction, none are farmer-owned. The top four companies now control 33% of US production capacity (RFA 2009). Because of the economies of scale of its plants, and the fact that it can dominate the grain market in both food and fuel crops, ADM is emerging as the dominant player. As the AGROFUELS 75 et hanol from Brazil. By 2006 Brazilian import s j umped t o 434 million gallons (Renewable Fuel Associat ion 2008). Rat her t han ensuring energy independence, t he RFS mandat e reflect s an agreement bet ween indust ry and polit icians t o legislat e t he US’s dependency on import ed agrofuels. The liquid fuel t arget s in t he RFS are t he keyst one of t he agrofuels boom. They frame t he economic cont ext by legally forcing US consumers t o buy agrofuels. Wit hout t he t arget s, neit her agrofuels’ subst ant ial subsidies nor t heir prot ect ive t ariffs can sust ain t he indust ry. Remove t he 36-billiongallon-per-year t arget s and agrofuels come t o a grinding halt . This is why many concerned cit izens in t he US are calling for a suspension of agrofuel t arget s. A coalit ion of progressive environment al and social j ust ice groups in t he US launched a global call for a US morat orium in 2008. i The call for an agrofuels moratorium in Europe has forced European Commission officials to acknowledge the dangers of agrofuels expansion, leading to a move to down-size Europe’s agrofuels mandates from 10%to 4%. Adapt ed from Eric Holt -Giménez and Isabella Kenfield, When Renewable Isn’ t Sust ainable: Agrofuels and t he Inconvenient Trut hs Behind t he 2007 US Energy Independence and Securit y Act , Food First Policy Brief 13, 2008. i. See ht t p:/ / ga3.org/ campaign/ agrofuelsmorat orium. Goodell, Jeff. 2007. The Et hanol Scam: One of America’s Biggest Polit ical Boondoggles. Rolling St one 1032. Hill, Jason, Erik Nelson, David Tilman, St ephen Polasky, and Douglas Tiffany. 2006. Environment al, Economic and Energet ic Cost s of Biodiesel and Et hanol Biof uels. Paper read at Nat ional Academy of Sciences, July 12. Renewable Fuel Associat ion. 2008. Indust ry St at ist ics. Renewabl e Fuel Associ at i on. ht t p: / / www. et hanolrf a. org/ indust ry/ st at ist ics/ (accessed Oct ober 14, 2008). boom–bust cycle of food and fuel unfolds, the industry continues to consolidate. ADM’s stock options now dwarf all major competitors by 3:1 (Financial Times 2008). Agrofuels: Renewable… but not Green Before the advent of electricity and hydropower, much of the Western world lit their lamps with oil rendered from the blubber of whales, a “renewable” resource that the whaling industry nearly drove to extinction. (Even ater the commercialization of petroleum, the industry continued to hunt whales, marketing perfumes and baleen corsets in an atempt to save the industry.) Confusing the term 76 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 16 Yes, We Have No Tortillas While t hey may well be suffering under t he current financial crisis due t o speculat ion, big grain companies were not hit by food price inflat ion. Corporat ions like ADM and Cargill bot h buy and sell grain, so t hey st and t o gain from eit her low or high grain prices. When grain prices drop, t hey buy. Because of t heir market power t hey can wit hhold grain from t he market — hoarding supplies unt il t he price goes up again. When grain prices rise, t hey sell. This speculat ion was at t he heart of t he Mexican “ Tort illa Crisis” in 2007. It makes no difference t hat whit e corn is used for t ort illas and yellow corn for cat t le feed. As agrofuels cut int o t he acreage plant ed t o yellow corn, whit e corn was fed t o cat t le, t aking it off t he t ort illa market and inflat ing it s price. Grain merchant s, like ADM and Cargill, and corn processors, like Mexico’s binat ional Maseca, raised t heir prices. When t he Mexican government at t empt ed t o int ervene wit h a price cap, t hese corporat ions responded by wit holding grain from t he market (hoarding), which made t he problem worse. This incident illust rat es how t he agrofuels boom increases t he market power of t hese corporat ions—a power summarily unchecked by government s. “renewable” with the notion of sustainability hides an inconvenient truth: agrofuels targets in the industrial North are leading to massive environmental destruction in the global South. Millions of hectares of tropical forests, grasslands, and peat lands around the world are rapidly being cleared and burned to plant fuel crops for export. But when the full “life cycle” of agrofuels is considered—from land clearing to automotive consumption—the moderate emission savings are undone by far greater emissions from deforestation, burning, peat drainage, cultivation, and soil carbon losses (Searchinger et al. 2008). Every ton of palm oil produced results in 33 tons of carbon dioxide emissions—10 times more than petroleum (Monbiot 2007). Tropical forests cleared for sugarcane ethanol emit 50% more greenhouse gasses than the production and use of the same amount of gasoline (Tillman and Hill 2007). Commenting on the global carbon balance, Doug Parr, chief UK scientist at Greenpeace, states latly, “If even ive percent of biofuels are sourced from wiping out existing ancient forests, you’ve lost all your carbon gain” (Holt-Giménez 2007). There are other environmental problems as well. To produce a liter of ethanol takes three to ive liters of irrigation water and pro- AGROFUELS 77 duces up to 13 liters of waste water (Aslow 2007). It takes the energy equivalent of 113 liters of natural gas to treat this waste, increasing the likelihood that it will simply be released into the environment to pollute streams, rivers and groundwater. Intensive cultivation of fuel crops also leads to high rates of erosion, particularly in soy production—from 6.5 tons per hectare in the US to up to 12 tons per hectare in Brazil and Argentina (Altieri and Bravo 2007). Nonetheless, the agrofuels boom also ofers biotech companies, including Monsanto and Syngenta, the opportunity to irreversibly convert agriculture to genetically engineered crops worldwide. In 2008, 80% of corn, 92% of soy and 86% of coton in the US was genetically modiied (GM) (USDA 2008c). In the EU, consumer resistance has, to a large extent, kept GM crops out. But with agrofuels, the biotech industry has a chance to gain access through the back door by presenting GM crops as energy crops, not food crops. Like a Trojan horse, the expansion of GM corn and soy for special ethanol processing plants will remove geographical barriers to the contamination of non-GMO crops. Second Generation Fuel Crops: Greening the Parachute? Proponents of agrofuels argue that present-day agrofuels made from food crops will soon be replaced with environmentally friendly crops like fast-growing trees and switchgrass. This myth, wryly referred to as the “bait and switchgrass” game, invites us to accept present ineficient and polluting agrofuels on the chance that a beter, greener alternative is in the works. This is a bit like being asked to jump out of a plane on the assurance that parachutes will be invented before you hit the ground… Second generation agrofuels will do nothing to decrease the monopoly power in the food and fuel industries. They won’t avoid the ecological problems of industrial fuel crop monocultures, nor will they resolve the problem of resource competition between food and fuel. This is because the issue of which crops (food or non-food) are converted to fuel is irrelevant. If and when fuel crops like switchgrass and eucalyptus trees become viable agrofuel commodities, they will migrate from hedgerows and woodlots into the ield where the main crops are grown. Here they will compete with food crops for land, water, and resources. Additionally, second generation agrofuels will 78 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 17 Biotechnology: “Stacking” Agrofuels’ Market Power Monsant o and agribusiness giant Cargill recent ly launched a j oint vent ure called Renessen, a whole new agribusiness corporat ion wit h an init ial invest ment of nearly half a billion dollars. Renessen is t he sole provider of t he first commercially available, genet ically modified, energy-dedicat ed crop, “ Mavera High-Value Corn.” Mavera corn is “ st acked” wit h foreign genet ic mat erial for increased oil cont ent , amino acid product ion, Monsant o’s st andard Bt pest icide, and it s Roundup Ready gene. The genius of t his operat ion, and t he danger t o farmers, is t hat farmers must sell t heir crop of Mavera corn t o a Renessen-owned processing plant t o recoup t he higher value of t he crop (for which t hey paid a premium on t he seed). Cargill’s agricult ural processing division has creat ed a plant t hat only processes t heir brand of corn. Furt her, due t o t he genet ically engineered presence of lysine, an amino acid lacking in t he st andard cat t le feedlot diet , t hey can sell t he wast e st ream as a high-priced cat t le feed. Renessen has achieved for Monsant o and Cargill nearly perfect vert ical int egrat ion. Renessen set s t he price of seed, Monsant o sells t he chemical input s, Renessen set s t he price at which t o buy back t he finished crop, Renessen sells t he fuel, and farmers are left t o absorb t he risk. This syst em robs small farmers of choices and market power, while ensuring maximum monopoly profit s for Renessen, Monsant o and Cargill. From Annie Shat t uck, The Agrofuels Troj an Horse, Food First Policy Brief , no. 14, Inst it ut e for Food and Development Policy, 2008. not be commercially available for at least a decade (if ever), because they require major scientiic discoveries in plant physiology to break down lignin, cellulose and hemi-cellulose—not simple reinements of existing technology. A recent study from Iowa State University indicates that under the RFS targets, the expansion of cellulosic feedstock for ethanol production will worsen, not lessen, the competition for land and resources between food and fuel, sending prices skyrocketing. Further, they determine that, “In order for switchgrass ethanol to be commercially viable, it must receive a diferential subsidy over that awarded to corn-based ethanol.” In other words, subsidies to second-generation fuels must be even greater than those presently artiicially propping up corn ethanol. The same study estimates that a 3%–4% increase in AGROFUELS Figure 5 Key World Energy Statistics: World Energy Use Source: International Energy Agency 2007 © OECD/IEA 2007. Head of Communication and Information Office, Paris, France. Figure 6 Key World Energy Statistics: Additional Land Available for Agrofuels Source: International Energy Agency 2007 © OECD/IEA 2007. Head of Communication and Information Office, Paris, France. 79 80 FOOD REBELLIONS! fuel economy would save the same amount of fuel as that expected to be replaced by agrofuels—without massive taxpayer subsidies (Baker et al. 2008). Can we really consume our way out of overconsumption? The need to reduce Northern dependence on foreign oil has led many people to embrace agrofuels as a replacement for fossil fuels and “energy independence.” A quick look at where most of the world’s energy is consumed and where the available land for agrofuels is found dispels this myth (see Figures 6 and 7). The truth is, nearly half of the planet’s energy is consumed in the industrial North, while almost all of the available land for agrofuels (including forests, peat bogs, and browsing land) is found in Africa and Latin America. The tragedy of agrofuels is that the global South will sacriice its forests, savannas, peat bogs and productive land to satiate the energy appetite of the industrial North. There is no reason to sacriice the possibility of sustainable, equitable food and fuel systems to an industrial strategy that compromises both. Many successful, locally focused, energy-eicient and peoplecentered alternatives are presently producing food and fuel in ways that do not threaten food systems, the environment, or livelihoods. The question is not whether agrofuels per se have a place in our future, but whether or not we will allow a handful of global corporations to determine our future by dragging us down an environmentally devastating dead end. To avoid this trap we have to abandon the cornucopian myths let over from the age of abundant oil. We must dare to envision a diferent, steady-state agrarian transition linked to diverse, resilient local food systems. 6 Summing Up the Crisis The global monopolies of the industrial agrifoods complex, with the help of the international inance institutions and the complicity of governments, have served up a major planetary crisis. Further, the global institutions ostensibly in charge of monitoring and protecting the world’s food and inancial systems completely failed to anticipate the food and inancial system meltdowns. The food crisis is rooted in a vulnerable global food system that has become socially, environmentally and inancially dysfunctional. Food has become another commodity subject to inancial speculation. The trade regime serves predatory markets instead of human needs. Agriculture has become an industrial mode of corporate accumulation rather than the basis for productive livelihoods and a sustainable supply of good, healthy food. Local and national food systems have been mercilessly uprooted to make way for global corporate interests. Land, labor, water, and the planet’s genetic patrimony have been privatized and commodiied. Even diet has been colonized by agrifoods corporations in their relentless drive for proit. Because the food system and the inancial system have coevolved, the twin crises are inextricably linked. The human dimensions of these crises are oten lost in a sea of abstrusely large numbers: one billion starving people, 1600% proit increases, $306 billion in subsidies, multi-trillion dollar bailouts… But as they merge and deepen, the concrete realities of the twin crises become unavoidable. A food system in crisis does not just hurt “the poor” in the abstract, but directly afects our families, our neighborhoods, our diets, our health, the soil, the water, the forests, and the air. It afects our own future as well as that of our children, and it damages our planet earth. Popular US author-journalist Michael Pollan claims that the US’s pressing challenges of climate change, the energy crisis, and the health care crisis are impossible to solve without reforming the food system. We would go further to say that solving the world’s inancial 82 FOOD REBELLIONS! and food crises is impossible without transforming the global food system. If crises can be globalized, so can opportunities. Indeed, there may never be a beter time than now to positively transform the global food system. We have an opportunity to address the root causes of poverty and hunger, to build fairness, sustainability and local resilience into the way we produce, process, transport and consume food. In doing so, we can reconstruct and build resiliency into our economies and communities by rebuilding our food systems. If the food crisis also presents us with a wide array of opportunities, the question is: Who beneits? If opportunities are seized by the existing international institutions and multinational corporations to implement the same political, technological, and neoliberal approaches that got us into these messes in the irst place, then not only will we not solve the root problems of hunger, we will be unable to advance equitable, lasting and sustainable alternatives. Distinguishing between proximate and root causes of the crisis is the irst step in being able to choose genuine solutions. Part Two of Food Rebellions! will analyze diferent approaches to solving the food crisis by describing the socioeconomic and political terrain of struggle in which diferent actors actively atempt to capture the opportunities with their own solutions. Some seek to solve the crisis by reairming the mandates of existing institutions, by reforming existing programs, or by advancing new technologies. Others are transformative in outlook. All will play a decisive role in the outcomes for our food systems. PART TWO WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT 7 Overcoming the Crisis: Transforming the Food System To overcome the food crisis, we need to transform the food system. Sound ambitious? Yes, but there has never been a beter time to end hunger. In spite of decades of globalization, people around the planet continue to save local seeds, hold on to family farms, build local economies, establish fair markets, and stubbornly keep their civic organizations alive. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide are working tirelessly to ensure the transparency and accountability of our public and international institutions, struggling to roll back the monopoly power of the agrifoods corporations, and are ighting for the “triple botom line” of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Though systemic changes are diicult to see, these eforts have not only put constant pressure on governments, international inance institutions and multinational corporations, they have created important social and political infrastructures for the growing practice of food sovereignty: the democratic control over our food systems. Taken together, these movements and organizations number in the tens of thousands. Made up of advocates and practitioners, over the years they have developed a wealth of political, technical and entrepreneurial skills that work in concert to put food irst—before monopoly megaproits. Islands of sanity in a dysfunctional global sea, these experiences are steadily building bridges between organizations and communities, linking sustainable production practices, equitable trade relationships and new, locally centered businesses around the globe. Despite their steady growth, sustainable agriculture and community food systems approaches ind it hard to “scale up,” to become the rule rather than the exception. Big agribusiness, international processors and multinational retail chains insist that only they have the eiciencies of scale needed to feed the world. According to them, a world without Yara, Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, Tyson, Tesco and OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 85 WalMart is a world doomed to starvation. However, these arguments conveniently fail to mention that the agrifood industry’s dominance comes not from their superior productivity, but from their access to vast expanses of land, immense market power, cheap oil, taxpayer subsidies, protective tarifs, tax breaks, and an underpaid and exploited labor force. Furthermore, industrial agrifoods corporations almost never pay the costs of the extensive social and environmental damage resulting from the overuse of chemicals, labor abuses, product dumping and unhealthy foods. Given the skewed playing ield, it is remarkable that alternatives to the industrial agrifoods complex even exist, much less scale up. But they do exist, they are growing, and we need to help them make the systemic leap from being the hopeful “alternatives” to becoming the norm. The task is not about making small projects bigger or simply creating more and more small projects—though both of these things should and will happen. The challenge is to remove the structural barriers that are holding back all these promising alternatives. Most of the technology, business models, and organizational experience already exist. The next step is to change the outdated rules of our food systems so that rather than favoring monopoly control over our food, they ensure the diversity, resilience, sustainability and democratic control of our food systems. If there is a silver lining to the recent food and inancial crises it is that together they can be leveraged to change how we produce and consume our food. The institutional pillars of our global food systems are buckling under the weight of decades of unsustainable production and consumption, and changes are inevitable. But, as we shall see, rather than changing the architecture, our governments and international institutions are busy propping up the fraying system with bailouts, subsidies, and shaky promises of “just-in-time” technical ixes. This puts everyone at risk. We can, and must, do beter. Though the titans of the industrial agrifoods complex are stronger now than they have ever been, the public institutions that do their bidding are not, and the current crisis is a crushing indictment against the industrial agrifoods model. It has shaken public faith in the international institutions that govern our global food and inancial systems. Not only were the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Northern governments unable to prevent the food and inancial meltdowns, they were caught completely of guard. Ater years of vigorously promoting 86 FOOD REBELLIONS! trade liberalization, the WTO is unable to muster agreement or enthusiasm for the Doha round. The World Bank and the IMF—widely detested even before the crises—are struggling to re-invent themselves. These institutions have not only failed the developing world, they have failed the very system they were designed to serve. This crisis of conidence has plunged these institutions into a political crisis of their own. Internationally weakened and internally fractured, the solutions they advance to solve the food and inancial crises are compromised by political maneuvering to ensure each institution’s own survival. (Unsurprisingly, one of the few results of the disappointing G20 Summit in London in 2009 was a tripling of the IMF’s budget to $750 billion. This major injection of cash is part of a desperate atempt to re-establish the fund’s inancial dominance over developing economies.) Encouragingly, broad-based movements for food sovereignty—literally, people’s self-government of the food system—are widespread and growing rapidly. First deined by the international peasant federation Via Campesina as “people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to deine their own food and agriculture systems,” food sovereignty proposes that people, rather than corporate monopolies, make the decisions regarding our food. Food sovereignty is a much deeper concept than food security—the term usually employed by governments, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program—because it proposes not just guaranteed access to food, but democratic control over food: from production and processing, to distribution, marketing and consumption. Whether applied to countries in the global South working to re-establish national food production, to farmers protecting their seed systems from genetically modiied organisms (GMOs), or rural–urban communities seting up their own marketing systems, food sovereignty aims to democratize our food systems. Food Rebellions! will address both oicial and grassroots solutions to the food crisis. By understanding the interests behind the solutions being proposed, we are beter able to visualize and act upon the opportunities before us. While the range of solutions proposed for solving the food crisis is diverse and sometimes confusing, our informed, democratic engagement is the key to identifying and advancing sustainable solutions that restore resiliency and equity to our ailing food systems. OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 87 Reviving Aid to Agriculture: The Arsonist’s Try to Put Out the Fire The weak, more-of-the-same response syndrome Oicial responses to the global food crisis have resulted in a policy patchwork with shortsighted mitigation eforts from the North, and desperate emergency actions from the global South. When food price inlation irst hit, countries that could aford it ofered cash subsidies, vouchers, food-for-work, health and nutrition, and school feeding programs to those sectors hardest hit by high prices. Some governments tried to bring down prices by lowering tarifs on food imports. Others imposed export restrictions to keep their grain at home. The former measure hurt local farmers and reduced essential state revenues. The later took food of the global market and was a disincentive to countries whose farmers depend on exporting their products. A few countries re-established national grain reserves. Global institutions were quick to provide some food aid, but slow to look at the causes of the crisis. Unfortunately, their mitigation eforts fell woefully short of addressing the enormity of the problem. In December 2007, the FAO introduced the Initiative on Soaring Food Prices. This initiative has spent $24 million in 54 countries to improve smallholder access to chemical and organic farm inputs and irrigation. The International Fund for Agricultural Development contributed $100 million in 2008 and made $200 million more available by redirecting existing funds to improve poor farmers access to seeds and fertilizer in 37 countries (IFAD 2008). This is all still just a drop in the bucket. The FAO estimates that rebuilding agriculture in these countries will take over $30 billion a year. In April 2008—over a year into the global food crisis—World Bank President Robert Zoellick called for a “New Deal for a Global Food Policy.” The bank promised to double its low-interest loans for agriculture to $800 million in Africa, ofered $200 million in grants, urged for a conclusion to the Doha round, and called on the $3 trillion industry in sovereign wealth funds to create a “One Percent Solution” for equity investment in Africa (Zoellick 2008). In late May, the bank announced the billion-dollar Global Food Response Facility. This is a rapid inancing mechanism (loans) for governments to 88 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 18 The Politics of Food Aid In 2007, despit e growing hunger, f ood aid f ell globally by 15% t o 5.9 million t ons f or t he year—t he lowest level since 1961. This ref lect s t he t endency of f ood aid t o respond t o int ernat ional grain prices—and not t o t he f ood needs of t he poor. When t he price of cereals is low, Nort hern count ries and t ransnat ional grain companies sell t heir commodit ies t hrough f ood aid programs. When grain prices are high, t hey sell t heir grains on t he global market . So when people are less able t o buy f ood, less f ood aid arrives (WFP 2007). The World Food Program expect ed t o feed 70 million people in 2008 (WFP 2008). By mid-year, wit h t he explosion of food price inflat ion, it had revised t his est imat e up t o 80 million. Towards t he end of t he year t hey said t hey would feed 90 million people—one in t en of t he world’s hungry—at a cost of $6 billion, t wice as much as t hey had budget ed (De La Torre Ugart e and Murphy 2008). Most of t he WFP’s budget and most of t heir food comes from government s. Official food aid is dominat ed by t he US model, init iat ed in 1954 wit h t he passing of Public Law 480. The US’s obj ect ive wit h PL 480 was “ t o lay t he basis for a permanent expansion of our export s of agricult ural product s wit h last ing benefit s t o ourselves and peoples of ot her lands” (USAID 2008). The modalit ies of food aid from t he US reflect it s commercial int erest s in providing food: • By law, 75% of food aid from t he US must be purchased, processed, t ransport ed, and dist ribut ed by US companies (Melit o 2007). • In 2002, j ust t wo US companies—ADM and Cargill—cont rolled 75% of t he global grain t rade, wit h US government cont ract s t o manage and dist ribut e 30% of food aid grains. Only four companies cont rol 84% of t he t ransport and delivery of food aid worldwide (Barret 2006). • Bilat eral t rade agreement s cont rol 50%–90% of global food aid. For example, US aid requires recipient count ries t o accept genet ically modified grains (FAO 2006). • In 2007, 99.3% of US food aid was “ in-kind,” t hat is, food procured in t he US and shipped t o recipient count ries on corporat e ships, rat her t han purchased wit h cash or coupons closer t o recipient s (WFP 2007). Apologist s for t his kind of food aid insist t hat t he privat e sect or is t he most efficient way t o dist ribut e food. This assert ion ignores not only t he huge st at e subsidies, but also t he enormous inefficiencies and inherent manipulat ions in food aid dominat ed by corporat e monopolies: OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 89 • In general, t he delivery of food aid from vendor t o village t akes four t o six mont hs (Melit o 2007). • Transact ion cost s t ake over 60% of t he t ot al emergency food aid budget (Melit o 2007). • This food aid frequent ly adds 30% efficiency losses due t o “ t ying” purchases t o US companies (Melit o 2007). • Food aid reaches less t han one-quart er (a mere 200 million people per year) of t he 850 million people who are hungry. If evenly dist ribut ed, recipient s would receive only 50 kilograms each. If all food aid were divided amongst t he 850 million hungry of t he world, it would amount t o less t han 12 kilograms per person annually—falling far short of urgent needs (FAO 2006). There are t hree t ypes of food aid: program aid, proj ect aid, and emergency aid. Program aid is not really food aid, but cheap food sales t o help t he donors dispose of surplus commodit ies. Proj ect aid is used for proj ect s including food for work and food for school programs, most oft en dist ribut ed by t he World Food Program and nonprofit s. The t hird is emergency aid, originally used t o mit igat e hunger accompanying nat ural disast ers and wars. This emergency aid is primarily dist ribut ed by t he World Food Program and t hree Nort h American NGOs: CARE, World Vision, and Cat holic Relief Services. Since 1996, emergency aid has been replacing program and proj ect aid, becoming a permanent fact or in t he economy of many count ries (in Africa, for example). Ten years ago, program aid account ed for 70%, and emergency only 10% of t ot al food aid. Now t he relat ionship is complet ely invert ed—donors dist ribut e 10% of food aid as program aid and 70% as emergency aid. Barret , Christ opher B. 2006. Food Aid’s Int ended and Unit ended Consequences. Rome: Agricult ure and Development Economics Division (ESA) of t he Food and Agricult ure Organizat ion of t he Unit ed Nat ions. De La Torre Ugart e, Daniel G. and Sophia Murphy. 2008. The Global Food Crisis: Creat ing an Opport unit y for Fairer and More Sust ainable Food and Agricult ure Syst ems Worldwide. Eco-Fair Trade Dialogue 11. Heinrich Boell Foundat ion and MISEREOR. ht t p:/ / www.ecofair-t rade.org/ pics/ de/ EcoFair_ Trade_Paper_No11_Ugart e__Murphy_1.pdf (accessed April 9, 2009). FAO. 2006. The St at e of Food and Agricult ure: Food Aid f or Food Securit y? Rome: Food and Agricult ure Organizat ion of t he Unit ed Nat ions. Melit o, Thomas. 2007. Various Challenges Impede t he Ef f iciency and Ef f ect iveness of U.S. Food Aid. Washingt on DC: Unit ed St at es Government Account abilit y Office. USAID. 2008. The Hist ory of America’s Food Aid. USAID. ht t p:/ / www.usaid.gov/ 90 FOOD REBELLIONS! our_work/ humanit arian_assist ance/ ffp/ 50t h/ hist ory.ht ml (accessed Oct ober 14, 2008). WFP. 2007. Food Aid Flows, 2007, Food Aid Monit or. In Int ernat ional Food Aid Inf ormat ion Syst em. Rome: Office of t he Execut ive Direct or, World Food Program. WFP. 2008. Overview of Operat ions 2008. World Food Program. ht t p:/ / www. wfp.org/ appeals/ proj ect ed_needs/ document s/ 2008/ Overview.pdf (accessed Oct ober 29, 2008). establish food for work, conditional cash transfers, and school feeding safety net programs. The bank would also loan money for seeds, fertilizer, irrigation improvement, and provide budget support to ofset tarif reductions for food and other unexpected revenue shortfalls. The bank promised to increase its overall support for global agriculture and food to $6 billion in 2009, up from $4 billion (World Bank 2008c). For its part, the IMF provided additional balance of payments support to 12 countries under the Poverty Reduction Growth Facility in early 2008. However, as the global inancial crisis and recession hit, the food crisis fell of the agenda. The IMF is ofering up to $250 billion in conditional lending for balance of payments shortfalls in developing economies—about a third of the amount the US Congress gave its inancial houses in the 2008 inancial bailout package. In June of 2008, the FAO organized a High-Level Conference on Food Security in Rome. Instead of the promised “roadmap” to food security, the conference produced disagreement and paltry funds. This was followed by another “food summit” in Madrid in January of 2009, that basically reiterated the agreements (or lack thereof) from the Rome meeting. The weak response from international institutions prompted the International Planning Commitee (a coalition of farmer’s unions, NGOs, and civil society groups working for food sovereignty) to declare a “People’s State of Emergency” and called on the UN to create a commission on food made up of smallholder farmers and marginalized producers. (See the IPC Declaration in Appendix 6.) On the basis of emergency appeals, in late 2008 the World Food Program (WFP) raised $1.2 billion—nearly half its yearly budget— and distributed food aid to a record 80 million beneiciaries. However, the WFP estimates the cost of feeding a projected 93.3 million hungry people will be $6.2 billion in 2009. This will require OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 91 an 80% increase in new donor resources (WFP 2008). This massive increase in food aid will still reach less than one-tenth of the people going hungry on the planet. Considering that food prices began to rise in 2005 and spiked in early 2008, the response from international institutions was decidedly slow. It was not fast enough to avert the export bans from food-deicit countries (that in many ways made the global situation worse), and just slow enough to allow commodity speculators and grain hoarders (like ADM and Maseca) the perverse opportunity to make money on the price rises, aggravating the situation, driving the system even faster towards a full-blown food crisis. Though the WFP quickly received the funding it needed to make up its $700 million shortfall in buying power (largely thanks to a $500 million donation from Saudi Arabia), international plans to bring the crisis under control did not get under way until the leaders of the UN, World Bank, IMF and WTO met in Bern, Switzerland, in late April 2008. The World Bank’s freshly formulated “New Deal for a Global Food Policy” set the tone for the high-level agreements to beef up the World Food Program and establish immediate safety nets and long-term production-enhancing measures, particularly in Africa. Throughout July and August of 2008, as the architecture for the global food system was being propped up, hopeful public statements referring to the “Global Partnership for Food,” and the “New Deal for a Global Food Policy” emanated from the halls of power in Rome, New York and Washington DC. In late September of 2008, the global inancial crisis hit Wall Street—and then exploded on the rest of the world. Suddenly, the food crisis was forgoten. Financial giants Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, the American International Group (AIG) and Bear Stearns, their reserves overwhelmed by toxic securities, tumbled towards bankruptcy. Between $1– $3 trillion worth of inancial assets evaporated. Credit was tied up as banks refused to lend to each other. Trading and markets ground to a halt, and oil and commodity markets crashed. Ater leting Lehman Brothers fail, the US Treasury called for an immediate $700 billion bailout of the nation’s favored banks and insurance companies. The US Congress gave then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the last two major investment banks let on Wall Street—unprecedented discretionary power over these funds. Soon 92 FOOD REBELLIONS! thereater, US banks received another $2 trillion in emergency loans from the US Federal Reserve. There were no conditions placed on the Treasury’s bailout and what (if any) collateral US banks put up in order to qualify for these loans has yet to be disclosed. In 2008 alone the US government commited $243.7 billion of taxpayer money to bail out international inancial institutions (Economist 2009). As the inancial crisis reverberated around the world, Great Britain, France and Germany followed suit with similar, if more modest, conditional bailouts of their own. The trillion-dollar diference in the response to the food crisis and the inancial crises is revealing. Six months ater the June 2008 Food Summit in Rome only $2 billion of the $20 billion that was eventually promised for food and agricultural aid had actually arrived. Meanwhile, US banks and insurance companies received half of their $700 billion bailout in a mater of weeks. Insurance giant AIG got $85 billion right of the bat. When they later admited they could not account for $24 billion of their bailout money, they were nonetheless rewarded with another tranche of $37.8 billion (Williams-Walsh 2008). Wells Fargo and JP Morgan received $25 billion in bailouts. Citigroup got $40 billion (Economist 2009). When Kenyan farmer Stephen Muchiri, head of the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation, heard of the US and European inancial bailouts he lamented, “People here are saying that [the bailout] money is enough to feed the poor in Africa for the next three years!” (Eunjung Cha and McCrummen 2008). Actually, the bailouts are over 30 times the amount needed to rebuild smallholder food systems worldwide. Concerned that even the limited promises made at the food summits will now not be met at all, FAO Director Jacques Diouf fairly pleaded with world leaders, “The global inancial crisis should not make us forget the food crisis.” The inancial crisis has already plunged 119 million people into severe poverty, signaling that its impact on the world’s food systems will be extensive and severe. As the crisis reverberates in the “real economy,” the centrality of agriculture will become increasingly evident. How the majority of the world’s population weathers the economic crisis will depend in large part on the strength of smallholder agriculture and the resiliency of local—rather than global— food systems. In the long run, how well our economies recover will also depend on the nature of the transformations taking place in agriculture. If these transformations are based on the equitable and OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 93 sustainable recovery of the world’s local food systems, they will go a long way to ensuring economic recovery, the end of hunger, and the well-being of the world’s majorities—without which any real global economic recovery is highly doubtful. The Comprehensive Framework for Action: Not All Opportunities are Solutions The current situation creates opportunities. But opportunities should not be mistaken for solutions… If a new global partnership for agriculture and food is to emerge from the current crisis, it is crucial to ensure that this partnership does not simply seek to boost supply by promoting technology-driven recipes, but also empowers those who are hungry and malnourished and whose livelihoods may be threatened by precisely this renewed interest in encouraging agricultural production. Olivier De Schutter (2008, p. 25), United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food In his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Dr. De Schuter, a human rights expert and professor at the Center for the Philosophy of Law at the Catholic University in Louvaine, Belgium, was responding to the oicial proposals that see in the food crisis investment opportunities for “public–private partnerships.” Referring to the controversial agricultural development projects being advanced in Africa, De Schuter warns, “The diiculty in identifying the best options in this regard is best illustrated by the ongoing discussion on the impacts to be expected from the work of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).” The special rapporteur is concerned with “[How these] investments will be channeled, towards whom, and for which purpose” (De Schuter 2008). While the food system is changing in response to the crisis, whether state, big philanthropy or private sector investments will beneit the poor and underserved, or reverse industrial agriculture’s destructive impact, is still up for discussion. Unfortunately, these discussions have been anything but public, taking place in high-level sessions and behind closed doors. The Comprehensive Framework for Action, the main international document outlining the oicial response to the food crisis, is an example of this. In April 2008, the United Nations established a High-Level Task 94 FOOD REBELLIONS! Force (HLTF), headed up by the World Bank, the IMF and the FAO, to address the global food crisis.7 At the FAO’s High-Level Conference on World Food Security held in Rome in June 2008, the HLTF released the drat of the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA), proposing joint actions to overcome the food crisis. The inal document, released in July, is a consensus of the global institutions in the High-Level Task Force. It proposes outcomes and actions to meet the immediate needs of vulnerable populations as well as to build long-term resiliency into the global food system for food security. The CFA was a turning point in the international response. On the one hand, it brought the mitigation eforts of concerned nations under one roof. On the other, it re-asserted the dominant roles of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO in deining the rules of the global food system. This arrangement was endorsed by world leaders at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido Toyako in July 2008. In the short term the CFA encourages governments, philanthropies, the private sector and the international institutions to enhance emergency food assistance, nutrition interventions and safety nets and boost smallholder food production. Governments are expected to adjust trade and tax policies to protect food security. The CFA envisions continuing these policies in the future to ensure local food availability and improve international food markets. While the CFA takes no position on the issue, it urges governments to come to an “international agrofuels consensus.” The HLTF calls for US$25–$40 billion a year to reactivate the slow progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (one-third for immediate needs and two-thirds for long-term actions). This would require developed countries to actually keep their promises of increasing overseas development assistance (ODA) to 0.7% of their gross national income. They also call on developed countries to double food aid and increase agricultural development assistance from 3% to 10% of all ODA within ive years. The document asserts that “the key to achievement of the outcomes set in the CFA will be close partnerships between national governments, HLTF members, civil society and private sector organizations, donors as well as other vital actors.” The CFA generally relects the World Bank’s shit in thinking about agricultural development, as laid out in the World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (World Bank 2008b). On the one hand, ater decades of neglect, the bank inally recognizes that OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 95 neither poverty nor hunger can be addressed without supporting smallholders. The bank now claims that agricultural policies should be pro-poor and environmentally sound, and that they should ensure women’s rights to own and access productive resources. The CFA goes somewhat beyond this position by calling for an equitable international trading system and by recognizing the human right to food. In doing so, they imply—but do not specify—that governments have a legal obligation to ensure the food security of their citizens. However, the bank’s 2008 report and the CFA both studiously avoid addressing the root causes of the crises and fall back on assumptions that have proven false in light of the food crisis. Both renew the call for the liberalization of trade, a swit conclusion to the WTO’s Doha round, and assume that integrating farmers into global commodity market chains will beneit smallholders (when the last 20 years of privatization and global commodity markets demonstrate exactly the opposite). The loss of agrobiodiversity and farmers’ dangerous dependence on a few commercial (and increasingly expensive) seed varieties is patently ignored. In a masterful stroke of reductionism, both documents assume that “leveling the playing ield” between large and small producers simply means improving rural infrastructure and providing smallholders with access to fertilizer and improved seed. There are no concrete strategies to ensure access in light of the skyrocketing increase in input prices and the restriction of agricultural credit presently squeezing world agriculture. Nowhere do these documents seriously consider the ways that the global trade and inance regimes discriminate against smallholders nor do they address the deleterious market distortions caused by corporate oligopolies. They refrain from suggesting any regulation of agribusiness’ monopoly power as a way of decreasing volatility and building in resilience to the food system. There is no suggestion that the way to ensure fair prices to farmers and afordable prices to consumers might be to reduce the 80% share of the food dollar going to the middlemen of the industrial agrifoods complex. Neither the World Development Report nor the CFA see a role for redistributive agrarian reform, and there is no mention of the growing trend in “land grabbing” by large-scale investors taking place throughout the world (for example, for agrofuels plantations). Regretably, neither the World Development Report nor the CFA recognizes the inherent potential in the rapid and highly productive spread of low-input, agroecological and organic agriculture worldwide. 96 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 19 Land Grabs! The food and financial crises have sparked a flurry of land grabs. Corporat ions and government s are buying up t ract s of farmland on foreign soil. These land grabs are bot h a food securit y st rat egy for nat ions rich in capit al and poor in agricult ural land, like Saudi Arabia, and a low-risk invest ment hedge in t roubled financial t imes. Where in t he midst of a food crisis can free agricult ural land be found? It can be found in nat ions like Sudan, a count ry now synonymous wit h suffering, violence and hunger where t he World Food Program fed 5.6 million people t his year (World Food Program 2008); Cambodia, where 19%of t he populat ion lives on less t han a dollar a day (World Bank 2009); and Pakist an, where rampant povert y is a direct cause of polit ical violence and inst abilit y. Under t he “ allinvest ment is good invest ment ” logic of t he World Bank and t he Int ernat ional Finance Corporat ion, capit al-st arved nat ions wit hout adequat e support s for t heir own agricult ure are opening t heir lands t o foreign ownership. For Gulf St at es including Oman, Qat ar, Saudi Arabia, and t he Unit ed Arab Emirat es t hat are largely dependent on food import s, t he need t o insulat e t heir populat ions from price shock has become painfully clear. When food prices skyrocket ed in 2007 and 2008, t he food import bill of t he Gulf st at es more t han doubled (GRAIN 2008). Government s act ed almost immediat ely. Bet ween March and August 2008 Gulf Coast Consort ium government s began leasing millions of hect ares of agricult ural land abroad t o secure food for t heir populat ions (GRAIN 2008). The government of Kuwait for example, leased land in Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, and Sudan, most ly t o insulat e t he nat ions’ low-paid Filipino laborers from t he skyrocket ing price of rice on t he global market . The out -sourcing of food product ion is not limit ed t o desert st at es, eit her. Japanese, Korean, and Egypt ian firms are securing land for food product ion overseas as well (GRAIN 2008). All of these omissions spring from the development ideology espoused by the World Bank. For the bank, economic development remains a process that eventually eliminates most of the world’s smallholders. At best, the bank envisions smallholder strategies as contributing to “poverty alleviation,” while strategies for “serious” economic development are reserved for plantation agriculture, agrofuels, manufacturing, and extractive industries (Havnevik et al. 2007). The World Bank paradigm and the CFA framework run the risk of condemning smallholders to the role of cheap providers of OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 97 Not t o be left out of t he boom, privat e capit al is racing in. Deut uch Bank and Goldman Sachs are buying up livest ock operat ions in China. BlackRock of New York Cit y recent ly creat ed a $200 million agricult ural hedge fund (GRAIN 2008). In a part icularly egregious example, Jarch Capit al, a USbased privat e invest ment firm, recent ly leased 400,000 hect ares in sout hern Sudan—not t hrough any official channels, but from a Sudanese warlord whose son had laid claim t o t he t errit ory (Blas and Walls 2009). Wit h over t hree million people dependent on int ernat ional food aid, misery-ridden Sudan seems an unlikely ground zero for t he land grab craze. Government s and privat e firms in Bahrain, Egypt , Kuwait , Qat ar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sout h Korea, and t he Unit ed Arab Emirat es are all grabbing up land in relat ively wat er-rich regions of Sudan wit h t he blessing of t he Khart oum government (Blas and Walls 2009). Saudi Arabia’s Hadco leased 25,000 hect ares of cropland, Abu Dhabi launched a proj ect t o develop 28,000 hect ares in t he nort h, and Qat ar’s Zad Holding Company is looking int o an agricult ural vent ure t here as well (Blas and Walls 2009). All of t his amount s t o a new round of colonialism in Africa. Sparked by high food prices and risky financial market s, t his new round of enclosures— effect ively a land reform in favor of corporat e agribusiness—is leaving small farmers landless and eroding t he foundat ion on which t o build sovereign food syst ems. Blas, Javier and William Walls. 2009. U.S. Invest or Buys Sudanese Warlord’s Land. Financial Times. January 9. GRAIN. 2008.Siezed! The 2008 Land Grab f or Food and Financial Securit y. ht t p:/ / www.grain.org/ go/ landgrab (accessed November 1, 2008). World Bank. 2009. Frequent ly Asked Quest ions about Povert y in Cambodia. ht t p:/ / go.worldbank.org/ T2890U8730 (accessed January 31, 2009). World Food Program. 2008. Where We Work: Sudan. ht t p:/ / www.wfp.org/ count ry_brief/ indexcount ry.asp?count ry=736 (accessed December 30, 2008). emergency food in the short run, and a rural reserve for poverty and underpaid labor in the long term. The CFA does not see the food crisis as an opportunity to reform the food system, but as an occasion to mitigate the negative impacts of the existing system. An assessment carried out by the FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN 2008) claims the CFA’s approach will, “[Contribute] to cementing existing power structures which are the source of violations of the human right to food worldwide…” Pointing out the undemocratic way in which the CFA’s platform was formulated, FIAN 98 FOOD REBELLIONS! observes that, “[The] decision on the CFA has not been taken by governments, let alone parliaments, and relevant [Community Service Organizations] have never been consulted in a meaningful way.” The disappointing response of governments and international institutions to the crises is itself a relection of the dysfunctional global food and inance systems. As rights activist Shalmali Gutal from Focus on the Global South points out: The four fold crisis of food, finance, energy and climate [are] interrelated dimensions of a meta crisis… a larger systemic crisis. They are recurrent crises, they have happened before and they will happen again. The impact of the crisis now is bad. But the response of governments, industry and the international agencies… are equally bad and are going to make the current situation much, much worse. (Guttal 2009) What can be done if the institutions that are supposed to guide our economies and food systems are part of the problem, rather than the solution? Luckily, while bad, these responses have also opened up governments and institutions to increasing social scrutiny. People are beginning to question the leadership, the policies, and the structures of the global food system. The multiple crises are hiting people hard across the North–South divide—a boundary that, with globalization, has become increasingly permeable. Important social and political spaces for informed engagement and public debate on the issues are being steadily pried open by people acting locally and transnationally. Transforming our Food Systems: Advocacy and Practice To solve the food crisis, we need to transform the food system. Rather than simply increasing aid, imposing more “free trade,” applying technical ixes, or otherwise propping up a dysfunctional food system, ending hunger will require restructuring the ways we produce, process, distribute and consume our food. These transformations are already underway. Like green grass breaking through the asphalt, local, equitable and sustainable alternatives are thriving in the cracks of the global food system. Helping food system alternatives grow and give fruit requires creating OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 99 favorable structural conditions to unleash their transformative potential. The following section focuses on the principles and practices that form the basis for these emerging transformations. The Science and Practice of Agroecology Agronomy, genetics, and molecular biology are the sciences of choice for agribusiness because they are able to generate a steady stream of marketable products for industry. In the developing world, these products—such as genetically engineered crops—have yet to demonstrate higher yields, superior drought-resistance, or more efective pest control than what ecological farmers have already developed. Promises of future productivity from transgenic “super-seeds” are based on heroic assumptions and hopeful projections—not actual past performance. Ironically, it is industry’s faith in science, rather than science per se, that provides the basis for their projections. While sustainable agriculture has frequently been dismissed by the international agricultural research centers as “lacking science,” Emiliano Juarez of Mexico explains t he import ance of organic mat t er Leonor Hurt ado 100 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 20 The Right to Food The right t o be free from hunger is a fundament al human right . Though t he right t o food has been enshrined in int ernat ional law for over 60 years, it is syst emat ically violat ed for nearly a billion people. The 1948 Universal Declarat ion of Human Right s, t he Int ernat ional Covenant on Economic, Social and Cult ural Right s (ICESCR), and t he Convent ion on t he Right s of t he Child, among ot hers, all uphold t he right t o food. The right was legally defined by t he UN Commit t ee on Economic, Social and Cult ural Right s (1999) as: ‘ t he right of every man, woman and child alone and in communit y wit h ot hers t o have physical and economic access at all t imes t o adequat e food or means for it s procurement in ways consist ent wit h human dignit y.’ Wit h t he large maj orit y of t he world’s hungry being small farmers or landless workers, t he right t o food must be underst ood as t he right t o feed oneself and one’s family (Claeys 2009). The ICESCR out lines t hree specific responsibilit ies of t he st at e: t o respect , prot ect and fulfill t he right t o food. The first t wo imply t hat government s must ensure t hat neit her t he st at e nor individuals t ake any act ion t hat deprives people of t he means t o feed t hemselves. The responsibilit ies t o respect and prot ect are fundament al t o underst anding t he legal right t o food—which is oft en falsely int erpret ed as t he right t o receive food or food aid. The obligat ion t o fulfill t he right t o food means t hat government s must facilit at e access t o food and food producing resources, and where access is not possible by one’s own means, government s have a responsibilit y t o provide it direct ly. In 2004 t he General Council of t he FAO laid out a road map for implement ing t he right t o food. The guidelines specifically ment ion land reform, access t o and sust ainable management of resources, and sust ainable agricult ural development (FAO 2004). The human right t o food is universally accept ed (it has been accept ed by 155 count ries) and legally binding, but it is rout inely violat ed by nat ional the fact is that the practices of many ecological farmers have been racing ahead of industrial science’s understanding of sustainability for some time. The science of agroecology, developed through close ecological observation of traditional farming systems, has become the science for sustainable agriculture. Agroecologists have documented remarkable management practices around the world in which farmers restore and improve farm ecosystem functions. These practices have resulted in stable, high-yielding food production, soil and water conservation, and the enrichment of agricultural biodiversity. OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 101 and int ernat ional policy. In what former UN Rapport eur Jean Ziegler called ‘ schizophrenia in t he Unit ed Nat ions syst em’ (Zeigler 2008), int ernat ional financial inst it ut ions promot e economic policies t hat syst emat ically violat e t he right t o food, while inst it ut ions like t he World Food Program and UNICEF work t o alleviat e hunger. The same is t rue of st at es. Nat ional t rade and invest ment policies rout inely dest roy people’s abilit y t o feed t hemselves in cont radict ion t o int ernat ional human right s commit ment s and development goals. Despit e t oot h-and-nail resist ance from t he World Bank and ot hers, t he right t o food is making legal headway. Act ivist groups and NGOs are working t owards t he j ust iciabilit y of t he right t o food. Just iciabilit y—when violat ions can be brought t o court , and vict ims can be compensat ed for damages and are guarant eed t hat t he right will not be violat ed again—is essent ial t o implement ing t he right t o food. In addit ion t o int ernat ional effort s, 22 count ries have now included an explicit ment ion of t he right t o food in t heir const it ut ions. Claeys, Priscilla. 2009. Personal communicat ion. Special Advisor t o t he UN Special Rapport eur on t he Right t o Food. February 3. FAO. 2004. Volunt ary Guidelines t o Support t he Progressive Realizat ion of t he Right t o Adequat e Food in t he Cont ext of Nat ional Food Securit y. Rome: Food and Agricult ure Organizat ion of t he Unit ed Nat ions. FIAN. 2009. Just iciabilit y of t he Right t o Food. Heidelberg: Food First Informat ion and Act ion Net work. ht t p:/ / www.fian.org/ programs-and-campaigns/ j ust iciabilit y-of-t he-right -t o-food (accessed May 4, 2009). UN Commit t ee on Economic Social and Cult ural Right s. 1999. General Comment 12: The Right t o Adequat e Food. Geneva: Economic and Social Council of t he Unit ed Nat ions. Zeigler, Jean. 2008. Promot ion and Prot ect ion of all Human Right s, Civil, Polit ical, Economic, Social, and Cult ural Right s, Including t he Right t o Development . In Report of t he Special Rapport eur on t he Right t o Food. Geneva: Unit ed Nat ions General Assembly. By studying the ecological principles at work behind these practices, agroecologists have been able to learn and contribute to the practices of sustainable agriculture worldwide. The social, economic and environmental superiority of farmers’ agroecological alternatives as compared to conventional or “semitechnical” farming (part traditional, part chemical) are dramatic. The superior resilience of sustainable farms when subjected to extreme weather hazards (such as drought and hurricanes); their enhanced ability to capture carbon (and cool the planet); their provisioning of 102 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 21 Agroecology—Some Definitions In t he most basic sense, agroecology is “ t he applicat ion of ecological concept s and principles t o t he design and management of sust ainable agroecosyst ems” (Alt ieri 1995). Agroecological agricult ure can cover a broad range of approaches, including sust ainable agricult ure, ecological agricult ure, ecofarming, ecoagricult ure, low-ext ernal-input agricult ure, organic agricult ure, permacult ure, and biodynamic agricult ure. In general, t hese t erms all refer t o roughly t he same t hing. They all t ry t o use nat ural processes and eliminat e or significant ly reduce t he use of ext ernal input s, especially t he more t oxic and widely cont aminat ing ones (e.g., poisons and t ransgenic seeds). Organic agricult ure can t hus be seen as a specific inst ance of ecological agricult ure, in which chemicals are rej ect ed ent irely. Permacult ure and biodynamic agricult ure are, in t urn, specific t ypes of organic agricult ure. Sust ainable agricult ure is oft en used as if synonymous wit h ecological agricult ure, but also get s used by convent ional, chemical agricult ure people for syst ems t hat use chemicals, but which t hey claim will endure for a long t ime wit hout damaging t he environment . In t his book we will int erchange t he t erms ecological agricult ure and agroecological agricult ure t o refer t o farming syst ems t hat : • Make t he best use of nat ure’s goods and services as funct ional input s • Int egrat e nat ural and regenerat ive processes, such as nut rient cycling, nit rogen fixat ion, soil regenerat ion and nat ural enemies of pest s int o food product ion processes • Minimize t he use of non-renewable input s (pest icides and fert ilizers) t hat damage t he environment or harm t he healt h of farmers and consumers • Make bet t er use of t he knowledge and skills of farmers, improving t heir self-reliance • Make product ive use of people’s capacit ies t o work t oget her t o solve common management problems, such as pest , wat ershed, irrigat ion, forest and credit management . This definit ion is from Jules Pret t y and Richard Hine, Reducing Food Povert y wit h Sust ainable Agricult ure: A Summary of New Evidence, Cent re for Environment and Societ y, Essex Universit y, UK, 2001. Alt ieri, Miguel. 1995. Agroecology: t he Science of Sust ainable Agricult ure. Boulder: West view Press. OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 103 well-balanced diets; and, yes, their ability to consistently produce more food per hectare than conventional farming methods, have all been measured in a wide diversity of ecosystems around the world— particularly in the global South, where the need is greatest. As we will see in the following sections, unlike agribusiness’s expensive promises to develop “climate-ready” seeds some time in the future, these farmer-led alternatives exist now, are comparatively inexpensive, highly efective, and easily transferable farmer-to-farmer. Can Ecological Agriculture Feed the World? Smashing the Myth of Low Productivity8 For years, critics claimed that ecological agriculture might be able to address environmental concerns, but couldn’t produce suicient food to sustain an exploding human population. Such skepticism was understandable—the Green Revolution had been widely credited with “saving a billion people” from starving. The social upheaval and environmental damage it provoked were generally ignored or underemphasized. Questioning the Green Revolution seemed almost heretical… How could we criticize technologies that produced more food? Now, years later, with the insights available to us in seminal works like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Frances Moore-Lappé’s World Hunger: Twelve Myths, as well as more recent critiques like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Paul Roberts’ The End of Food, and Raj Patel’s Stufed and Starved, the inescapable social and environmental costs of the industrial food system have led many to question Green Revolution strategies for ending hunger. Sustainable alternatives are receiving greater atention. Organic agriculture is fast on the rise, and the call to buy local, buy seasonal, and buy fair is growing louder. But critics, such as geographer Vaclav Smil and the conservative Hudson Institute’s Dennis and Alex Avery, see sustainable agriculture as a “liberal fetish” that would bring hunger and ruin to millions. Such concerns would be valid if agroecological methods were as unproven or unproductive as oten portrayed. However, besides the thousands of years of small-scale and family agriculture that developed and ield-tested the antecedents of many modern sustainable practices, over the past 40 years a signiicant amount of scientiic literature has compared “conventional” and “sustainable” agriculture. What were valid and important doubts among some scientists about sustainable agriculture four decades ago have since turned 104 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 22 The MST and Agroecology by José Maria Tardin and Isabella Kenf ield Brazil has emerged as an agro-indust rial superpower. It is also a global epicent er for well-organized rural social movement s. Indeed, t he t wo phenomena are int ricat ely relat ed. As more land has been devot ed t o monocult ures and product ion for agro-export , expulsion of family farmers from t heir lands has increased, along wit h povert y and hunger in rural areas, leading peasant s and workers t o organize and resist . The most import ant rural social movement t o have emerged in Brazil is t he Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST). The MST was founded in t he sout hern st at e of Paraná in 1984 where it organized landless families and rural workers. The MST’s primary t act ic is t he non-violent occupat ion of unproduct ive lands belonging t o large landowners. These occupat ions are based on a const it ut ional clause t hat st at es t hat privat e propert y, including land, must serve a social funct ion. Land t hat does not generat e sufficient employment or meet defined rat es of agricult ural product ion may legally be expropriat ed from landowners by t he government for t he purpose of agrarian reform. Today t he MST is organized in 23 of Brazil’s 27 st at es. At t he MST’s recent 25t h year celebrat ion, cofounder and nat ional coordinat or João Pedro St édile st at ed t hat t he movement has forced t he expropriat ion of 35 million acres of land (larger t han t he count ry of Uruguay) and assist ed 370,000 families gain t it les t o land. The MST has built hundreds of public schools, t aught t ens of t housands of it s members t o read and writ e, and has founded over 400 cooperat ives. The MST has become a global symbol of resist ance, has played a maj or role in t he organizat ion of Via Campesina, and has pioneered t he t heory and pract ice of food sovereignt y. These accomplishment s come wit h some hard lessons. The MST’s init ial approach t o product ion was indust rialized agricult ure. Event ually, t his pat h provoked maj or economic collapses for t he families on t he MST’s agrarian reform set t lement s. Many families sold t heir lot s and ret urned t o cit y slums. The MST realized it had t o provide families wit h an alt ernat ive agricult ural model. In t he mid-1990s, t he MST’s part icipat ion in Via Campesina put it s leaders in cont act wit h indigenous and campesino movement s from ot her regions of Lat in America t hat were already pract icing agroecology. Agroecology is aligned wit h t he MST’s mission and vision because it develops small-scale, sust ainable, food-orient ed and regional agricult ural syst ems; recuperat es t radit ional, indigenous knowledge of sust ainable agricult ure; and incorporat es a polit ical ideology t hat emphasizes t he liberat ion of campesino OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 105 families from t he dest ruct ion and oppression of agribusiness corporat ions— all essent ial t o forging food sovereignt y. At it s fourt h nat ional congress in 2000, t he MST decided t o adopt agroecology as nat ional policy t o orient product ion on it s set t lement s. Via Campesina in Brazil is composed of eight organizat ions: t he Movement of t he Landless Rural Workers (MST), Movement of Small Farmers (MPA), Movement of t he Dam Affect ed (MAB), Movement of Campesina Women (MMC), Movement of Past oral Yout h (PRJ), t he Past oral Land Commission (CPT), t he Federat ion of Agronomy St udent s of Brazil (FEAB) and t he Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI). Today, t he eight organizat ions t hat part icipat e in Via Campesina–Brasil have all adopt ed agroecology as an official policy. To spread agroecology and count er t he power of indust rial agricult ure, t he MST and Via Campesina–Brasil have founded 11 secondary schools and int roduced universit y courses in agroecology. These schools have t he mission t o engage and t rain t he movement s’ yout h t o provide t echnical assist ance in agroecology t o campesino families in rural areas. The format ion of t hese schools places Via Campesina–Brasil at t he vanguard of rural development policy in Brazil, and is t est ament t o t he movement s’ capacit y t o advance agroecological policies at st at e and federal levels. The Lat in American School for Agroecology (ELAA) was conceived during t he 2005 World Social Forum in Port o Alegre, when represent at ives of Via Campesina–Int ernat ional, t he federal government s of Brazil and Venezuela, t he st at e government of Paraná and t he Federal Universit y of Paraná (UFPR) signed a prot ocol of cooperat ion for t he Lat in American count ryside. The prot ocol proposes act ions for t he st rengt hening of campesino resist ance t o indust rial agricult ure, including t he promot ion of agroecology t hrough t he t raining of t echnicians at schools such as ELAA. The first universit y course for agroecology in Brazil, ELAA is accredit ed by UFPR, which organizes t he school in conj unct ion wit h t he Lat in American Inst it ut e for Agroecology, Educat ion and Research for Campesina Agricult ure (ICA), composed of members of Via Campesina–Brasil. ELAA was inaugurat ed on August 27, 2005, on t he MST set t lement Cont est ado, in t he municipalit y of Lapa, in Paraná. In 2008, 88 st udent s from 18 st at es of Brazil and t wo from Paraguay were mat riculat ed int o t wo t erms at ELAA, bot h of which were scheduled t o graduat e in 2009. All of ELAA’s st udent s are “ milit ant s,” or act ivist s, from t he social movement s in Via Campesina. Women represent about 40% of t he st udent body. The average age of st udent s is 20, and t he age range is bet ween 18 and 54. Each class st udies for t wo semest ers per year for t hree-and-a-half years. The t wo t erms alt ernat e every t hree mont hs bet ween “ school t ime” and “ communit y t ime,” when t he st udent s put int o pract ice in t heir communit ies what t hey are learning at ELAA. School t ime semest ers last 65 days, 106 FOOD REBELLIONS! during which t he st udent s live at ELAA and maint ain a daily schedule of six hours of t heoret ical classes, work in agricult ural product ion, management , agricult ural experiment s, lect ures, domest ic work (food preparat ion, cleaning), experient ial exchanges, sport s, and a cult ural night every Sat urday. Since t he course began, t he st udent s have been organized int o 20 groups during school t ime. These develop work and t raining in agroecological t echnical assist ance wit h 20 of t he 108 families on t he Cont est ado set t lement . During communit y t ime, each st udent develops t he same work wit h five families in t heir home communit ies. ELAA’s t eachers are professionals wit h high academic qualificat ions (usually a PhD or mast ers degree), many of t hem from public universit ies and ot her research inst it ut ions in Brazil. These professors work primarily as volunt eers. Despit e it s progress, t hree years aft er it began operat ing, ELAA cont inues t o funct ion precariously due t o lack of funding and support from federal and st at e government agencies. One semest er was cancelled due t o lack of funds, and t he physical infrast ruct ure of t he school remains inadequat e. The only classroom remains t he casarão, t he propert y’s original farmhouse, built by slaves in t he 1880s, which also holds t he library, wit h only 160 books and 30 t it les, and t he t elecent er, wit h six comput ers connect ed t o t he Int ernet . While t he casarão serves as a symbolic reminder of t he MST’s cont ribut ion t o t he st ruggle against hist oric land and income inequalit y, it is inadequat e for t he scient ific lab work necessary for t he st udent s’ learning. The government ’s reluct ance t o provide funding st ems from t he st rong polit ical backlash against t he schools for agroecology—from powerful corporat ions and large landowners vest ed in Brazil’s agro-indust rial boom. In an era of rising food prices and increasing global demand for Brazilian et hanol—especially from t he US—it is unlikely t hat t he government will increase support t o Via Campesina’s schools for agroecology in t he fut ure. into a “New Myth” that ignores this accumulated scientiic work and regards as “common knowledge” the claim that yields from sustainable agriculture are insuicient to feed the human population. Skepticism is a vital and healthy part of science and public debate, but it must be moderated by even-handed evaluations of available information. So what does the available information on organic agriculture say? Are organic yields suicient to feed us? OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 107 Ecological agriculture and the global food supply A study in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems looked at 293 examples comparing alternative and conventional agriculture from 91 studies (Badgley et al. 2007). The University of Michigan researchers who carried out the study were able to demonstrate that current scientiic knowledge simply does not support the idea that a switch to organic and sustainable agriculture would drastically lower food production and lead to hunger. Instead, they found that current knowledge implies that, even under conservative estimates, organic agriculture could provide almost as much food on average at a global level as is produced today (2,641 as opposed to 2,786 kilocalories per person per day ater losses). In what these researchers considered a more realistic estimation, ecological agriculture could actually increase global food production by as much as 50%—to 4,381 kcal per person per day. The University of Michigan study synthesized as much of the current scientiic literature on the subject as possible, gathering 160 cases comparing production from sustainable/organic methods to conventional production, and 133 cases comparing sustainable/organic production to local, low-intensity methods (i.e., subsistence farming or other non-industrialized practices). The research team determined the average ratio of yield from organic production to yield from conventional/low-intensity production. They then took data from the FAO and calculated the amount of food theoretically available on a caloric basis if all agriculture were organically produced. The study found large diferences in yield ratios between developed and developing countries. From the production estimate based on the 160 cases in developed countries, organic production could theoretically generate an amount of food equal to 92% of the current caloric availability (or a yield ratio of 0.92). This ratio is close to that found in a previous study. However, looking at the 133 examples from the developing world, the University of Michigan team estimated food production equivalent to an overall yield ratio of 1.80—or 180% of current production in the developing world. In the “conservative case” set out by the researchers, the yield ratio for developed countries was used to develop a picture of potential yields from an all-organic global food system. Under this scenario, production would drop slightly, from 2,786 kcal per person per day to 2,641 kcal, a level still above the suggested intake of healthy adults. 108 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 23 Ecological Agriculture by Roland Bunch The convent ional, high-input agricult ure which has dominat ed agricult ural development pract ice for t he last half cent ury has shown it self largely unable t o meet t he needs of resource-poor smallholders. This is because resource-poor farmers can’ t afford it , nor do t hey have access t o t he infrast ruct ure (irrigat ion, roads, input s, credit and market s, et c.) necessary t o make it work. Furt hermore, many smallholders who have been using small amount s of chemical fert ilizers and pest icides have allowed t heir soils t o det eriorat e t o t he point t hat t he use of such fert ilizers has become only marginally profit able at best . And recent increases in t he price of fert ilizers could easily force many smallholders out of t he fert ilizer market , t hereby sharply decreasing t heir product ivit y once again. At t he same t ime, ecological agricult ure is rapidly becoming an import ant alt ernat ive in t he developing world t o bot h convent ional, high-input agricult ure on t he one hand and t radit ional low-yield agricult ure on t he ot her. Very frequent ly, by using small amount s of ext ernal input s, plus large amount s of int ernal input s and improved management , smallholders can achieve very good yields, oft en t hree t o five t imes t radit ional levels of product ivit y (Uphoff 2000; Bunch 1999). Some 3% of all developing world small-scale farmers are already using program-int roduced ecological agricult ure t echnologies, and virt ually all of t his adopt ion has occurred wit hin t he last decade (Pret t y et al. 2006). Small-farmer adopt ion of such t echnologies, independent of out side programs, is very likely at least as great , if not several t imes more ext ensive. And t he invest ment in spreading t hese t echnologies has been very small compared t o t hat invest ed in high-input agricult ure. For over 25 years, t he Consult at ive Group on Int ernat ional Agricult ural Research (CGIAR) has focused on high-input chemical agricult ure and on plant genet ics. Inst ead of serving as a net work for exchanging ideas generat ed by farmers, NGOs and ot hers, it t ries t o develop all t he basic t echnology it self because of an obsolet e, t op–down, t he-scient ist -knowsbest paradigm. Furt hermore, t he CGIAR syst em is largely organized around commodit y lines, an approach not at all well suit ed t o t he complex, diverse syst ems of small farmers. Ot her problems include t he CGIAR syst em’s inabilit y t o respond quickly t o farmers’ needs, it s almost exclusively t echnological approach t o farmers’ problems and it s consist ent underest imat ion of t he negat ive ecological impact on fut ure product ivit y of chemical-based t echnology. These fact ors make it unlikely t hat t he CGIAR syst em will respond effect ively t o farmers’ needs in t he realm of ecological OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 109 agricult ure. In addit ion, t he limit ed pot ent ial of a largely chemical-based Green Revolut ion approach was shown clearly in t he almost t ot al failure of t he Sasakawa/ Borlaug effort t o int roduce t he Green Revolut ion int o West Africa in t he 1990s. The program blamed t his failure on farmers’ react ions t o a t emporary market problem, but t o assume subsist ence farmers will not adopt a learned t echnology once prices have readj ust ed is t o assume t radit ional farmers are incredibly dumb, which t hey are not . Furt hermore, farmer int erviews have confirmed t hat t he t emporary market problem was not t he reason for t he program’s failure. Technologically, and in t erms of it s credibilit y, ecological agricult ure has finally come of age. Over 4.4 million farmers have adopt ed t hese pract ices on 3.5 million hect ares. As a result , t heir harvest s increased by an average of 73% (Pret t y and Hine 2000). Ext ensionist s and researchers alike are finding t hat t remendous, previously unheard of pot ent ial exist s for achieving sust ainably product ive agricult ure even on soils regarded as “ low pot ent ial” soils. It t urns out t hat crops’ growt h does not depend primarily on t he t ot al amount of nut rient s in t he soil, but rat her on t he const ant availabilit y of nut rient s, even if t hey are present in very small concent rat ions (Primavesi 1980; Bunch 1999). Furt hermore, crops can be fed t hrough mulches (or even a nut rient solut ion of wat er, as in hydroponics) j ust as well as t hrough t he soil. Therefore, t he nat ural fert ilit y of t he soil, or it s “ cat ion exchange capacit y,” even if very low, does not need t o affect t o any great ext ent t he product ivit y of t he land. Well-managed land, even of close t o t he poorest qualit y, can be very product ive. Equally import ant for t he poor, t his can be done at very low cost s. Wit h an invest ment of only $0.25 t o buy a handful of velvet bean or j ack bean seed, a lit t le pat ience and a willingness t o learn a different way of managing t he soil, a farmer can increase his or her yields by 200% and even 300% in most cases. These soils are kept covered at all t imes, are never or only rarely ploughed, and t he crops are fed largely t hrough t he mulch, or lit t er layer (Primavesi 1980; Bunch and Lopez 1995). This sort of soil management , in fact , mimics t he rainforest it self, which follows every one of t he above rules of t humb (Bunch 1999). And since rainforest s have produced prodigious amount s of biomass for t housands of years, we have reason t o believe t hat farmers will be able t o maint ain high levels of product ivit y over t he long haul. Such pot ent ial has now been proven in case aft er case (Pret t y et al. 2006). Probably t he most spect acular case is t hat of t he Syst em of Rice Int ensificat ion developed in Madagascar. Scient ist s at t he Int ernat ional Rice Research Inst it ut e, t he CGIAR cent er t hat developed miracle rice, have for many years maint ained t hat t he t radit ional rice plant is genet ically capable of producing a maximum of less t han 10 t ons per hect are of grain. A t ypical example is t he st at ement t hat “ yields for mult iple variet ies peak out 110 FOOD REBELLIONS! at about 8 t ons per hect are, even wit h high nit rogen applicat ions, up t o 200 kilograms per hect are” (Ladha et al. 1998). Nevert heless, farmers in Madagascar, on some of t he most deplet ed, acidic soils in t he world, have been achieving yields of 5–10 t ons per hect are, and occasionally even 15 t ons per hect are (Uphoff 2000). And t hey are achieving t hese yields wit h no use of chemical fert ilizer. A whole series of int erest ing and pot ent ially revolut ionary t echnologies are surfacing around t he world, among non-government al organizat ions and even among t he farmers t hemselves. These t echnologies are somet imes similar t o convent ional t echnologies, and ot her t imes approach being bot h st range and wonderful. They go by names such as “ wat er harvest ing,” “ dispersed t rees,” “ green manure/ cover crops,” “ home-made foliar sprays,” “ improved fallows,” “ cont our veget at ive barriers,” “ nat ural pest cont rol,” “ hand-hoe precision plant ing,” et c. In most cases, t he yield increases achieved by one of t hese t echnologies will compound t hose achieved by ot hers. For inst ance, in t he case of a program in San Mart in Jilot epeque, Guat emala, from 1972 t hrough 1979, a st udy done in 1994 found t hat t he average farmer st udied (among all t hose who part icipat ed in t he program from four villages wit hin t he t arget area) had increased his maize yields from 400 kilograms per hecat re in 1971 t o 4,500 kilograms per hect are in 1994. And t his increase was achieved almost ent irely wit h ecological agricult ure t echnology, even t hough many of t oday’s best t echnologies were unknown in 1979 (Bunch 1995). Bunch, Roland. 1999. More Product ivit y wit h Fewer Ext ernal Input s: Cent ral American Case St udies of Agroecological Development and t heir Broader Implicat ions. Environment , Development and Sust ainabilit y 1 (3/ 4):219–33. Bunch, Roland and Gabino Lopez. 1995. Soil Recuperat ion in Cent ral America: Sust aining Innovat ion af t er Int ervent ion. London: Sust ainable Agricult ure Programme, Int ernat ional Inst it ut e for Environment and Development . Ladha, J.K., G.J.D. Kirk, J. Bennet t , S. Peng, C.K. Reddy and U. Singh. 1998. Opport unit ies for Increased Nit rogen-use Effciency from Improved Lowland Rice Germplasm. Field Crops Research 56:41–71. Pret t y, J, A.D. Noble, D. Bossio, J. Dixon, R.E. Hine, F.W.T. Penning de Vries and J.I.L. Morison. 2006. Resource-conserving Agricult ure Increases Yields in Developing Count ries. Environment al Science & Technology 40 (4):1114-1119. Pret t y, J. and R. Hine. 2000. Feeding t he World wit h Sust ainable Agricult ure: a Summary of New Evidence. Final Report f rom SAFE-World Research Proj ect . Colchest er, UK: Universit y of Essex. Primavesi, Ana. 1980. O manej o ecológico do solo: a agricult ura em regiões t ropicais. Sao Paulo: Nobel. Uphoff, Norman. 2000. Agroecological Implicat ions of t he Syst em of Rice Int ensif icat ion (SRI) in Madagascar. Environment , Devel opment and Sust ainabilit y 1 (3/ 4). OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 111 Under more realistic assumptions—that a switch to organic agriculture would mean the relatively lower developed world yield ratios would apply to production in the developed world and the relatively higher developing world yield ratios would apply to production in the developing world—the result was an astounding 4,381 kcal per person per day, a caloric availability more than suicient for today’s population. Indeed, it would be more than enough to support an estimated population peak of around 10–11 billion people by the year 2100. Another frequent claim by critics of organic agriculture is that organic agriculture requires more land. This requirement, they say, is because of lower yields and the use of green manure—nutrients from cover crops planted in between food crop rotations—instead of synthetic nitrogen. This point was tested in the Michigan study as well, which evaluated the nitrogen availability generated solely by green manure as opposed to nitrogen from synthetic sources. Based on 77 studies, they found that, assuming green manures could be planted on the current agricultural land base in between food crops, during winter fallow, or as a relay crop, 140 million metric tons of nitrogen could be ixed by green manures each year. In comparison, the global use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in 2001 was 82 million metric tons, or 58 million metric tons less than the theoretical production of green manures. These results suggest that, in principle, no additional land is required to obtain enough useful nitrogen to replace the current use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Other organically acceptable sources of nitrogen, including intercropping, alley cropping with leguminous trees, reintegration of livestock and annual crops, and inoculation of soil with free-living nitrogen ixers, were not included in the analysis. In other words, similar to the indings around yields from organic production, their estimate is a conservative one. There may be signiicant potential in such alternative nitrogen sources that could be realized if research resources were devoted to them on the scale of the efort that has supported the Green Revolution. The Michigan study shows that (notwithstanding future research) the answer to whether organic agriculture can provide enough food for the world is an unambiguous yes. 112 FOOD REBELLIONS! Smallholders: Leading the Practice of Sustainable Agriculture We know ecologically managed farms can be at least as productive as conventional farms, but can this approach avoid the social and environmental pitfalls of the Green Revolution? The functions performed by small ecological farming systems spread widely across Africa, Asia and the Americas comprise a social and ecological asset for humankind. In an era of escalating and increasingly volatile fuel, input and food costs, the unpredictability of climate change, the accelerating degradation of the environment, the spread of GMO contamination and the concentration of corporate-controlled food systems, small and medium-sized, biodiverse, ecologically managed farms are the most viable form of agriculture capable of feeding the world and reducing ecological and economic stress. There are ive main reasons:9 1. Small farmers are key for the world’s food security While 91% of the planet’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land are increasingly being devoted to agro-export crops, agrofuels and transgenic soybean to feed cars and livestock, some 450 million farms (85%) measuring less than two hectares still produce most of the staple crops needed to feed the planet’s rural and urban populations. In Latin America, about 17 million peasant farmers farming more than 60 million hectares (over one-third of the total cultivated land), with average farm sizes of about 1.8 hectares, produce 51% of the maize, 77% of the beans, and 61% of the potatoes for domestic consumption (Ortega 1986; Altieri 1999). Africa has approximately 33 million small farms, representing 80% of all farms on the continent (Nagayets 2005). Despite the fact that Africa now imports huge amounts of cereals, the majority of African farmers (mostly women) farm less than two hectares (Nagayets 2005) and are responsible for 90% of the continent’s agricultural production (Spencer 2002). In Asia, some 200 million rice farmers cultivate two hectares of rice, providing the bulk of the rice produced by Asian farmers. Small increases in yields on these small farms that produce most of the world’s staple crops will have far more impact on food availability at the local and regional levels than the doubtful increases predicted for large genetically modiied monocultures. OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 113 2. Small farms are more productive and resource conserving than large-scale monocultures. Although the conventional wisdom is that small family farms are backward and unproductive, research shows that under the same conditions—if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop—small farms are much more productive than large farms. In terms of kilograms per hectare, integrated farming systems in which the small-scale farmer produces grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products can produce four to ten times more than single crop monocultures on large-scale farms (Rosset 1999). The productivity of small farms producing polycultures of beans, squash, potato and fodder is higher in terms of harvestable products per unit area than farms growing just one crop with the same level of management. Yield advantages for polycultures (called “over-yielding”) range from 20% to 60%, because polycultures reduce losses due to weeds, insects and diseases, and make A farmer from t he Cent er for Indigenous Peasant Development , an indigenous organisat ion t hat promot es sust ainable agricult ure in Oaxaca, Mexico. Leonor Hurt ado 114 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 24 Campesino a Campesino: Latin America’s Farmers’ Movement for Sustainable Agriculture Farmers helping t heir brot hers, so t hat t hey can help t hemselves…t o find solut ions and not be dependent on a t echnician or on t he bank. That is Campesino a Campesino. Argelio González, Santa Lucía, Nicaragua, 1991 This is t he farmers’ definit ion of Lat in America’s 30-year-old farmer-led movement for sust ainable agricult ure. El Movimient o Campesino a Campesino, or t he Farmer-t o-Farmer Movement is one of t he cont inent ’s most successful, ext ensive and remarkable experiences in sust ainable agricult ure. Campesino a Campesino began among t he smallholders of t he ecologically fragile hillsides and forest perimet ers of t he Mesoamerican t ropics. Using relat ively simple met hods of small-scale experiment at ion combined wit h farmer-led workshops in agroecology, soil and wat er conservat ion, seed select ion, crop diversificat ion, int egrat ed pest management (IPM), and biological weed cont rol, t hese farmers found ways t o raise yields, conserve t he environment and improve t heir livelihoods, farmer-t o-farmer. Through t he work of t housands of volunt eer and part -t ime farmer-t echnicians, or promot ores, and t he support of hundreds of t echnicians and professionals from local development organizat ions, t he promot ores of Campesino a Campesino have spread t heir movement t o hundreds of t housands of smallholders t hroughout t he Americas. Promot ores lead by example, inspiring t heir neighbors and ot hers t o experiment , innovat e and t ry new alt ernat ives. The Campesino a Campesino movement can be credit ed not only wit h spreading agroecological management , but also for pioneering farmer-led experiment at ion and farmer-t o-farmer development met hodologies across Lat in America (Brot fur die Welt 2006). One of t he most dramat ic examples of t his has been Cuba, where—t hanks t o st rong government support for farmer-led development —t he movement grew t o over 100,000 smallholders in j ust eight years (Holt -Giménez 2006). Roland Bunch, t hen of World Neighbors (Bunch 1982), originally described t he basic principles for what became farmer-led development as follows: • • • • • Mot ivat e and t each farmers t o experiment At t ain and ut ilize rapid, recognizable success Use appropriat e t echnologies St art wit h j ust a few, well-chosen t echnologies Train villagers as ext ensionist s. OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 115 Bunch saw t he development of local capabilit ies as an invert ed pyramid in which farmer-ext ensionist s experiment ed wit h one or t wo new t echnologies every year. If t hese were successful, t hey encouraged ot her farmers t o experiment wit h t he same t echnologies, and t o t each ot hers. In t his way, human capacit ies and t he t echnology base grew at compat ible rat es and were mut ually reinforcing. The focus was on campesino innovat ion and t he sharing of t echnology. The Campesino a Campesino Movement is a grassroot s response t o t he t echnical, ecological and inst it ut ional failures of t he Green Revolut ion in Lat in America. Many Green Revolut ion programs hoping t o achieve higher rat es of farmer part icipat ion in t heir ext ension programs have since adopt ed t he farmer-t o-farmer met hodology. The part icipat ory plant breeding now popular among agricult ural research cent ers is an example of t his. But Campesino a Campesino is about smallholders’ cont rol over t heir own agroecosyst ems more t han it is about met hodologies t o ext end new seeds. In fact , t he farmer-led nat ure of Campesino a Campesino t urns t he quest ion of part icipat ion on it s head. Rat her t han asking, “ How do we get farmers t o part icipat e in agricult ural development schemes?” t he movement challenges professionals t o ask how t hey can best part icipat e in farmer-led processes for agricult ural development . The Campesino a Campesino Movement is act ually a movement for social change. Based on principles of agroecology, solidarit y, and innovat ion, t he movement resist s t he ecologically degrading and socially dest ruct ive commodificat ion of soil, wat er, and genet ic diversit y and assert s t he right s of smallholders t o det ermine an equit able, sust ainable course for agricult ural development . The ent husiasm and commit ment of t he men and women in t he Campesino a Campesino Movement ring clear in t he words of promot er José Jesús Mendoza: If t here is anyt hing t hat t ruly sat isfies a person, it is helping ot hers; t o collaborat e so ot hers improve; collaborat e so ot hers overcome obst acles; collaborat e so t hat ot hers can live different ly all t hose t hings one suffers from in t he count ryside. I have felt such beaut iful t hings t hrough t hese experiences even t hough I never had any schooling. When someone want ed t o t each me somet hing, I was ashamed because I t hought I wouldn’ t be able t o underst and t hem. But wit h Campesino a Campesino, t he Mexicans came t o give us a workshop here in Sant a Lucía, and everyt hing changed. Before, when t echnicians came t o give workshops, I never underst ood what t hey were t alking about . But when t he Mexicans came, I underst ood everyt hing because I underst ood t heir experience. This filled me wit h ent husiasm t o keep learning about organic agricult ure, t he alt ernat ive for t hose t hat love t he land and love nat ure. For me it was like opening a book, a book wit hout let t ers, a book t hat says very deep t hings; immense, great , glorious, marvelous dreams come t rue! This 116 FOOD REBELLIONS! is t he book of life. It has t aught me many t hings and given me t hings I never t hought I would have. Campesinos came and gave us workshops and I liked what t hey t aught because t hey t aught what t hey pract iced. That was t he main t hing: do t o be able t o t each. This has been my mission, t o do t hings in order t o t each t hem t o ot hers, which is t he best way t o improve life in t he count ryside. That was in 1987. It has been sevent een years and I can see t he fruit of t he dreams I had when I went t o my first workshop. I never imagined t he set backs I would have, but I have been able t o assimilat e t heir lessons. Each day t he school of life t eaches us new t hings, beaut iful t hings, precious t hings. Above all, when a dreamer has posit ive, concret e t hings t hat lift him up, crit icism is not import ant . Campesino a Campesino is one of t he most glorious experiences of my life. Some might ask, “ What have you done?” They don’ t want t o see t hese marvelous t hings, or see t hat one can live bet t er wit h everyt hing t hat nat ure gives us. But I feel fulfilled because I have been able t o help many people healt hily, purely, wit hout prej udice. (Holt -Giménez 2006) Brot fur die Welt . 2006. Campesino a Campesino: Const ruyendo procesos. St ut t gart : Brot fur die Welt . Bunch, R. 1982. Two Ears of Corn. Oklahoma Cit y: World Neighbors. Holt -Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a Campesino: Voices f rom Lat in America’s Farmer t o Farmer Movement f or Sust ainable Agricult ure. Oakland: Food First Books. more eicient use of the available resources of space, water, light and nutrients (Beets 1982; Gliessman 1998). In overall output, the small, diversiied farm produces much more food, even if measured in dollars. In the US, data shows that the smallest two-hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and neted about $2,902 per hectare. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and neted about $52 per hectare (USDA 2002). Not only do small- to medium-sized farms exhibit higher yields than conventional farms, but when farmed agroecologically, they reduce negative impact and can even have a positive impact on the environment. Small farms are multifunctional, more productive, more eicient, and contribute more to economic development than do large farms. Communities surrounded by many small farms have healthier economies and more food security than do communities surrounded by depopulated, large mechanized farms (Goldschmidt 1978). Because their livelihoods depend on healthy, on-farm ecosystem functions, small-scale ecological farmers also take beter care OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 117 of natural resources, reduce soil erosion and conserve biodiversity (Holt-Giménez 2001; Rosset 1999). The inverse relationship between farm size and output can be atributed to the more eicient use of land, water, biodiversity, labor and other agricultural resources by small farmers. So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be beter of with smallscale farmers. Building strong rural economies in the global South based on productive small-scale farming will provide employment and allow the people of the South to remain with their families, stemming the painful tide of migration. As the worlds’ population continues to grow and the amount of farmland and water available to each person continues to shrink, a small farm structure will become even more central to feeding the planet. 3. Small, traditional and biodiverse farms are models of sustainability Despite the onslaught of industrial farming, the persistence of more than three million agricultural hectares under ancient, traditional management in the form of raised ields, terraces, polycultures and diverse agroforestry systems is proof of successful indigenous agricultural strategies and a tribute to the ingenuity of traditional farmers. These microcosms of traditional agriculture that have stood the test of time, and that can still be found almost untouched ater 4,000 years of cultivation in the Andes, Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, ofer promising lessons for sustainability because they maintain biodiversity, thrive without agrochemicals, and sustain year-round yields even under marginal environmental conditions. The local knowledge and wisdom accumulated during centuries of farming comprise a Neolithic legacy of fundamental value for the future of humankind. Recent research suggests that many small farmers cope and even prepare for climate change, minimizing crop failure through increased use of drought-tolerant local varieties, water harvesting, mixed cropping, opportunistic weeding, agroforestry and a series of other traditional techniques. Surveys conducted on hillside farms ater Hurricane Mitch in Central America showed that farmers using sustainable practices such as “velvet bean” leguminous cover crops, intercropping, and agroforestry sufered less hurricane damage than their conventional farm neighbors. The study, spanning 360 118 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 25 Las Chinampas: Testament to Indigenous Science The t radit ional float ing gardens called chinampas of Mexico produced maize yields in t he mid-1950s of 3.5–6.3 t ons per hect are (Sanders 1957). At t hat t ime, t hese were t he highest long-t erm yields achieved anywhere in Mexico, and were nearly double t he average yields in t he Unit ed St at es. Each hect are of chinampa could produce enough food for 15–20 persons per year at modern subsist ence levels. Recent research has indicat ed t hat each chinampero can work about t hree-quart ers of a hect are of chinampa per year (Jimenez-Osornio and del Amo 1986), meaning t hat each farmer can support 12–15 people sust ainably, and wit hout expensive input s. Jimenez-Osornio, J. and S. del Amo. 1986. An Int ensive Mexican Tradit ional Agroecosyst em: The Chinampa. Paper read at 6t h Int ernat ional Scient ific Conference IFOAM, at Sant a Cruz CA. Sanders, W.T. 1957. Tierra y agua: A St udy of t he Ecological Fact ors in t he Development of Meso-American Civilizat ions. PhD dissert at ion, Harvard Universit y. communities and 24 departments in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, showed that diversiied plots had 20% to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture, less erosion, and experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbors (Holt-Giménez 2002). Undoubtedly, the ensemble of traditional crop management practices used by many resource-poor farmers represent a rich resource for modern development workers seeking to create novel agroecosystems well adapted to the local ecological and socioeconomic circumstances of peasants. Peasants use a diversity of techniques, many of which it well to local conditions. The techniques tend to be knowledge intensive rather than input intensive, but clearly not all are efective or applicable, therefore modiications, adaptations, and agroecological innovation are constantly occurring. The challenge is to ground the foundations of such changes in farmers’ agroecological knowledge. OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 119 4. Small farms represent a sanctuary of agrobiodiversity In general, traditional and small-scale farmers grow a wide variety of cultivars. Many of these plants are landraces grown from seed passed down from generation to generation, and are more genetically heterogeneous than modern cultivars. This reduces farm vulnerability and enhances harvest security in the face of diseases, pests, droughts and other stresses. In a worldwide survey of crop varietal diversity on farms involving 27 crops, scientists found that considerable crop genetic diversity continues to be maintained on farms in the form of traditional crop varieties, especially of major staple crops (Jarvis et al. 2008). In most cases, farmers maintain diversity as insurance in the face of social, economic and environmental unpredictability. Many researchers have concluded that this varietal richness enhances productivity and reduces overall yield variability. For example, studies by plant pathologists provide evidence that mixing of crop species and/or varieties can delay the onset of diseases by reducing the spread of disease-carrying spores, and by modifying environmental conditions so that they are less favorable to the spread of certain pathogens (Altieri 2004). Recent research in China found that four diferent mixtures of rice varieties grown by farmers from 15 diferent townships over 3,000 hectares sufered 44% less blast incidence and exhibited 89% greater yield than homogeneous ields—without the need to use chemicals (Zhu et al. 2000). Transgenic crops are already contaminating the world’s centers of genetic diversity, puting the planet at tremendous ecological risk (Quist and Chapela 2001). It is crucial to maintain areas of peasant agriculture free of contamination from crops with genetically modiied organisms (GMO), as traits important to indigenous farmers (resistance to drought, food or fodder quality, maturity, competitive ability, performance on intercrops, storage quality, taste or cooking properties, compatibility with household labor conditions, etc.) could be eliminated by GMOs whose transgenic qualities (e.g. herbicide resistance) are of no importance to farmers who don’t use agrochemicals. Under this scenario, risk will increase and farmers will lose their ability to produce relatively stable yields with a minimum of external inputs under changing biophysical environments. The social impacts of local crop shortfalls, resulting from changes in the genetic integrity of local varieties due to genetic contamination, is already underway in the global South. 120 FOOD REBELLIONS! Maintaining pools of genetic diversity that are geographically isolated from any possibility of cross fertilization or genetic pollution from uniform transgenic crops will create “islands” of intact germplasm which will act as safeguards against future ecological failure brought on by the spread of GMO crops. These islands of genetic sanctuary will serve as the source for the GMO-free seeds that will be needed to repopulate the ecological farms in the North inevitably contaminated by the advance of transgenic agriculture. The small farmers and indigenous communities of the global South, with the help of scientists and NGOs, can continue to create and safeguard the biological and genetic diversity that strengthens and enriches agriculture on the planet. BOx 26 Back to the Future: From Frijol Tapado to Green Manures The f rij ol t apado is an ancient syst em used t o produce beans in mid-elevat ion areas of Cent ral America on st eep slopes wit h high amount s of rainfall where most beans in t he region are grown. To begin t he process, farmers choose a fallow field t hat is t wo t o t hree years old so t hat t he woody veget at ion dominat es t he grasses. If t he fallow period is less t han t wo years, t hen t he grasses will be able t o out -compet e t he emerging bean plant s and soil fert ilit y will not have been fully rest ored since t he last harvest . Next , pat hs are cut t hrough t he field wit h machet es. Then bean seeds are broadcast ed int o t he fallow. Finally, t he fallow veget at ion wit h bean seed is cut down int o a mulch t hat is allowed t o decay and provide nut rient s t o t he mat uring bean seedling. Approximat ely 12 weeks aft er broadcast ing, a harvest is made. In Cost a Rica, t he est imat e is t hat 60%–70% of t he beans in t he count ry are produced by f rij ol t apado. Compared t o ot her more int ensive met hods of bean product ion, t he t apado syst em has a higher rat e of ret urn because of lower cost s. Soil erosion is minimized, t here is no need for expensive and t oxic agricult ure chemicals and t he syst em requires relat ively lit t le labor (Buckles et al. 1998). By underst anding t he rat ionale of f rij ol t apado, a cont emporary discovery, t he use of “ green manures,” has provided an ecological pat hway t o t he int ensificat ion of maize in areas where long fallows are not possible anymore due t o populat ion growt h or conversion of forest t o past ure. Aft er t he maize is harvest ed, t he field is sown wit h Mucuna pruriens or “ velvet bean,” leaving a t hick mulch layer year-round. One of t he main effect s of t he velvet bean-mulch layer is improved mineral nut rit ion in t he maize crop, cumulat ive soil fert ilit y and reduced soil erosion (Alt ieri 2004). OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 121 5. Small farms cool the climate Industrial agriculture is directly responsible for 13.5% of global greenhouse gases through emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O—a gas with 296 times the warming power of CO2) (IPCC 2007; Crutzen 2007). These result from extensive cultivation, large catle operations, and the production and application of synthetic fertilizers. Fity percent of all fertilizer applied to the soil ends up in the atmosphere or in local waterways. Deforestation, largely for industrial agriculture, constitutes another 18% of global emissions (Stern Review 2007). Climate change poses enormous threats to food production. One Experiences in Cent ral America show t hat Mucuna-based maize syst ems are st able, allowing respect able yields every year. In part icular, t he syst em appears t o great ly diminish drought st ress because t he mulch layer helps conserve wat er in t he soil profile. Wit h enough wat er around, nut rient s are made readily available, in good synchronizat ion wit h maj or crop upt ake. In addit ion, t he Mucuna suppresses weeds, eit her because velvet bean physically prevent s t hem from germinat ing and emerging, or from surviving very long during t he velvet bean cycle, or because a shallow root ing of weeds in t he lit t er layer–soil int erface makes t hem easier t o cont rol. Most import ant for t he t ropics, Mucuna helps neut ralize pH in t he mulch–soil int erface, t hus helping plant s avoid t he aluminum t oxicit y t hat plagues many acid soils in t he t ropics. Dat a shows t hat t his syst em, grounded in farmers’ knowledge and involving t he cont inuous annual rot at ion of velvet bean and maize, can be sust ained for at least 15 years at a reasonably high level of product ivit y, wit hout any apparent decline in t he nat ural resource base (Flores 1989). As illust rat ed wit h t he Mucuna syst em, an increased underst anding of t he agroecology and et hnoecology of t radit ional farming syst ems is necessary t o cont inue developing cont emporary syst ems. This can only result from int egrat ive st udies t hat det ermine t he myriad of fact ors t hat condit ion how farmers perceive t heir environment and subsequent ly how t hey modify it t o lat er t ranslat e such informat ion t o modern scient ific t erms. Alt ieri, Miguel. 2004. Linking Ecologist s and Tradit ional Farmers in t he Search for Sust ainable Agricult ure. Front iers in Ecology and Environment 2:35–42. Buckles, D., B. Triomphe and G. Sain. 1998. Cover Crops in Hillside Agricult ure: Farmer Innovat ion wit h Mucuna. Ot t awa, Canada: Int ernat ional Development Research Cent er. Flores, M. 1989. Velvet beans: an Alt ernat ive t o Improve Small Farmers’ Agricult ure. ILEIA Newslet t er 5:8–9. IAASTD. 2009. Summary for Decision Makers of the Global Report. Island Press, Washington DC. Source: The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, 2007. Design: UNEP/GRID-Arendal, Ketill Berger. 122 FOOD REBELLIONS! Figure 7 Projected Impact of Climate Change OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 123 Figure 8 Vulnerability: The Human Factor in Natural Disasters NATURAL DISASTER = EVENT + VULNERABILITY / SUSTAINABILITY Resist ance Resilience Source: Blaikie et al. 1994 to two degrees centigrade increases in average global temperatures will likely cause crop yields to fall in many underdeveloped areas of the global South. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), large areas of Africa could be stricken by yield decreases of over 50% by the year 2020 as a result of an increasingly hoter and drier climate. Small mountain glaciers will disappear, threatening water supplies, and there will be extensive damage to coral reefs. When average global temperatures rise by three, four and ive degrees centigrade, we can expect major declines in productivity in northern regions, severe crop losses, widespread water shortages in the Mediterranean and southern Africa, species extinctions, and a devastating rise in sea level. Vulnerability: the human side of disaster Severe climate-induced events are called “hazards.” Even at low increases in global temperature hazards can occur in the form of intense storms and droughts, heat waves, freezing spells, and forest ires. The higher the average global temperature change, the higher the likelihood that global climatic changes become irreversible, making agriculture so hazard ridden that in many parts of the world it may become impossible to sustain farm livelihoods. Unstable weather and extreme weather hazards are already increasing worldwide and are especially dangerous for rain-fed 124 FOOD REBELLIONS! agriculture, farmers on steep, fragile hillsides, farms with shallow soils and agriculture in the low-lying delta regions—in other words, for the smallholders that make up the majority of the world’s farmers. Whether or not an extreme weather hazard is disastrous depends not only on the intensity of the hazard itself, but also on the level of vulnerability of the people who experience it. If the level of vulnerability is high, even a low-intensity hazard can result in a climate disaster. When farmers are poor and hungry, have too litle agricultural land, farm unprotected soils with poor water access and low agrobiodiversity, even a low-intensity hazard—like a heat wave, cold snap, or a three-week delay in the rainy season—can have devastating consequences. It is important to realize that the vulnerability of people to climate disasters is socially produced: that is, pushing the world’s farmers to precarious farming conditions is the result of decisions taken in the market, in government, and in the global institutions. The fact that these decisions have put nearly half of the world’s food production and three-iths of the world’s poor at risk of disaster is tragic and needs to be immediately reversed. The good news is that, just as vulnerability is socially produced, so is sustainability the result of human decisions. We can decide to build resiliency, equity, and sustainability into our agricultural systems. Will genetic engineering save us? Unfortunately, the high likelihood of multiple, overlapping, unpredictable hazards precludes the ability of a single, transgenic “drought-resistant” or “virus-resistant” crop to protect agriculture from the destructive impacts of climate change. A drought-resistant variety might save a crop in the unusual year in which only drought limits production. But when drought is accompanied by some combination of loods, heat waves, cold snaps or new pest outbreaks, these “climate-ready” seeds will not be able to stabilize production. Studies carried out by the Australian government even indicate that the new “drought-resistant” seeds from the Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) underproduce local varieties in good years.10 In the long run, “one problem-one gene” technologies are a poor mitigation option because it will be impossible to ind, isolate and insert all the genes needed to deal with the multiple hazards resulting from climate change. It will also be impossible to insert climateready genes into all of farmers’ crops. If one or two “climate-ready” seeds begin dominating production it will reduce agrobiodiversity OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 125 and undermine whatever existing agroecological resiliency farmers had to climate hazards in the irst place. What is urgently needed is not a few designer seeds, but integrated agro-ecosystem management that builds in environmental resilience in the face of complex and unpredictable climate hazards. Coping with climate change Helping farmers cope with climate change will require action in three main areas: remediation, mitigation and adaptation. Remediation addresses the causes of climate change by reducing agriculture’s impacts on the climate. Mitigation measures must reduce impacts of climate change on agriculture. Adaptation strategies are designed to improve farmer’s ability to respond to climate change. When formulating coping strategies to address agriculture and climate change, we need to ask some very basic questions: How will the strategy or technology remediate the problem? Does it actively reduce agriculture’s contribution to global warming by reducing carbon and nitrous oxide emissions (e.g. by building soil and biomass reserves and by maintaining low levels of petroleum consumption)? Will it mitigate the impact of climate events on agriculture? Does it reduce farmers’ vulnerability in social, economic and environmental terms? Will it increase their environmental resistance to the impacts of climate events? Will it increase their ability to recover (resilience) from the event? Does it enhance and protect their agrobiodiversity, ensure their rights over seeds and protect their access to land and water? Will it increase their market power? How will the approach reinforce farmers’ capacity to quickly and constantly adapt to unpredictable changes in climate, weather, and agro-ecosystem functions? Does it develop a dependence on expensive, hard to get or slow to develop inputs? Or does it strengthen quick, lexible, independent responses? Does it enhance local management practices for agrobiodiversity and ecosystem bufering? Small, biodiverse, ecological farms have a positive efect on climate remediation because small farmers usually amend their soils with organic materials that absorb and sequester carbon beter than soils that are farmed with conventional fertilizers. Around four tons of carbon per hectare is stored in organically managed soils (LaSalle and Hepperly 2008). Researchers have suggested that the conversion of 10,000 small- to medium-sized farms to organic production would 126 FOOD REBELLIONS! store carbon in the soil equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars of the road (Sayre 2003). Further climate contributions by small farms accrue from the fact that most use signiicantly less fossil fuel in comparison to conventional agriculture. This is mainly due to a reduction of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, relying instead on organic manures, legumebased rotations, and habitat diversity practices designed to enhance the populations of beneicial insects. Farmers who live in rural communities near cities and towns and are linked to local markets avoid the energy wasted and the gas emissions associated with transporting food hundreds and even thousands of miles. There is much to learn about mitigation from indigenous modes of production. These systems have a strong ecological basis, maintain valuable genetic diversity, and lead to regeneration and preservation of biodiversity and natural resources. Traditional methods are particularly instructive because they provide a long-term perspective on successful agricultural management under conditions of climatic variability. The great advantage of small farming systems is their high levels of agrobiodiversity arranged in the form of variety mixtures, polycultures, crop-livestock combinations and/or agroforestry paterns. Modeling new agro-ecosystems using such diversiied designs are extremely valuable to farmers whose systems are collapsing due to debt, pesticide use, transgenic treadmills, price volatility, or climate change. Such diverse bufers are highly adaptive systems against natural or human-induced hazards. A comparison of the “one problem-one gene” approach being pushed by biotechnology industry and Green Revolution advocates, with the smallholder-based agroecological approach reveals that the former potentially addresses only mitigation (drought-resistant GMOs are still an uncertain 5—10 years away from being released). However, agroecological approaches are already helping smallholders remediate, mitigate and adapt to climate change. Agroecological smallholders are the planet’s safeguards against the looming agricultural collapse being provoked by industrial agricultural systems. Institutions in the North can play a major role by supporting small biodiverse farms as the basis for strong rural economies in the global South. Such economies will not only provide sustainable production of healthy, agroecologically produced, accessible food for all, it will help cope with and reverse climate change. It OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 127 will also ensure that indigenous peoples and small farmers continue their millennial work of building and conserving the agricultural and natural biodiversity on which we all depend, now and in the future. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development11 The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse. (IAASTD 2008) The importance of agroecological smallholder agriculture was inally gaining oicial recognition just as the world food crisis hit. While “emergency responses” like the Comprehensive Framework for Action were being hastily cobbled together by high-level task forces, 61 nations met in Johannesburg, South Africa in April of 2008 to adopt a groundbreaking United Nations report on agriculture (IAASTD 2008). A joint initiative of the World Bank, the UNDP, the FAO and other institutions, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was designed as a hybrid consultation model based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The report took four years and consultations with over 400 scientists to complete. Considering that the IAASTD grew from discussions initiated by agribusiness corporations with then-president of the World Bank James Wolfenson, the report’s indings are surprisingly radical—calling for a thorough, botom–up transformation of the global food system. Applauded by farmer organizations and civil society groups, shunned by agribusiness monopolies, shelved by the World Bank, yet quietly approved by 61 governments (excluding US, Canada and Australia), the IAASTD advocates reducing the vulnerability of the global food system through locally based innovations. It calls for redistributing productive land to the rural poor. According to co-author Marcia Ishii-Eitemann, in sum the IAASTD found that: Agriculture involves more than yields: it has multiple social, political, cultural, institutional and environmental impacts and 128 FOOD REBELLIONS! can equally harm or support the planet’s ecosystem functions on which human life depends. The future of agriculture lies in biodiverse, agroecologically based farming and can be supported by “triple-bottom-line” business practices that meet social, environmental and economic goals. Reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy and water crises; expensive, short-term technical fixes—including transgenic crops—do not adequately address the complex challenges of the agricultural sector and often exacerbate social and environmental harms. Achieving food security and sustainable livelihoods for people now in chronic poverty requires ensuring access to and control of resources by small-scale farmers. Fair local, regional and global trading regimes can build local economies, reduce poverty and improve livelihoods. Strengthening the human and ecological resilience of agricultural systems improves our capacity to respond to changing environmental and social stresses. Indigenous knowledge and community-based innovations are an invaluable part of the solution. Good decision making requires building better governance mechanisms and ensuring democratic participation by the full range of stakeholders. (for full conclusions see IAASTD 2008) IAASTD’s four-year analytical exercise started with a collective framing of the core problems of hunger and environmental destruction. Scientists then identiied and evaluated the most appropriate actions and solutions to these problems, locally, nationally and internationally. The IAASTD team found that the limiting factors to production, equitable distribution and environmental sustainability were overwhelmingly social, rather than technological in nature. Further, many proven agroecological practices for sustainable production increases were already widespread across the global South, but unable to scale up because they lacked a supportive trade, policy, and institutional environment. This is why IAASTD recommends improving the conditions for sustainable agriculture, rather than just coming up with technological ixes. Unsurprisingly, even though the idea of a world-wide agricultural assessment originally came from the biotechnology industry, when it became clear that genetically modiied seeds were not to be OVERCOMING THE CRISIS 129 hailed as the solution to the food crisis, both Syngenta and Monsanto abandoned the IAASTD process, and refused to endorse the inal report “because of its failure to recognize the role modern plant sciences, including plant biotechnology and crop protection, can play in increasing agricultural crop productivity” (CropLife 2008). While IAASTD found multiple and lexible answers to complex agricultural problems, the corporations wielding the biotechnology hammer could not keep from seeing Southern agriculture as one big nail. This industrial ire may be one reason why the FAO and the World Bank chose not to refer to IAASTD at the food crisis summits in Rome and Madrid. None of the institutional responses to the food crisis (the High-Level Task Force, the Comprehensive Framework for Action, World Bank, FAO, World Food Program) dare address the IAASTD’s call for trade reform, land reform, and investment in low-input, sustainable agricultural management technologies. Nonetheless, because the IAASTD’s conclusions are very compatible with the calls from grassroots food and farming groups for food sovereignty, the report has created a rare political opening for alternatives and the social movements that promote them. While the “oicial” solutions to the food crisis garner only weak support, social movements working to advance agroecological alternatives are using the IAASTD as a national and international policy tool to open up the public debate on the future of agriculture. 8 Africa and the End of Hunger Africa is central to any lasting solution to hunger on the planet. When poverty and hunger are eliminated in Africa, all of the world’s poor will be beter of. Whatever happens in Africa—or doesn’t happen— will have a profound efect on the world’s food systems. What is happening in Africa to address the food crisis is in many ways emblematic of global events. Successes or failures in Africa relect the potential or the limitations of the global food systems to serve the interests of the world’s poor majorities. If the system doesn’t work in Africa, then it doesn’t work for the world. In this sense, ending hunger in Africa is not simply a “global challenge” for the world’s governments. Just as the persistence of poverty in Africa is a challenge for the global economic system, the food crisis is a challenge to the dysfunctional global food system. The stakes on the continent are high in human, environmental and geopolitical terms. In many ways, of course, Africa’s recent history is one of conquest by and resistance to foreign economic and geopolitical interests. The carving up of the continent at the 1884 Berlin Conference sealed the irst “Scramble for Africa.” Countries that missed the opportunity to proit from Africa in the 19th century had plenty of chances in the 20th and even more in the 21st century. Africa was the continent most consistently pushed towards extreme structural adjustment policies. As Walden Bello has observed, the continent was a net food exporter in the 1960s, “averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966–70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer” (Bello 2008). A corollary of this import dependence has been an opening up of the continent’s resources to the highest, and in some cases most unscrupulous, bidder. Thus US businessman Philippe Heilberg has claimed 4,000 square kilometers of fertile land by the Nile in a deal with a Sudanese warlord (Blas and Walls 2009), and the Korean Daewoo corporation atempted to lease 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar (Jung-a and Oliver 2008). While there are other high AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 131 proile land grabs involving foreign powers, notably from Europe, North America, India and China, the inequities of land distribution in some parts of Africa have been merely exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policy. Under the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ models of land reform promoted by the World Bank in South Africa, less than 5% of the land has been redistributed from white to black owners since the end of apartheid (Zigomo 2008). Yet social movements in Africa are vital and active, working on concrete solutions in the ields and concrete policy changes for governments—to bring about food sovereignty. Central to these eforts have been the work of women and women’s organizations—women grow the majority of the food on the continent, yet they shoulder the triple burden of needing to work for a wage, build community, and feed their family. It is no surprise, then, that at the 2008 Via Campesina 5th international conference in Maputo, Mozambique, one of the loudest calls was for the recognition of food sovereignty as an end to violence against women. It is important to realize that just as there is a world-wide diversity of people-driven food systems struggling to emerge from under the weight of the agrifoods monopolies, there is also a continent-wide diversity of grassroots initiatives to end hunger in Africa. Collectively, these life-airming initiatives cover more area and reach more people than oicial, more centralized eforts. Their organizational and technological approaches tend to be grounded in a people-irst, noncorporate perspective. They employ more agroecological and democratic means for improving smallholder agriculture as a strategy to end hunger. These African alternatives were not given a seat at the table at the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA), nor were they considered in the planning of the new Green Revolution in Africa. However, because extreme hunger is so widespread, it is hard to imagine how any efort to end hunger in Africa could be successful without them. Whether or not oicial and grassroots eforts can work together to end hunger is the question facing not just Africa, but the entire world. Africa’s Agrarian Question Because the majority of sub-Saharan Africa’s hungry people come from poor farming families cultivating two hectares or less—and because over 80% of the continent is still rural—the challenge of ending hunger and poverty on the continent is necessarily an agrarian 132 FOOD REBELLIONS! question. Africa’s agrarian questions concern land, labor, markets, technology and politics at local, regional, national and international scales. These concerns are not just about feeding people, but also about changing the present conditions of production that keep the rural poor from feeding themselves. Africa’s agrarian questions are not adequately addressed by simply asking, “What is the role of African smallholders?” Because of the great diversity of smallholder agroecosystems on the African continent, we also need to ask what kinds of technologies, markets, resource use and ownership rights will suit Africa’s diverse agricultural transformations. And, we need to ask, who will lead these transformations? This last question is especially important because, as the result of decisions regarding the food, fuel, and economic crises, Africa’s smallholders are increasingly falling victim to new grabs for land, water, markets, and genetic resources. Will the food crisis usher in a new era of rural debt, contract farming, and agricultural exports for foreign food and energy needs? Or will the crisis provide an opportunity for new agrarian models of development and food sovereignty? In Africa, the struggle to eliminate hunger is the struggle for the future of agriculture. There are many parallels between the continent’s historic movements for independence and today’s struggles for food sovereignty. Though sub-Saharan Africa is a region rich in minerals and natural resources, over 450 million live on less than $2 a day and over a third of the population sufers from malnutrition (Faurès and Santini 2008). Proposals to end poverty and hunger on the African continent must come to grips with the fact that since colonial times, Africa’s food systems and natural resources have been relentlessly appropriated by foreign capital, frequently in collusion with national elites. Even today, at the height of the food crisis, some African governments are negotiating the sale and long-term lease of agricultural land to foreign governments and corporations. Others are providing forests, brushland and pastureland to foreign agrofuel corporations. The struggles for food sovereignty in Africa are widespread, and are especially diicult because the continent not only continues to be a major source of natural resources for the industrial North, but, in a time of shrinking global markets, the food crisis actually makes Africa’s poor farmers a prime target for major seed, biotechnology and fertilizer companies desperate for new consumers. While each poor farmer may not have much money to spend, taken as a whole these farmers constitute a big and lucrative market, particularly if AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 133 foreign aid and African governments provide conditions for market expansion with infrastructure, research, and investment incentives. Of course, African governments must increase aid to agriculture. Encouragingly, in 2003 at the African Union summit in Maputo, Mozambique, African leaders endorsed the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), in which they promised to increase government agricultural support to 10% by 2015.12 The private sector has an important role to play in ending hunger, and in these times of crisis has a social responsibility to serve the public good. However—especially in Africa—care must be taken to ensure that the beneits from improvements in agriculture accrue primarily to poor farmers, not state farms, agro-export farms, sovereign wealth funds or transnational corporations. Who improves African agriculture, how, under what agreements and by what means, will determine whether the eforts to end hunger in Africa succeed or fail. Lack of atention to these issues runs the risk that the long-overdue support to African agriculture will be used as a prop for a lawed global food system when what is needed is a thorough transformation of agriculture. Tensions between top–down and botom–up approaches to solve the food crisis in Africa are being played out in a transnational “development arena” where oicial discourses of “partnerships” frequently accompany less altruistic political or commercial agendas, and oten mask the real exclusion of farmers from participating in the substantive decisions that afect their lives. The future of Africa’s food systems and the fate of millions of smallholders and hungry people hinge on the outcomes emanating from this arena. Informed public debate, institutional transparency and accountability, and amplifying the diverse voices of farmers’ organizations and their proposals are essential for inding a sustainable and equitable path through the food crisis. The challenge is to diversify and democratize initiatives for agricultural development and at the same time respond quickly and efectively to the crisis on the ground. The diiculty in doing all of this is especially evident in the rit between oicial calls for a new Green Revolution in Africa and the continent’s grassroots movements for African agroecological alternatives. 134 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 27 A Return to the Roots? Or Fertilizing the Money Tree? Boost ing Food Product ion in Africa’s Breadbasket Areas: An unprecedent ed part nership among key players in agricult ural development aims t o significant ly boost food product ion in Africa’s “ breadbasket regions,” link local food product ion t o food needs, and work across Africa’s maj or agricult ural growing areas—or agroecological zones—t o creat e opport unit ies for smallholder farmers. This upbeat byline announced t he new “ Memorandum of Underst anding” signed by t he Alliance for a Green Revolut ion in Africa (AGRA), t he Food and Agricult ure Organizat ion of t he Unit ed Nat ions (FAO), t he Int ernat ional Fund for Agricult ural Development , and t he World Food Program at t he FAO High-Level Conference on World Food Securit y in Rome, June1–4, 2008 (AGRA 2008). The memorandum not only signaled t he renewal of t he Green Revolut ion as a solut ion t o food crises, it marked t he ret urn of t he Green Revolut ion t o it s st rat egic root s. Over 50 years ago, when t he Rockefeller Foundat ion began funding research for t he indust rial t ransformat ion of agricult ure (Jennings 1988; Rockefeller Foundat ion 2007), researchers int roduced high-yielding variet ies (HYVs) of wheat , maize, and rice on prime, irrigat ed cropland in t he Philippines, Mexico and India, leading t o impressive yield increases among t he farmers able t o afford t he input s required for HYVs t o deliver t heir high-yielding t rait s (Toenniessen 2008). The Green Revolut ion rode a wave of “ development decades” from t he 1960s int o t he 1980s (Rapley 1996), and was inst rument al in est ablishing t he dominance of Nort hern agribusiness in Lat in America and Asia (Burbach and Flynn 1980; Pat el 2007; Janvry 1981). During t hat period, developing count ries were awash wit h foreign aid and experiencing impressive economic growt h. They built roads, ext ended subsidies, est ablished price support s, provided cheap credit , and built nat ional agricult ural research syst ems t o spread t he HYVs being produced by int ernat ional crop breeders. This led t o a worldwide explosion of grain product ion (Evanson and Gollin 2003). The germplasm collect ed from peasant s by Green Revolut ion scient ist s cont ribut ed $10.2 billion a year t o US corn and soy product ion in t he 1970s–80s. Heavy US government subsidies led t o a surplus of cheap grain t hat was dumped in Sout hern count ries, dest roying local market s and helping maj or corporat ions—Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)—capt ure t hree-quart ers of t he world grain t rade (Vorley 2003). Fully one-t hird of t he seed produced by t he Int ernat ional Cent er for Maize and Wheat Improvement was appropriat ed by privat e Nort hern companies, including AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 135 Pioneer Hy-Brid, and Cargill (Ecologist 1996). The expansion of biot echnology in t he 1990s helped consolidat e t hese global monopolies. Bayer Crop Science, Syngent a, and BASF cont rol half of t he t ot al agrochemical market (UNCTAD 2006). In t he 1990s, fallout from t he Green Revolut ion’s environment al degradat ion and t he increasingly poor performance of it s high-yielding variet ies led t o a 21%drop in donor support , provoking a “ silent crisis” in t he CGIAR research syst em. Under a condit ional bailout from t he World Bank, t he CGIAR diversified operat ions wit h a “ t hrice green” revolut ion in an at t empt t o bring t he Green Revolut ion’s ext ernalit ies under cont rol, raise yields, and at t ract more funding (CGIAR 1996). For five decades t he Green Revolut ion has t ried t o eliminat e hunger by increasing product ivit y t hrough genet ic crop improvement . Now focused on biot echnology, genet ic improvement cont inues t o eclipse all ot her agricult ural research and development act ivit ies (CGIAR 1996; WorldBank 2008). AGRA. 2008. Boost ing Food Product ion in Af rica’s “ Breadbasket Areas” : New Collaborat ion Among Rome-based UN Agencies and AGRA. Alliance for a Green Revolut ion in Africa. ht t p:/ / www.agra-alliance.org/ cont ent / news/ det ail/ 633/ (accessed April 2, 2009). Burbach, Roger and Pat ricia Flynn. 1980. Agribusiness in t he Americas. New York: Mont hly Review. CGIAR. 1996. CGIAR Annual Report : CGIAR 25 Years, 1971–1996. Washingt on DC: Consult at ive Group on Int ernat ional Agricult ural Research. Ecologist , The. 1996. CGIAR Agricult ural Research for Whom? The Ecologist Nov/ Dec, 259–70. Evanson, R.E. and D. Gollin. 2003. Assessing t he Impact of t he Green Revolut ion, 1960 t o 2000. Science 300 (5620):78–82. Janvry, Alain de. 1981. The Agrarian Quest ion and Ref ormism in Lat in America. Balt imore: John Hopkins Universit y Press. Jennings, Bruce H. 1988. Foundat ions of Int ernat ional Agricult ural Research: Sciences and Polit ics in Mexican Agricult ure. Boulder: West view Press. Pat el, Raj . 2007. St uf f ed and St arved. London: Port obello Books. Rapley, J. 1996. Underst anding Development : Theory and Pract ice in t he Third World. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Rockefeller Foundat ion. 2007. Af rica’s Turn: A New Green Revolut ion f or t he Twent y-f irst Cent ury. The Rockefeller Foundat ion. ht t p:/ / www.rockfound. org/ library/ africas_t urn.pdf (accessed August 15, 2008). Toenniessen, Gary H., Joseph de Vries and Eric Holt -Giménez. 2008. Replenishing t he Breadbasket : Food and Philant hropy. A World of Possibilit ies. ht t p:/ / www.aworldofpossibilit ies.com/ det ails.cfm?id=336 (accessed July 10, 2008). UNCTAD. 2006. Tracking t he Trend Towards Market Concent rat ion: The Case of t he Agricult ural Input Indust ry. Unit ed Nat ions Conference on Trade and Development . ht t p:/ / www.unct ad.org/ en/ docs/ dit ccom200516_en.pdf (accessed Oct ober 14, 2008). 136 FOOD REBELLIONS! Vorley, Billy. 2003. Food Inc.: Corporat e Concent rat ion From Farm t o Consumer. Unit ed Kingdom Food Group. ht t p:/ / www.ukfg.org.uk/ docs/ UKFG-FoodincNov03.pdf (accessed July 15, 2008). World Bank. 2008. World Bank Launches $1.2 Billion Fast -Track Facilit y f or Food Crisis. World Bank. ht t p:/ / web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/ EXTERNAL/ NEWS/ 0, ,cont ent MDK:21783685~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~t heSit ePK:4607,00. ht ml (accessed November 11, 2008). The Green Revolution Returns13 For two and a half decades the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) invested 40%–45% of their $350 million a year budget in an unsuccessful efort to spread the Green Revolution across Africa (World Bank 2004). Supporters of the Green Revolution ofer multiple explanations for its failure to raise yields on the continent, among them Africa’s exhausted soils, inadequate infrastructure, poor governance and declining support for African agriculture (Evanson and Gollin 2003). They claim the Green Revolution “bypassed” Africa, and the CGIAR’s failure to eradicate hunger on the continent is due to lack of proper implementation of the Green Revolution model (Rockefeller Foundation 2007). Critics of the Green Revolution maintain that Africa can’t be blamed for its actual conditions, and that the failure is with the Green Revolution’s model itself (see Food First www.foodirst.org; ETC Group htp://www.etcgroup. org; and GRAIN htp://www.grain.org). There is some basis for claims that Africa was bypassed by the Green Revolution. Prior to the oil shocks of the 1970s, many African governments moved decisively to increase food production by enacting land reform, implementing rural development projects, providing producer subsidies, establishing marketing boards and price guarantees, and increasing investments in rural infrastructure. National agricultural research systems were established to test and distribute packets of seeds and fertilizer. Under these conditions, the Green Revolution did begin to raise yields in basic grains in some places, leading many to believe that the “Asian miracle” could be replicated in Africa (Havnevik et al. 2007). However, following the oil shocks and the debt crisis of the 1970s, and the World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, African governments were forced to reduce state services, dismantle marketing boards, close development projects and end subsidies AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 137 and price guarantees. Government research and extension vanished. As market-led approaches to economic development replaced stateled approaches, agriculture fell of the development agenda and the Green Revolution ground to a halt (Havnevik et al. 2007). In the 1990s there were multiple high-proile unsuccessful atempts to score victories in Africa, notably by former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and philanthropist Ryoicho Sasakawa with the “father” of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug. The repeated failures of the Green Revolution in Africa also coincided with the Green Revolution’s overall global slump (see Box 27 “A Return to the Roots?”). Notwithstanding, at the 2004 African Union summit, then secretary-general of the United Nations Koi Annan called for a “uniquely African Green Revolution.” Renewed alliances for the Green Revolution In 1997 then newly appointed president of the Rockefeller Foundation Gordon Conway published The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century, in which he called for a new, high-yielding Green Revolution based on equity and sustainability. Rockefeller’s atempt to re-launch the Green Revolution in Africa in 1999 made litle headway until June 2006, when it cosponsored the African Fertilizer Summit with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in Abuja, Nigeria. Representatives from 40 African governments, African and multilateral development banks, the CGIAR, and agribusiness executives discussed strategies for modernizing African agriculture. A month later, the foundation rolled out its strategy in Africa’s Turn: The New Green Revolution for the 21st Century. It included: • Promotion of hybrid and genetically engineered seeds and chemical fertilizers • Training of African agricultural scientists for crop improvement • Market development • Local agrodealer distribution networks • Infrastructure investments • Agricultural policy reforms. Two months later, the Rockefeller Foundation partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA)—the non-governmental organization 138 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 28 Like Living Software: AGRA’s Strategy for Agricultural Development The Bill and Melinda Gat es Foundat ion is spending billions on it s Alliance for a Green Revolut ion in Africa. The vast maj orit y of t hose dollars are going int o new t echnologies for African agricult ure. Likening plant s t o soft ware, t he foundat ion is at t empt ing t o build a new t echnological infrast ruct ure. AGRA’s grant s t end t o focus in four key areas: t echnological research and development ; soil fert ilit y (most ly t hrough increasing t he use of chemical fert ilizers); increasing access t o seed and input s; and creat ing policy environment s favorable t o market driven, export -orient ed agricult ure. Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS) In order t o address a perceived deficiency in improved seed, AGRA plans t o release 1,000 new crop variet ies in t he next 10 years t hrough part nerships wit h t he CGIAR, privat e seed companies, and public ext ension. The t echnological development program uses genet ic engineering as well as convent ional breeding, and focuses on enhancing st ress t olerance, yield and nut rient cont ent . The program will also fund t he educat ion of mast er’s and PhD level scient ist s and plant breeders, as well as t raining programs for t housands of st udent s and t echnical graduat es in agribusiness leadership. Under t his program falls AGRA’s Agro-dealer Development Program, which seeks t o build a net work of agro-input dealers t o be t he primary conduit by which improved seed and fert ilizer reach rural communit ies (and t hrough which surplus is ext ract ed). A $13.2 million grant from t his program t o set up agro-input dealers in Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi comes at a t ime when t he government of Malawi is using an IMF loan t o subsidize t he price of fert ilizer by up t o 90% (Gat es Foundat ion 2008). AGRA Soil Health Program The foundat ion aims t o improve soil fert ilit y, largely by increasing fert ilizer use in Africa 400% t o 30 kilograms per hect are (Gat es Foundat ion 2008). AGRA is negot iat ing wit h Yara Fert ilizer on concessionary pricing and wit h t he African Development Bank and t he World Bank on a pot ent ial Fert ilizer Financing Mechanism. Policy Advocacy AGRA seems t o subscribe t o t he minimalist st at e, market dependent t heory of development (Moyo et al. 2008), and is act ively advocat ing for proindust ry policies in Africa. At a recent privat e sect or forum, AGRA called for AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 139 Summary of Projects Implemented Under PASS AGRA’s sub-program Total amounts (US$) Participating countries Agrodealer Development $24,824,032 Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Mali, Nigeria, Zambia Educat ion for African Crop Improvement $15,685,943 Ghana, Uganda, Sout h Africa, subSaharan Africa Fund for t he Improvement and Adopt ion of African Crops $5,516,366 Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Et hiopia, Sout h Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, sub-Saharan Africa Seed Product ion for Africa $3,754,003 Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzanian, Uganda, Sout h Africa, sub-Saharan Africa Tot al $49,780,344 Source: Moyo, Chambat i and Murisa. 2008. regulat ory frameworks t o approve new seed t echnologies (i.e., GM crops), facilit at e t he privat izat ion of nat ional seed indust ries, and reduce barriers t o nat ional and int ernat ional t rade (AGRA 2008). Gat es and AGRA are generously funding t he inst it ut ions t hat brought about t he first Green Revolut ion—t he CGIAR syst em, t he Int ernat ional Rice Research Inst it ut e, t he Int ernat ional Maize and Wheat Improvement Cent er (CIMMYT)—and government agricult ure minist ries, as well as nat ional research cent ers and public universit ies in Africa. However, one maj or depart ure from t he model of t he first Green Revolut ion is t he heavy part icipat ion of privat e indust ry. Part ners in t he privat e sect or include Monsant o, Syngent a, DuPont , Yara Fert ilizer, and several nat ional seed companies. Though AGRA claims it is not current ly funding t he development of GM crops, t he Gat es Foundat ion is, and AGRA’s part ners, such as t he African Agricult ural Technology Foundat ion, are act ively advocat ing for t heir legalizat ion. AGRA. 2008. Privat e Sect or Forum on African Agricult ural Development . Alliance for a Green Revolut ion in Africa. ht t p:/ / www.agra-alliance.org/ cont ent / news/ det ail/ 823 (accessed January 3, 2009). Gat es Foundat ion. 2008. Agricult ural Development St rat egy 2008–2011. Seat t le: Bill and Melinda Gat es Foundat ion. Moyo, S., W. Chambat i and T. Murisa. 2008. An Audit of t he Alliance f or a Green Revolut ion in Af rica. Nairobi, Kenya: Act ion Aid Int ernat ional. 140 FOOD REBELLIONS! designed to implement the ideas of the Doubly Green Revolution and the strategies in Africa’s Turn. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s $38.7 billion philanthropy put up $100 million of AGRA’s initial $150 million budget. The alliance quickly formed the Program for a Green Revolution in Africa (ProAGRA) to implement AGRA. Most of the board members of both AGRA and ProAGRA were employees of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (Daño 2007). AGRA: recycling the Green Revolution? While AGRA adopted the Green Revolution’s technological paradigm—prioritizing genetic crop improvement and fertilizer applications as the central pillar of their strategy for agricultural improvement—it also added variations that relect new developments within the CGIAR, the seed and chemical industries, and the global inance BOx 29 Gates’ Gene Revolution The Gat es Foundat ion is using t he vast maj orit y of it s agricult ural development funds t o develop new seeds for African agricult ure. While some of t his development is t aking place t hrough convent ional crop breeding, Gat es’ programs invest heavily in biot echnology. One example is t he f oundat ion’s part nership wit h t he Af rican Agricult ural Technology Foundat ion (AATF). AATF has received $43 million f rom Gat es t o develop genet ically engineered “ wat er ef f icient maize f or Af rica.” New lines of genet ically engineered maize are slat ed t o be complet ed by 2010, wit h f ield t rials scheduled f or 2013. The AATF will manage t he f unds in collaborat ion wit h t he Int ernat ional Maize and Wheat Improvement Cent er (CIMMYT) and t he Monsant o Corporat ion. Monsant o is providing t he proj ect propriet ary genet ic mat erial, expert ise, and t heir nascent drought -t olerant t ransgenes. CIMMYT is providing high-yielding maize variet ies adapt ed t o “ Af rican condit ions” and AATF will dist ribut e t he seed t o local dealers. The Gat es Foundat ion is also funding a proj ect of t he AATF in part nership wit h Universit y of California Berkeley, t he Int ernat ional Crops Research Inst it ut e for t he Semi-Arid Tropics, and DuPont t o develop a sorghum variet y wit h increased lysine and vit amin A (ISSAA 2008). The Int ernat ional Pot at o Cent er is working on a Gat es-funded vit amin A enriched sweet pot at o, while Harvest Plus, a program of t he CGIAR (also wit h foundat ion money), is AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 141 sector. This time a broader array of traditional African food crops will be included in the technological mix. Microinance, and loan guarantees to state and commercial banks will provide credit. The project is establishing a powerful advocacy arm to inluence the policies of African governments. AGRA is making a special efort to reach women—both as farmers and as researchers. Its “integrated soil fertility program” will use “smart subsidies” to increase the application of chemical fertilizers of four million farmers by 400% to 30 kilogram per hectare per year (Gates Foundation 2008). This is to be accompanied by instruction on how to build up and conserve soil organic mater. While AGRA’s Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS) is not now distributing genetically engineered seeds, AGRA has made it known that it will consider introducing GMOs in the future when regulations are in place. Meanwhile, AGRA’s training programs are steadily preparing African crop scientists in working on biofort ificat ion of several crops including maize, cassava, rice, wheat , and sweet pot at o. Drought , climat e change, and biofort ificat ion offer a public relat ions “ Troj an Horse” for t he biot echnology indust ry, especially in Africa. The new so-called, climat e-ready (drought t olerant ) t ransgenics are by most est imat ions years away, but t he indust ry is not wait ing. Syngent a, BASF and Monsant o have already filed pat ent applicat ions on nearly t wo-t hirds of climat e-relat ed genes at pat ent offices worldwide (ETC Group 2008). Alt hough t he AATF promises t o release t heir new wat er-efficient crops royalt y free, j ust who will own t he seeds, who will sell t hem, and how long t he magnanimit y of t he foundat ion’s corporat e part ners will last is yet t o be seen. Even if t he biofort ified and wat er-efficient crops are dist ribut ed royalt y free forever, t he indust ry st ill st ands t o profit enormously. Biofort ified and wat er-efficient crops, posing as a development st rat egy, will open African market s t o biot echnology in general. The prying open of t his massive new market t o biot ech product s explains t he “ donat ion” of t he indust ry’s int ellect ual propert y. ETC Group. 2008. Pat ent ing t he Climat e Genes and Capt uring t he Climat e Agenda. ETC Group. ht t p:/ / www.et cgroup.org/ upload/ publicat ion/ pdf _ file/ 687 (accessed Sept ember 25, 2008). ISSAA. 2008. Sout h Af rica Approves Biof ort if ied Sorghum Trials. Int ernat ional Association for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, September 19. ht t p: / / www. i saaa. org/ kc/ cropbi ot echupdat e/ onl i ne/ def aul t . asp?Dat e =9/ 19/ 2008#3141 (accessed January 5, 2009). 142 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 30 Opening Africa to the Biotech Industry Unt il 2008, Sout h Africa was t he only African nat ion commercially growing genet ically modified crops, but t he landscape for t ransgenics is rapidly changing. The biot ech indust ry is fiercely market ing t heir product s as a “ development st rat egy” in Africa. In a clever act of double-speak, t he Syngent a Foundat ion has been lobbying for t he legalizat ion of Bt corn in Kenya under t he banner of a “ development proj ect ” called “ Insect Resist ant Maize for Africa.” The African Agricult ural Technology Foundat ion, a public– privat e part nership bet ween t he Gat es and Rockefeller Foundat ions, AGRA, t he CGIAR syst em, and biot echnology firms Monsant o, Syngent a, and DuPont , is developing new GM crops for Africa and advocat ing pro-biot ech policies. Wit h support from Gat es and AGRA, biot echnology is being market ed as Africa’s only way t o end cycles of hunger, drought , and povert y, and t o deal wit h t he impact s of climat e change. All t old, 2008 was a milest one year f or t he indust ry’s proj ect of “ development ” in Af rica. Egypt and Burkina Faso became t he second and t hird Af rican nat ions t o commercialize GM crops. Egypt approved a Monsant o Bt corn variet y (MON810) and Burkina Faso allowed t he plant ing of Bt cot t on. Kenya, Uganda, Mali and Malawi init ially approved biosaf et y laws t hat will likely pave t he way t o commercializat ion of GM crops in t hose count ries. Meanwhile f ield t rials of GM crops are planned or underway in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, and Maurit ania. The pipeline f or biot ech crops specif ically market ed t o Af rica is long, and again, is being creat ed largely under t he banner of “ development . ” A peek int o Africa’s t ransgenic fut ure: • GM bananas—Researchers at Cornell Universit y’s Agricult ural Biot echnology Support Proj ect II (funded by USAID) are developing a t ransgenic variet y of East African highland banana resist ant t o bot h nemat odes and t he black Sigat oka fungus. Field t rials are underway in Uganda (Shot koski 2006a). • GM t omat oes—Also t hrough USAID and Cornell, a new GM t omat o resist ant t o yellow leaf curl virus is being t est ed in Mali (Shot koski 2006b). • GM pot at o—Sout h Africa has been asked t o approve plant ings of a GM pot at o developed at Michigan St at e Universit y resist ant t o t he pot at o t uber mot h. The mot h is a post -harvest pest t hat at t acks pot at oes in AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 143 st orage and shipping. The pot at o is being market ed t oward small-scale farmers (Swanby 2008; Mat loga 2008). • “ Wat er Efficient Maize for Africa” —Joint proj ect of t he Gat es Foundat ion, AGRA, Monsant o, and t he CGIAR syst em, t ransgenic variet ies of maize t hat supposedly confer drought resist ance are under development and may be released as early as 2013. • High nit rogen use efficiency rice—US based Arcadia Biosciences is part nering wit h t he AATF t o bring rice wit h bet t er nit rogen use efficiency t o Africa (Arcadia Biosciences 2008a). Arcadia received funding from USAID and has part nerships wit h affiliat es of DuPont and Monsant o for commercializing it s t echnology (Reut ers 2008; Arcadia Biosciences 2008b). Arcadia Biosciences. 2008a. Arcadia Biosciences and t he Af rican Agricult ural Technology Foundat ion Ent er int o Agreement f or Development of Improved Af rican Rice. Press release, December 2. ht t p:/ / www.arcadiabio.com/ pr_0032.php (accessed December 8, 2008). Arcadia Biosciences. 2008b. Arcadia Biosciences Receives $3.6 Million USAID Grant t o Develop Improved Crops in India. Press release, December 2. ht t p:/ / www.arcadiabio.com/ pr_0031.php (acessed December 8, 2008). Mat loga, Polelo. 2008. New GM Pot at o Book: Execut ive Summary. African Cent er f or Biosaf et y. ht t p: / / www. biosaf et yaf rica. net / port al/ index. php?opt ion=com_cont ent &t ask=view&id=174&It emid=35 (accessed December 8, 2008). Reut ers. 2008. DuPont and Arcadia Biosciences Collaborat e t o Improve Nit rogen Use Ef f iciency in Corn. March 12. ht t p:/ / www.reut ers.com/ art icle/ pressRelease/ idUS165580+12-Mar-2008+PRN20080312 (accessed December 8, 2008). Shot koski, Frank. 2006a. East Af rican Highland Banana Resist ant t o Black Sigat oka and Nemat odes. Single-Proj ect Report . Cornell Univerist y. ht t p:/ / www. absp2. cornel l . edu/ proj ect s/ proj ect . cf m?product id=23 (accessed December 8, 2008). Shot koski, Frank. 2006b. Tomat o Virus Resist ance f or West Af rica. SingleProj ect Report . Cornell Universit y. ht t p:/ / www.absp2.cornell.edu/ proj ect s/ proj ect .cfm?product id=26 (accessed December 8, 2008). Swanby, Haidee. 2008. GMO’s in Sout h Af rica: Overview of Current St at us 2008. African Cent re for Biosafet y. ht t p:/ / www.biosafet yafrica.net / port al/ index.php?opt ion=com_cont ent &t ask=view&id=246&It emid=63 (accessed December 8, 2008). 144 FOOD REBELLIONS! biotechnology (Agra-Alliance 2008). Further, AGRA’s main benefactor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Yara, Monsanto, and Syngenta Foundations, support African biotechnology institutions such as the African Harvest Biotech Foundation, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), and the International Service for Acquisition of Agricultural Biotechnology Applications, in a concerted push for GMO research and promotion (Daño 2007). This work focuses on genetically engineering crops for high vitamin content, pest resistance, drought, and weed tolerance. Within the larger Green Revolution scheme, these projects and AGRA are mutually reinforcing: as one prepares the scientists, the other prepares the biotechnology; as one establishes seed distribution networks, the other releases GMOs. Strategically, AGRA signiies a substantive shit for the Green Revolution. In the absence of the 1960s’ African “development state” that provided funding for credit, research, infrastructure and marketing services, supporters of the new Green Revolution are hoping that this time public–private philanthropy partnerships will step in to take up the slack. While there may not be large proits to be made at irst, “recognition is a proxy” until proits can be obtained (Gates 2008). Given the reluctance of the private sector to invest in infrastructure and services for the poor, this is clearly a big gamble. Africa needs some $15 billion a year in agricultural investment. If Northern governments are backtracking on their promises for increasing aid, how can we be sure the private sector will make up the diference? The Green Revolution requires major social investment in order to be successful (even on its own terms). Structurally, however, AGRA appears to reproduce the same commercial bias of former Green Revolutions and reinforces the World Bank’s antagonistic position against smallholder agriculture. For all its claims to independence, AGRA is considered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be the “African face and voice for our work.” AGRA’s benefactor clearly spells out its function in the Gates Foundation’s theory of change: In order to transition agriculture from the current situation of low investment, low productivity and low returns to a market-oriented, highly-productive system, it is essential that supply (productivity) and demand (market access) expand together and that production systems use natural resources efficiently and help farmers man- AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 145 age their risks… [this] involves market-oriented farmers operating profitable farms that generate enough income to sustain their rise out of poverty. Over time, this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production… We are uniquely focused… on 150 [million] smallholder households in Sub-Saharan Africa… that have the potential to transform agriculture at scale. We consider these farmers, most of whom are women, our customers and their needs and realities guide our work. (Gates Foundation 2008) AGRA will follow the market-driven development strategies of the World Bank designed to open Africa’s smallholder sector to the volatile world market and push the “least eicient” African farmers out of agriculture. When combined with the same social and technological paradigm that has driven the Green Revolution for four decades, and given the present economic and political limitations of many weakened African states, potential for a renewed structural violence against poor rural communities is great. Will it work? AGRA appears to be having some successes in reviving the Green Revolution. Government agricultural ministries in seven countries and national agricultural research centers like the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, the National Agricultural Research Organization of Uganda, the University of Ghana, and the University of KwaZulu Natal—all strapped for cash—have locked to AGRA in the hopes of resurrecting their abandoned agricultural programs. Over 550 African scientists are being trained in biotechnology and crop breeding. National and international non-governmental organizations are accessing resources directly and indirectly by participating in AGRA projects. Even the international agricultural research centers, including the International Potato Center, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, and the International Rice Research Institute, are beneiting from new research funding for biotechnology. International agribusiness corporations, while not stampeding into the continent, are making exploratory investments in seed and fertilizer markets, positioning themselves for future opportunities. (For example, Yara, the Norwegian fertilizer giant, is willing to take lower returns on their investments in order to establish their dominance in the African market.) For those convinced that a new Green 146 FOOD REBELLIONS! Revolution is the answer to Africa’s problem of hunger, AGRA must seem like a long-awaited miracle. Whether or not AGRA will be able to revive and re-it the Green Revolution and whether or not this solves the problem of hunger in Africa is another story. The efort, the largest in over three decades, raises a number of questions: • Why did the Green Revolution not consider the successful, already existing agroecological alternatives when formulating its strategy for Africa? • Why were farmers’ organizations never consulted? Why are individual farmers being consulted ater the program has already been designed? • How will the Green Revolution protect the agroecological biodiversity of smallholders? How will it avoid the old Green Revolution’s “monoculture trap?” • How will the Green Revolution protect farmer’s rights to their native seeds? How will it ensure a robust, in situ conservation of these seeds and the knowledge of how to cultivate them? • If credit is only available for commercial seeds and fertilizers— which are bought and sold as commodities—how will the Green Revolution ensure the sustainable restoration of those aspects of healthy agroecosystems that are not commodities, like soil organic mater, agrobiodiversity, non-commercial and non-food crops, and refuges for beneicial insects? • How will the Green Revolution ensure the democratic representation of farmers’ organizations in agricultural development, especially key projects like AGRA? • How will the Green Revolution empower farmers and farmers’ organizations to advance their own agendas for agrarian reform and agricultural development? • Beyond national self-suiciency in grains, how will the Green Revolution strengthen farmers’ food sovereignty, i.e., ensure the democratization of the food system in favor of the poor? • What are the Green Revolution principles and mechanisms for social and environmental safeguards? For public accountability and transparency? What role will farmers play in establishing these principles and using these mechanisms? • How will the Green Revolution address climate justice and the remediation, mitigation and adaptation to climate change? How AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 147 will it help farmers roll back “land grabbing” for agrofuels and food export? These are just a few of the complex concerns that can’t be answered on a program website under “Frequently Asked Questions.” They must be addressed socially, in open dialogue and in public debate at local, national and regional levels. Addressing these questions—and opening up the debate to agroecological alternatives to the Green Revolution—is a necessary step in a larger, democratic, problemsolving process of social learning that allows for trial and error, change and adjustment on the basis of broad-based consent. The fact that AGRA brings together the same social and technological assumptions, research institutions and corporate interests from the world’s irst Green Revolution to re-launch a new Green Revolution in Africa cannot be welcomed as good news. Despite claims that Africa’s new Green Revolution will now beneit women and conserve soils, if the same paradigms and structures of the old Green Revolution remain intact, the biggest unanswered question is: How will AGRA avoid reproducing the devastating structural violence of the irst Green Revolution? African Agroecological Solutions There has been no lack of agroecological solutions to the Green Revolution in Africa (Asenso-Okyere 1997; Mortimore and Adams 2001; Rej et al. 1996). The system of rice intensiication (SRI) developed in Madagascar has raised yields as high as eight tons per hectare and spread to a million farmers in over two dozen countries (Uphof 1999). A survey of 45 sustainable agriculture projects in 17 African countries, covering some 730,000 households, revealed that agroecological approaches substantially improved food production and household food security. In 95% of these projects, cereal yields improved by 50% to 100% (Prety et al. 2003). A study of organic agriculture on the continent (See Box 31 Organic Agriculture in Africa) showed that small-scale, modern, organic agriculture was widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, contributing signiicantly to improved yields, incomes and environmental services (Prety et al. 2008). Over 170 African organizations from nine countries in East and Southern Africa belong to the Participatory Land Use Management (PELUM) network, which has been sharing agroecological knowledge 148 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 31 Organic Agriculture in Africa In 2008 t he Unit ed Nat ions Conference on Trade and Development in conj unct ion wit h t he Unit ed Nat ions Environment Programme (UNEP-UNCTAD capacit y-building Task Force on Trade, Environment and Development ) released a st udy ent it led Organic Agricult ure and Food Securit y in Af rica. The st udy, prepared by Rachel Hine and Jules Pret t y (Universit y of Essex) and Sophia Twarog (UNCTAD), begins by acknowledging t hat “ [d]espit e global pledges… t he number of people suffering from hunger has increased every year since 1996.” Through t he analysis of 15 programs promot ing and implement ing t he t ransit ion t o sust ainable organic farming in East Africa, t he st udy shows t hat , in t he words of Supachai Panit chpakdi, secret arygeneral of UNCTAD and Achim St einer, execut ive direct or of UNEP, “ organic agricult ure can be more conducive t o food securit y in Africa t han most convent ional product ion syst ems, and… it is more likely t o be sust ainable in t he long t erm” (Pret t y et al. 2008). In every case examined, access t o food was enhanced by t he t ransit ion t o organic farming. In spit e of t he widespread associat ion of organic agricult ure wit h lower yields, t he st udy found t hat t he conversion from t radit ional low-chemical input farming t o organic pract ices did not result in any loss of product ivit y. In fact , as t he farms became more est ablished, product ivit y well exceeded t hat of t radit ional farms and even mat ched t hat of high-input modern farms. Farming household food securit y was enhanced not only by increased quant it ies of readily available calories, but also by t he income generat ed t hrough sale of t he surplus produce result ing from t he conversion t o organic. Local communit ies also experienced direct benefit from t he increased supply of fresh organic product s. Not surprisingly, t he t ransit ion t o organic farming pract ices has an overwhelmingly posit ive effect on t he nat ural environment . The programs st udied promot ed a highly sust ainable and ecologically int egrat ed model rat her t han a simple subst it ut ion of chemical input s wit h organic fert ilizers. By harnessing nat ural biological and ecological processes t o increase product ion, 93%of t he case st udies showed “ benefit s t o soil fert ilit y, wat er supply, flood cont rol and biodiversit y.” The organic soil fert ilit y management pract ices which were employed minimize or eliminat e t he use of non-renewable chemical fert ilizers and pest icides, reduce soil erosion, increase soil wat er ret ent ion and bring t he wat er t able closer t o t he surface. This affords farmers a longer growing season and great er resilience t o nat ural fluct uat ions in weat her. Organic farms benefit from increased AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 149 biodiversit y, which provides habit at for predacious insect s and pollinat ors as well as nut rient complement ary plant associat ions. The increased healt h and diversit y of t he farm ecology creat es a more secure syst em overall, which promot es st abilit y in t he regional food supply. The fact ors t hat cont ribut e t o t he success of organic agricult ure in addressing t he problems of food insecurit y are int ricat ely int erwoven wit h t he very processes of product ion on a regionally adapt ed organic farm. Whereas convent ional high-input agricult ure relies on cost ly t echnologies and chemicals, t he shift t o successful organic farming depends more on t he enhancement of local environment al and social resources. For example, t he organic farmer is compelled t o form closer connect ions and alliances wit h neighbors in order t o effect ively safeguard t heir common wat er and land resources. These st ronger communit y t ies lead t o a variet y of posit ive result s such as t he format ion of farmers’ advocacy groups, cooperat ives for collect ive credit , mut ually support ive work arrangement s t hat lower overhead and t he sharing of skills and innovat ions. These enhanced social connect ions were considered by 93%of t he part icipant s t o be crit ical t o t he success of t heir proj ect s. The maj orit y of t he est imat ed 200 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack consist ent access t o adequat e amount s of food are small-scale farmers. The challenge t hen is t o enhance marginalized farmers’ abilit y t o feed t hemselves. Because organic agricult ure relies on locally available resources rat her t han cost ly chemical fert ilizers and pest icides, it offers a viable solut ion. The case st udy of Manor House Agricult ural Cent er in Kit ale, Kenya, cit ed in t he UN report , describes t he experience of t he 3,000 farmers who have learned and implement ed t he bio-int ensive met hods t hat are t aught and promot ed by t he cent er. The adopt ion of double digging and int egrat ed pest management increased (somet imes doubling) t he veget able yields of t he farmers. Part icipat ing farmers were not only able t o grow more food for t hemselves, t hey also saved money by abandoning t he use of chemical input s. The organic farm syst ems are less energy dependent and t herefore resilient even in t he face of rising fuel prices t hat can be crippling t o t he high-input dependent farm. Pret t y, Jules, Rachel Hine and Sophia Twarog. 2008. Organic Agricult ure and Food Securit y in Af rica, UNEP–UNCTAD Capacit y-building Task Force on Trade. New York and Geneva: Unit ed Nat ions Conference on Trade and Development / Unit ed Nat ions Environment Program. 150 FOOD REBELLIONS! in West Africa for 13 years.14 For 20 years, the Center for Information on Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA), has documented hundreds of agroecological solutions that successfully overcome many of the limiting factors in African agriculture.15 Elsewhere, these practices have proven to increase farmers’ agroecological resistance and resilience to climate-related hazards (Holt-Gimenez 2002). A growing number of Africans have other ideas about the future of their food systems. Repeatedly, at the World Social Forum in Nairobi (2006), the Food Sovereignty Forum (February 2007) and the Conference on African Agroecological Alternatives (November 2007) in Selingue, Mali, African researchers, technicians, civil society organizations, and farmers organizations rejected the new Green Revolution and demanded transparency and accountability from AGRA. They also called for debate, public engagement and democratic solutions to the African food crises (Food First 2007). Sustaining sustainability To be successful, eforts to improve agriculture and end hunger in Africa must be able to inspire and mobilize millions of farmers. To be sustainable, these eforts need to be based on smallholders’ capacity for innovation and solidarity. This way, a continuous stream of agroecological innovations can be spread across the continent quickly and efectively. This is possible if the process for agricultural improvement cultivates farmers’ enthusiasm. Roland Bunch, author of the development classic Two Ears of Corn, says: Technologies that fail to arouse people’s enthusiasm will spread only as far as the paid extensionists personally take them, whereas those that do create enthusiasm will “spread with phenomenal rapidity from one individual to another with very little outside stimulus.” In terms of program efficiency, the former situation is untenable. If a technology does not spread beyond the range of contact of the program’s paid personnel, whether they are agronomists or not, the program must find a more appropriate technology. We simply do not have the financial resources to use paid personnel alone to spread new technologies around the world. (Bunch 1982) The last 20 years of successful farmer-led movements for sustainable agriculture indicate that the seeds of enthusiasm are planted in the beginning stages of the technological innovation process. When farmers AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 151 identify problems and select, test and innovate possible solutions they later enthusiastically share these innovations. Farmers who lead the innovation process are capable of spreading methods for agricultural improvement farmer-to-farmer, over wide geographic areas. With minimal support they have also efectively shared their knowledge with farmers of other countries (Holt-Giménez 2006). The many African agroecological alternatives spreading across the sub-Sahara are an example of this. If the new Green Revolution techniques are to succeed where past crop-breeding atempts have failed, its advocates will need to meet with the farmer-led agoecological farmer organizations who are actually transforming agriculture on the ground in Africa. Otherwise, despite the unprecedented philanthropic injections of cash, Africa’s new Green Revolution will not be able to take agricultural improvement very far, or sustain its efort for very long.16 Beyond the impasse: transparency, accountability and public debate It is important to recognize the ways in which AGRA and the movements for African agroecological solutions agree, coincide or are complimentary. In the best scenarios, these areas provide potential common ground and ideally could lead to important synergies needed to overcome the food crisis. In the worst of scenarios, they can co-opt and dilute currently successful and independent eforts at agroecological development. It is just as important to recognize where and when the diferences between AGRA and African agroecological alternatives prevent these two from working together. If these diferences are great, they may even prevent convergence in those areas where the Green Revolution and African social movements actually agree. These conlicts can end up weakening the positive aspects of both approaches and lead to a failure to end hunger and poverty—an option that no one would wish for. The largest area of agreement between the approaches is the focus on smallholders, which for some governments and institutions is long overdue. AGRA’s commitment to African food production and their stated desire to help smallholders to capture more of the food value chain are also important areas of common ground. No one disputes the necessity of grounding a transformation of African agriculture on the needs of women farmers. However, there is a large gray area of discourse in which AGRA’s interpretations and plans for implementation are unclear and raise 152 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 32 The Tigray Project In Nort hern Et hiopia, a region severely affect ed by drought , famine, soil erosion, and povert y, a small sust ainable agricult ure proj ect has helped farmers nearly double t heir yields while reducing chemical fert ilizer use by almost a t hird (Edwards et al. 2007). The Tigray Proj ect st art ed in 1996 in j ust four communit ies. It has since spread t o 65 dist rict s. The farming syst em, according t o a report by t he Swedish Societ y for Nat ure Conservat ion (SSNC 2008) “ is based more on biological diversit y—part icularly t he rich knowledge and agrobiodiversit y of t he farmers—and ecosyst em services t han on fossil fuel.” Since 1996 t he Third World Net work along wit h t he Inst it ut e for Sust ainable Development , t he Bureau of Agricult ure and Rural Development in Tigray, t he Mekelle Universit y, t he Et hiopian Environment al Prot ect ion Aut horit y, t he UN Development Program, and t he Swedish Societ y for Nat ure Conservat ion have worked wit h local communit ies t o improve t he out put and resilience of farms by enhancing t he healt h of t he surrounding nat ural environment . Many of t he solut ions t hat t he proj ect promot es are adapt at ions of t radit ional farming t echniques t hat have been employed in t he region for t housands of years. Compost ing, int erplant ing and crop rot at ion are t he cornerst ones of managing soil fert ilit y in t he program. A variet y of t echniques, including check dams, cont our dit ches, select ive grazing and re-propagat ion of nat ive grasses are used t o decrease soil erosion and ret ain wat er. In some cases t he creat ive management of wat er resources, t hrough cat chment s and diversion of runoff, is allowing farmers t o grow t wo crops annually, one rain fed, and t he ot her irrigat ed. Rat her t han plant ing one or t wo st aple crops, t he farmers spread t heir risk and increase t he overall resilience of t he farm by using diverse t radit ional crop variet ies and regionally adapt ed seeds (SSNC 2008). The Tigray proj ect has not only been successful in increasing yields of t he farms t hemselves, it has also creat ed new opport unit ies as a result of many doubts among ecological farmers and social movements. Just how AGRA understands and acts on terms like “agroecology,” “land rights,” “biodiversity,” and “fair markets” will determine whether or not its programs compliment or undermine agroecological practices and peasant demands.17 There are two important, interrelated areas in which AGRA and African agroecological movements fundamentally difer. The irst is technical and the second is sociopolitical. Technically, AGRA has fully adopted the Green Revolution’s con- AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 153 bet t er ecosyst em services provided by a well managed commons. Gebre Mikael, a farmer in t he region who also keeps over 30 bee hives, has wat ched t he regional product ion of honey increase over t he years as a result of t he reforest at ion and insect iary plant ings, which provide forage for bees (SSNC 2008). A nursery set up in 2004 has provided more t han 50,000 saplings t o t he communit ies in Nort hern Et hiopia. The variet ies are carefully select ed t o be mult ifunct ional—st abilizing soil, fixing nit rogen, shading t he under st ory and providing animal forage. The proj ect has also creat ed opport unit y for women. Fruit t rees from t he nursery have become an import ant source of income for many women, who are t radit ionally barred from plowing fields or using work animals. Women farmers are encouraged t o pre-germinat e seed for veget able seedlings and t end t o nurseries for plant s t hat require a longer growing season (SSNC 2008). Dr. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, “ t he godfat her of t he Tigray Proj ect ” and t he force behind it s incept ion, believes t hat sust ainable agricult ure is t he fut ure not j ust in Et hiopia, but also in t he world. “ Organic farming, I am sure, will feed t he world. I am also sure t hat unless organic farming re-expands, t he human component of t he world will event ually shrink” (Moberg and Lundberg 2007). Edwards, Sue, Arefayne Asmelash, Hailu Araya, and Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher. 2007. Impact of Compost Use on Crop Yields in Tigray, Et hiopia. Rome: Nat ural Resources Management and Environment Depart ment , Food and Agricult ure Organizat ion of t he Unit ed Nat ions. Moberg, Fredrik and Jakob Lundberg. 2007. Ecosyst em Services-Based Farming in Et hiopia Increases Crop Yields and Empowers Women. Sust ainabl e Development Updat e 7 (6). SSNC. 2008. Ecological in Et hiopia—Farming wit h Nat ure Increases Prof it abilit y and Reduces Vul nerabil it y. St ockholm: Swedish Societ y f or Nat ure Conservat ion. www.nat urskyddsforeningen.se/ upload/ Foreningsdokument / Rapport er/ engelska/ Report _int ernat ional_Et hiopia.pdf (accessed February 2, 2009). ventional Northern paradigm of seeing crop genetics as the main road to agricultural improvement. The institutional and political mutualism between AGRA’s crop breeding work and the Gates Foundation’s support for transgenic crops is a potential “deal breaker” for ecological farmers, many NGOs, smallholder organizations and peasant movements in Africa. As long as the Gates Foundation continues to view agricultural “science” in the narrow terms of genetic manipulation, it is unlikely that AGRA will gain the trust needed for signiicant collaboration with African smallholder movements. 154 FOOD REBELLIONS! Despite claims that it will employ well-known “participatory crop breeding” methodologies, AGRA’s technical paradigm still centers the locus of agricultural innovation in the laboratory under the direction of crop scientists, rather than in the ield under the direction of farmers. This efectively prioritizes crop science over agroecology. It also undermines the potential for agroecological innovation and keeps control over development in the hands of scientists rather than farmers. In order to respond to constantly changing local conditions, ecological agriculture needs strong support for constant, widespread, and decentralized agroecological innovation. This kind of support has the added beneit of cultivating the capacity for agroecological innovation among farmers rather than depending on new seeds from a relatively small cadre of experts. The tremendous potential for widespread farmer-led agroecological innovation is not well supported by AGRA’s expert-led crop breeding model, and it is highly unlikely that AGRA’s expert knowledge will ever reach or keep up with the 150 million smallholders it targets as clients. Socially, AGRA claims to be a farmer-led, African initiative. However, AGRA’s design comes from the US-based Rockefeller Foundation. During its irst year, before Koi Annan was invited to be chairman of the board, Rockefeller program oicer Gary Toenneissen ran AGRA. While most of the AGRA board and 90% of its staf are now from Africa, its scientiic direction comes from Joseph De Vries, director of the Program for African Seed Systems. Since its inception AGRA has given the primary decision-making power over problem-framing and strategic design, i.e., what is to be done, to the experts working within the Green Revolution’s institutional structures, with input from the corporate heads of the transnational seed, chemical and fertilizer monopolies. Secondary decision-making power, i.e., concerning how to implement AGRA, is being allocated to AGRA experts and government oicials. A select group of NGOs have been invited to participate in civil society consultations on AGRA. Stung by widespread criticism over its Green Revolution approach, AGRA representatives have begun participating in public consultations with NGOs and African farm leaders. While this dialogue is a very important step in the right direction, African farm leaders are understandably unhappy about being the last ones consulted. At a recent AGRA dialogue called by the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Simon Mwamba of the East African Small-Scale Farmers’ Federation expressed this frustration in no-nonsense terms: AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 155 You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation! The problem with consulting Africa’s farm organizations ater all the major program decisions have already been made and all the powerful institutional relationships established is more than an unfortunate oversight. The lack of early consultation with Africa’s farm organizations precludes substantive questioning of the way the problems of hunger and smallholder agriculture were deined. This has limited AGRA’s awareness and selection of potential solutions. The lack of early consultation has also inluenced AGRA’s ideas regarding farmer participation. Presently, farmers will be allowed to provide information to AGRA scientists regarding their preferences for crop varieties through participatory methodologies in crop breeding. However, AGRA’s strategies and positions on key issues that concern farmers—such as land reform, agroecology, global markets, and GMOs—have all been formulated without any input from Africa’s farmers or their organizations. These omissions relect a limited understanding of African agrarian struggles and a lack of recognition or appreciation of the dynamism of Africa’s farmers’ movements and ecological farmers. Sadly, the architects of AGRA seem to have missed, undervalued, or simply ignored the tremendous potential of the already existing and truly African-led experiences in ecological agriculture that over the last 20 years—in the wake of the irst Green Revolution’s failures—have been steadily spreading across Africa. Not including the principal beneiciaries from the very beginning of such a major efort is a grave strategic error that, given AGRA’s institutional momentum, will not be easy to rectify. The lack of mechanisms to ensure transparency, accountability, and substantive input on major strategic decisions will hinder AGRA’s ability to partner with African social movements. This squanders an opportunity to unleash the tremendous transformative power of the grassroots. Distributing money and grants to governments and NGOs may improve conditions as far and as long as the money is lowing, but it is unlikely to spark the widespread social transformations needed to save African agriculture. Can this change? Of course it can. The question is whether or not the helmsmen of Africa’s new Green Revolution have the political will to make these changes. A positive irst step would be for AGRA and 156 FOOD REBELLIONS! the rest of the Green Revolution’s institutions to open up to informed public debate on the problem, the means, and the ends of eradicating hunger on the continent. Africa’s Lessons Africa has much to teach us about ending hunger: the importance of creating favorable conditions for sustainable smallholder agriculture, and the potential dangers of relying on technological or philanthropic “megaixes.” It also shows us that the potential for turning the food crisis into a transformative moment exists even in the most desperate circumstances. In the face of the food crisis, African BOx 33 Cuba’s Urban Agricultural Transformation In 1997 Miguel Salcines, a mid-level agronomist , got permission t o use a 3.7 hect are plot of “ wast e land” on t he out skirt s of Havana for an organoponico, an int ensive veget able garden. Salcines and four ot hers, including a carpent er and a chemist , began t he process of founding t he Organoponico Vivero Alamar. What happened in t he int ervening years surpassed all expect at ion. Vivero Almar has seen it s product ion j ump from 20 t o 240 t ons of veget ables and it s cooperat ive grow from 5 t o 147 members, all on a lit t le over 11 hect ares. Let t uce, swiss chard, cucumber, t omat o, cabbage, beet s, carrot s, green beans, celery, okra (ladies’ fingers), eggplant (aubergines), peppers, and pot herbs are produced for local market s and schools. Vivero Almar is commit t ed t o spreading t he percept ion t hat t he co-op’s work is based on science and t echnology. Fift y members have eit her engineering degrees or mid-level t echnical t raining—and t he group does much of t heir own research and development . The group is experiment ing wit h different int erplant ings, biocont rol, and biologically based pest icides, all of which helps develop not only valuable t echnologies, but a sense of dignit y and pride in agricult ural work. According t o one aut hor, “ Gone are t he days where agricult ure is seen as backbreaking work undert aken by backward farmers t oiling from sunup t o sundown” (Koont 2009). Across t he cit y, t he pat io garden of Dr. Raul Gil is lush wit h fruit t rees, veget ables, and medicinal herbs. Dr. Gil asked t he government for permission t o t urn a local dump sit e adj acent t o his backyard int o a pat io garden in 1995. Now every Sat urday morning children gat her on t he pat io for classes on gardening and environment al issues. The abundant pat io garden—one of some 60,000 in Havana—produces only for t he household AFRICA AND THE END OF HUNGER 157 agroecological alternatives are spreading, despite the lack of oicial support. African farm organizations, civil society groups, and their converging demands for food sovereignty are growing stronger—in the face of opposition from multinational agribusiness corporations. The possibility for a quantitative and qualitative leap in Africa’s capacity to feed itself is embedded in the continent’s capacity for social transformation. To end hunger we need social change. Much of the developing world has large pockets of hunger driven by the same kind of blinding poverty, environmental degradation, and exploitation of people and resources. These countries are home to similar struggles for justice, food sovereignty and survival. They are also the theater for major aid and development eforts. To solve the and neighbors, but st ill receives free organic mat erial, seeds, and t echnical assist ance from t he government . The experience of individual gardeners like Dr. Gil and co-ops like Vivero Alamar are t he backbone of Cuba’s urban agricult ural success st ory. The reasons for Cuba’s j ourney t o it s seat as world leader in sust ainable and urban agricult ure are well known. Aft er t he Soviet Union collapsed, diesel fuel, gasoline, spare part s, agricult ural machinery, synt het ic fert ilizers, and pest icides virt ually disappeared from t he island. This “ Special Period” forced t he government t o undert ake a massive, rapid shift t o ecological and urban product ion. However, what is less well known is t hat Cuba had been preparing at least t o some degree, for t he pot ent ial of a complet e blockade of t he island. Organoponicos began showing up on armed forces compounds in t he lat e 1980s and t he Depart ment of Defense had been sponsoring research int o self-sufficiency in agricult ure since t he 1970s. At t he launch of t he “ Special Period,” Cuba had t he “ necessit y,” t he “ possibilit y,” and t he “ will” t o make a profound change in t he food syst em. The result ing programs were swift and successful. In 1994 t he government est ablished an organizat ion t o oversee t he int roduct ion of organoponicos like Vivero Almar. Inst ead of t he t radit ional st at e-owned or collect ive models, land was dist ribut ed part ly in parcels t o individual farmers, oft en organized in credit and services co-ops. Three years lat er t hat organizat ion became t he Urban Agricult ure Nat ional Movement . Since t hen, t he Cuban economy has added 350,000 new j obs in agricult ure and it s product ion of veget ables and herbs increased 1000%. But Cuba’s st unning success in t his depart ment comes not in simply adding j obs or increasing product ion. The program has also played an enormous role in communit y development , environment al qualit y, and building a healt hier cit y. Adapt ed from Sinan Koont , The Urban Agricult ure of Havana, Mont hly Review, vol.60, no. 8, 2009. 158 FOOD REBELLIONS! food crisis, the experience, needs and demands of smallholders, and the resources of oicial aid eforts, will need to come together to overcome the structural violence, racism and injustices that cause hunger. The breathtakingly successful urban agriculture program in Havana, Cuba—now producing over four million tons a year of the city’s food—has transformed Cuba’s urban food systems (See Box 33 Cuba’s Urban Agricultural Transformation). The architects of this transformation airm that the key ingredients for success were “necessity, possibility, and will” (Koont 2009). Those sufering from the injustices that cause hunger and poverty have a great supply of the irst two. The third ingredient—will—is fundamentally political. Unfortunately, it is not clear that governments, oicial development programs, the private sector and large philanthropies have the political will to transform (rather than prop up) the current dysfunctional and inequitable global food system. The good news is that the “will for transformation” has taken root in the world’s smallholder and food justice movements—and, it is growing. If the social will of farmers, communities and their movements bubbles up into governments, development programs and business to express itself as political will, it can unleash the tremendous transformative forces of smallholders and communities worldwide. The power of people demanding political change is not the only resource needed for solving the food crisis, but hunger can’t be ended without it. 9 The Challenge of Food Sovereignty in Northern Countries Fixing the US Food System As in the rest of the world, the global food crisis hit the US’s 50 million poor and near poor the hardest. Low-income, and historically marginalized communities already disproportionately sufered from diet-related disease and food insecurity. These communities have taken the lead in food justice struggles nationwide. Food justice asserts that no one should live without enough food because of economic constraints or social inequalities. Food justice reframes the lack of healthy food sources in poor communities as a human rights issue. Food justice also draws off of historical grassroots movements and organizing traditions such as those developed by the civil rights movement and the environmental justice movement. The food justice movement is a different approach to a community’s needs that seeks to truly advance self reliance and social justice by placing communities in leadership of their own solutions and providing them with the tools to address the disparities within our food systems and within society at large. Brahm Ahmadi, People’s Grocery, Oakland, California While Uncle Sam’s food and farm bill continues to subsidize bad food, overproduction and the dumping of commodities in the food systems in the global South, a broad-based, home-grown food movement led by youth, underserved communities, community groups, and family farm and labor organizations, is steadily taking back control over the food system. The actors in the US food movement range from inner-city food justice advocates and food banks working in the nation’s food deserts; to family farm organizations lobbying for price loors, grain reserves, fair trade rules and support for young farmers and farmers of color; to the diet and environment-conscious “foodies” 160 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 34 Structural Racism in the US Food System by Brahm Ahmadi, People’s Grocery The modern indust rial food syst em has left millions of poor people wit hout access t o basic healt hy foods. This is t he one of t he leading causes of t he disproport ionat ely high levels of chronic, diet -relat ed diseases in lowincome communit ies of people of color. Research shows t hat t here are far fewer supermarket s locat ed in t hese communit ies t han in middle class or affluent ones. The Universit y of Connect icut ’s Food Market ing Policy Cent er examined census and grocery st ore informat ion for 21 maj or met ropolit an areas across t he Unit ed St at es. They found t here were 30% fewer supermarket s in low-income areas t han in higher-income areas, and t hese lowincome areas had 55%less grocery st ore square foot age t han t heir wealt hier count erpart s. The st udy also found t hat t he levels of unmet food demand in t hese communit ies were as high as 70% (Cot t erill and Franklin 1995). The modern food syst em began failing inner cit y neighborhoods wit h t he explosion of suburban growt h in t he 1940s and 1950s, when many middle class and upwardly mobile whit e families moved t o newly emerging suburban communit ies. This “ whit e flight ,” combined wit h t he growing povert y of t hose left behind, weakened t he buying power of poor neighborhoods in t he inner cit ies. This economic decline was compounded by t he pract ice of “ redlining,” in which banks refused t o invest in neighborhoods of color. Supermarket s st opped invest ing in improvement s or expansion, and sales dropped. The great er buying power of suburbanit es and a nat ionwide t rend t owards larger st ores were import ant “ pull” fact ors favoring invest ment in t he suburbs. Wit h t he emergence of t he “ big-box” ret ail format —t arget ed at buyers wit h aut os—chain st ores rolled out larger and larger st ores t o capt ure t he growing suburban market . At t he same t ime, older inner-cit y st ores wit h smaller floor areas became relat ively less import ant t o t hese chains’ success. Ult imat ely, t he inner cit y was virt ually abandoned by t he leading supermarket chains. Today, in many urban communit ies of color it is easier t o purchase a gun t han it is t o buy a fresh t omat o. Because of t he lack of access t o healt hy foods, as well as a lack of knowledge about healt hier food choices, t he diet s of many people of color are t ypically higher in sugar, salt , fat , and refined carbohydrat es. The modern food syst em has t urned ent ire communit ies of color int o unhealt hy “ food desert s,” leading t o charges of st ruct ural racism and “ food apart heid.” In t he Unit ed St at es t oday, t he prevalence of virt ually every diet -relat ed disease is highest among people of color. Women of color are about 50%more likely t o be obese t han t heir whit e count erpart s. In West Oakland, California, a predominant ly African-American communit y, THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 161 t he diabet es rat e is four t imes great er t han t he diabet es rat e of t he surrounding Alameda Count y. Given t he magnit ude of problems in t he modern indust rial food syst em, many people are encouraged by t he growing food movement in t he Unit ed St at es. This movement emerged from t he back-t o-t he-land movement s of t he 1960s and 1970s, and has achieved not able successes in t he proliferat ion of farmers market s, communit y support ed agricult ure (CSA) and a high-end organic food indust ry. However, t hese development s have not significant ly improved food access for low-income urban communit ies of color or addressed t he needs of our nat ion’s underserved and vulnerable populat ions. Because t hey do not confront t he problems of racism and classism inherent in t he indust rial food syst em, t he sust ainable agricult ure and organic food movement s share some of t he same social failures of t he syst em t hey propose changing. Their alt ernat ives fail t o address t he urgent food, healt h and livelihood needs of low-income and underserved communit ies of color and oft en end up reproducing t he same polit ical and economic disenfranchisement inherent in t he indust rial food syst em. This does not hing t o heal t he profound physical and psychological disconnect many people of color have t o healt hy food syst ems or t o break t he dangerous cycle of dependency bet ween t hese vulnerable communit ies and t he food syst em present ly ruining t heir healt h. In order t o dismant le t he st ruct ural racism wit hin our food syst ems we must make a det ermined effort t o cult ivat e and increase t he leadership, voice, perspect ives and demands of low-income communit ies of color wit hin t he food movement . These communit ies have a cent ral role t o play in building a food syst em t hat meet s t heir specific needs. Indeed, a healt hy food syst em can and should be a powerful engine for local economic development and polit ical empowerment in low-income and underserved communit ies. The massive demographic shift s underway in t he Unit ed St at es indicat e t hat people of color will soon be t he maj orit y in many st at es. The food movement won’ t be able t o build t he social, economic and polit ical will t o t ransform our inequit able and unsust ainable food syst em wit hout t he st rong part icipat ion from t he maj orit y. In t urn, t his part icipat ion hinges on st rong leadership coming from communit ies of color. Priorit izing t he part icipat ion and leadership of people of color in t he food movement is not simply a humanist ic exercise—it is a prerequisit e for t he democrat izat ion and liberat ion of t he food syst em. Cot t erill, R.W. and A.W. Franklin. 1995. The Urban Grocery St ore Gap. Food Market ing Policy 8. Food Market ing Policy Cent er, Universit y of Connect icut . 162 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 35 The Next Generation of the Food Justice Movement by Anim St eel, The Food Proj ect , Bost on, Massachuset t s Somet hing unusual happens on Tuesday aft ernoons at t he corner of Dudley St reet and Blue Hill Avenue in one of Bost on’s poorest neighborhoods. A group of t eenagers set up t ent s and signs. They unload a van filled wit h veget ables from a farm j ust down t he st reet , and soon a market is in full swing. These young people, who work wit h The Food Proj ect , are part of a growing movement t o make local, healt hy, fair, and sust ainable food t he norm in t heir communit ies—rat her t han t he except ion. That ’s a t all order given bot h t he concept ual and polit ical obst acles. It ’s hard for most people t o grasp t he food syst em let alone a different kind of food syst em. Our food syst em, cont rolled by one of t he most powerful lobbies in t he world, is not easily changed. But what ’s happening on t his st reet corner is also powerful. Indeed, whet her or not we change t he food syst em may ult imat ely depend on t hese yout h and t heir peers across America. Beginning in t he early 1990s wit h The Food Proj ect in Bost on and Growing Power in Milwaukee, hundreds of programs have int roduced t housands of young people in every region of t he count ry t o t he simple power of growing t heir own food. Today, t hese proj ect s st ret ch from Hawaii t o Philadelphia; t hey produce mangoes and kale; t hey run CSAs and nut rit ion classes. As t he movement grew, t hey t ook root in colleges and st art ed t o t ackle school food policies. These programs could pave t he way for even bigger changes over t he next decade. As we ent er a new phase of t he food j ust ice movement —one punct uat ed by a new administ rat ion in 2009 and a new Farm Bill around 2012—t he t hings t hat mat t er increasingly mat ch t he st rengt hs and inclinat ions of t he generat ion current ly in t heir t eens, t went ies, and t hirt ies. In t his new phase of t he movement , for inst ance, t arget ed pressure on key lawmakers will mat t er, part icularly in t he lead-up t o t he next Farm Bill. To win more policy vict ories t han it did last t ime around, t he movement will need it s own “ surge” of cit izens t o call, writ e, and lobby legislat ors. A mobilized group of high school and college st udent s—even a fract ion of t he US’s 34 million—could make t he crucial difference. Over t he next several years, public opinion will also mat t er—much more t han it did t o when t he movement was younger and it s goals more modest . To amplify t he t arget ed pressure, t he movement needs t o build a groundswell of public support . As drivers of popular cult ure and as early adopt ers THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 163 of new media (e.g., MySpace, Facebook), young people may be key t o spreading t he message beyond t he choir. Somet hing else t hat will mat t er in t he next phase of t he movement is collect ive act ion and t he abilit y t o work across differences. I have oft en found young people more willing t o t ake risks, t hink different ly, and embrace a more expansive view of t he movement t han t heir older count erpart s—not universally or exclusively so, but wit h enough force t hat t hey are likely t o cement crucial connect ions bet ween local food and fair t rade, urban agricult ure and green j obs, foodies and farm workers. The more we underst and what t he essent ial ingredient s of change are, t he more we appreciat e how import ant young people are. It ’s not j ust t heory. Hist ory shows t hat young people oft en play a crit ical role in social movement s, especially in t he lat er st ages. In April 1960, 300 college st udent s gat hered in Raleigh, NC t o det ermine how t hey could build on t he success of t heir sit -ins. The organizat ion t hat emerged, t he St udent Nonviolent Coordinat ing Commit t ee (SNCC) was inst rument al in creat ing t he climat e of crisis t hat paved t he way for t he Civil Right s Act of 1964. In fact , it ’s almost impossible t o imagine t he civil right s movement —from SNCC t o t he Freedom Rides t o t he Lit t le Rock Nine—wit hout t he organized energy of yout h. (Mart in Lut her King himself was j ust 26 when he was draft ed int o t he movement in t he early 1950s.) Even more t o t he point , young people are already beginning t o flex t heir polit ical and economic muscle. The St udent Farmworker Alliance, working in solidarit y wit h t he Coalit ion of Immokalee Workers, forced t he fast food indust ry t o t he negot iat ing t able for t he first t ime in 30 years. The Real Food Challenge is t aking aim at $4 billion wort h of college food spending; in effect , get t ing schools t o divest from indust rial agricult ure and invest in a fair, green food economy. And a new generat ion of leaders—nurt ured by t he Root ed in Communit y net work, t he Michael Fields Agricult ural Inst it ut e’s int ernships, Unit ed St udent s for Fair Trade, t he Black Wat er Mesa Coalit ion, and ot hers—is poised t o t ake on even bigger t arget s. If t hey seize t he opport unit y, an organized group of young people could inj ect t his movement wit h some vit al energy. Unit ed across lines of race, class, and geography, t hey could be t he force t hat get s us t o a t ipping point . What ’s more, if t hey are sufficient ly organized, t hey may be t he best guard against one of our biggest obst acles: t he “ green-washing” of t he agrifood indust ry wit h unj ust ified and confusing claims about nut rit ion, t he environment , and social responsibilit y. Not only could young people play a crit ical role, t hey should. They have t he great est st ake in t he f ut ure. As Josh Viert el t old Slow Food’s Int ernat ional Congress in 2007, “ There is bad news and good news about t he yout h of America. The bad news is t hat t his is t he f irst generat ion in America t o have a short er lif e expect ancy t han it s parent s. The good 164 FOOD REBELLIONS! news is t hat t here is a group of young people who are det ermined t o change t hat . ” The market on Dudley St reet winds down around seven o’ clock. Any produce t hat ’s left over eit her goes home wit h t he t eens or is donat ed t o hunger relief organizat ions. The day began wit h an early harvest , so it ’s been a long one. But t he sense of sat isfact ion t hat comes wit h a hard j ob well done is palpable. I t hink t his is a key point . The Food Proj ect and it s kindred programs around t he count ry are powerful not j ust for t heir pot ent ial and for t he immediat e need t hey address, but because t hey sat isfy a deep desire in all people t o be useful, t o produce—not j ust consume—and t o be connect ed t o t he eart h. They t ap int o somet hing deep t hat was lost as most people moved off farms and t eenagers became j ust a market segment . Here is cause for hope. Though t he movement may be relat ively young and small, it s root s are very old—t hey st em from t he deepest t rut hs of nat ure and t he best aspect s of human nat ure. We will grow. and well heeled gourmands of the Slow Food movement, who want everyone to enjoy the pleasure of fresh, locally grown food. The socioeconomic realities and political strategies of these actors and organizations are diverse, and have sometimes led to tensions and work at cross-purposes. However, with the food and inancial crises, their demands are converging, and point to a powerful consensus: people want a food system that provides real, healthy food; good, green jobs; and that leads to a fair, sustainable future. Globalizing “from below,” advocates and practitioners in the food movement are reaching out to their international counterparts, drawing the links between food justice, sustainability, equity, food sovereignty and the right to food at home and abroad. These international similarities are widespread (Halweil 2004). In the US, where only 2% of people are farmers and most people are two or three generations and many miles away from the farm, the national food movement tends to draw most of its numbers from consumer and rights-based organizations. Youth activism—a growing force nationwide—injects new energy, diversity, ideas and forward-searching visions into the movement. Initiatives that make not just food, but healthy, culturally-appropriate food accessible to all, that bring grocery stores back to innercity neighborhoods, use the food system to bring jobs to young people and revitalize local economies, and promote social justice are emerging from the scorched earth of the industrial agrifoods THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 165 complex in America. Most of these initiatives are local in scale, but taken together they reveal a rising tide of change. The number of community supported agriculture (CSA) farms has more than doubled in the past ten years. In a CSA, consumers purchase a “share” of the farmer’s harvest each season and receive regular deliveries of produce directly from the farmer. In 2008 the USDA counted 4,865 “oicial” farmers markets—nearly twice as many as a decade ago (USDA 2008d). Thousands more informal direct market channels go uncounted. Many CSAs have adopted a sliding scale to make fresh produce more accessible to low-income residents; many farmers markets now accept food stamps and are expanding into “food deserts”—neighborhoods, oten in the inner city, without supermarkets or other places to buy healthy food. Urban agriculture is taking of as well. Programs like The Food Project in Boston, Grub in Olympia, Washington, the Growing Youth Project in Alameda, California and countless others are employing youth in sustainable agriculture and food distribution, giving teenagers meaningful work and bringing healthy food to local communities. Shortening the distance between consumers and the farm gate to a mater of feet, start-up businesses in backyard farming have taken Local product s being sold in a farmers market at Point Reyes, California Leonor Hurt ado 166 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 36 Food Crisis Solutions: Urban Food Gardens The growing awareness of t he indust rial food syst em’s negat ive social, environment al and healt h impact s is forcing reform from t he bot t om–up. Recent years have seen a massive resurgence of int erest in small-scale urban food gardening as a direct and self-empowering way of reassert ing cont rol over our basic right t o healt hy, affordable food. While buying organic and locally grown foods offer improvement s over fast and processed foods, it is difficult for even t he most dedicat ed urban dweller t o ent irely avoid part icipat ion in t he unj ust and ecologically devast at ing syst ems t hat current ly feed us. Growing our own food is perhaps t he most direct and t ransparent means of creat ing t he food delivery syst em t hat is based on human need rat her t han corporat e profit . Even a few pot t ed t omat oes on a balcony represent an act of resist ance t o t he indust rial agrifoods complex. Communit y gardens and urban farming programs also unit e neighborhoods, provide much needed green space and offer hands-on opport unit ies for land-based educat ion. Urban farming is not only beginning t o make a real cont ribut ion t o local food access, it has also become an int egral arena for social j ust ice, reinvigorat ing communit ies and shift ing consciousness t owards a deeper connect ion wit h t he eart h and t he nat ural processes upon which we depend. Alt hough t he amount of food produced wit hin cit ies represent s a small percent age of t he calories consumed, t he posit ive effect s of t hese effort s can lead t o exponent ial changes on a personal as well as societ al level. The non-profit Growing Power is an example of using urban food product ion in t he service of great er social j ust ice. The organizat ion enhances local food securit y by linking a collect ive (Rainbow Farmer’s Collect ive) of over 300 family farms t o resident s of Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago via t heir “ Farm-t o-Cit y Market Basket Program.” They also creat e employment and professional t raining opport unit ies for low-income yout h at t heir urban farm sit es, which furnish produce for CSA boxes. The garden t ours Growing Power provides are an inspirat ion t o over 3,500 people annually. Workshops and professional t raining offer pract ical gardening and farming “ know-how” on a diversit y of cut t ing-edge food product ion processes such as organic gardening, bee keeping, aquacult ure and animal husbandry, which can be adapt ed t o small urban spaces. i The People’s Grocery, in Oakland, California, is anot her grassroot s organizat ion t hat int erweaves programs for food sovereignt y wit h food j ust ice. Wit h “ 30,000 resident s, 53 liquor st ores, 17 fast food rest aurant s and 0 grocery st ores,” West Oakland sport s a rat e of hospit alizat ion for diabet es t hat is four t imes higher t han t he nat ional average. The People’s Grocery is focused on improving t he healt h of t heir underserved local communit y by THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 167 providing bet t er access t o nut rit ional educat ion as well as sources of fresh organic produce. Three urban plot s t oget her wit h a t wo-acre farm, locat ed half an hour out side t he cit y, grow food for t heir CSA program, which delivers low-cost , t op-qualit y produce t o West Oakland resident s wit h a t iered pricing syst em. The farm, urban food gardens and green-house also creat e j obs and t raining while support ing a variet y of ot her local food growing organizat ions. An ambit ious proj ect is underway t o open a grocery st ore which will st ock locally grown produce and value-added food product s, as well as provide a range of communit y services. By keeping t he food product ion and dist ribut ion chain wit hin a single neighborhood, j obs and profit s can re-circulat e wit hin t he local economy. One of t heir part ner organizat ions, Cit y Slicker, operat es an innovat ive back yard food garden program, which provides inst allat ion and upkeep ment oring for West Oakland resident s int erest ed in growing t heir own food. The success of t hese and ot her such programs has been dependent on embracing and respect ing racial and cult ural diversit y by working wit h a model t hat involves communit y collaborat ion on every level. ii In Spain, t he collect ive Baj o el Asfalt o Est a la Huert a (BAH) represent s a powerful social mobilizat ion against t he est ablished agro-indust rial syst em. BAH t ranslat es as “ Under t he concret e is t he garden.” The collect ive reclaims abandoned parcels in and around Madrid and inst alls high-diversit y organic food gardens. The group focuses significant at t ent ion on maint aining an ent irely horizont ally st ruct ure which direct ly links over 250 families t o t he seven “ part ner” growers. Decisions are made democrat ically t hrough a syst em of consumer sub-groups which send a speaker t o t he mont hly meet ings and more direct ly by at t ending t he general open assemblies t hat t ake place every t hree mont hs. The collect ive serves as an ecological educat ion forum and cat alyses polit ical organizat ion on various food and j ust ice issues. iii Growing food from wit hin t he cit y walls is not only a phenomenon of t he global Nort h. Supplement ing food sources wit h small urban plot s has long been an economic necessit y for impoverished resident s of overcrowded cit ies in t he global Sout h. Increasing food securit y t hrough enhancing t he pot ent ial of urban food product ion is beginning t o be promot ed more seriously. In 2007 t he UN FAO launched it s “ Food for t he Cit ies” urban farming program, which has proj ect s in a number of count ries t hroughout Africa and Sout h America including t he Democrat ic Republic of t he Congo, Senegal, Gabon, Mozambique, Bot swana, Sout h Africa, Namibia, Egypt , Mali and Columbia. The programs advocat e large numbers of small-scale gardens adapt ed t o t he special const raint s of each part icular urban sit uat ion. In t he Democrat ic Republic of Congo, t he FAO is working wit h cit y planners on t he ambit ious goal of providing food and ext ra income for 16,000 families by convert ing 800 hect ares of urban land int o allot ment gardens. The program in Bogot a and Medellin, Columbia works specifically wit h int ernally 168 FOOD REBELLIONS! displaced people living in slums. Food is grown in what ever space is available using plant ers made from salvaged cont ainers such as old t ires. According t o t he FAO: “ Every mont h, each family’s ‘ garden’ yields some 25 kg of produce including let t uce, beans, t omat oes and onions. Any surpluses are sold off for cash t o neighbors or t hrough a cooperat ive set up under t he proj ect ” (FAO 2007). i. See ht t p:/ / www.growingpower.org/ . ii. See ht t p:/ / www.peoplesgrocery.org/ and ht t p:/ / www.cit yslickerfarms.org/ . iii. See ht t p:/ / bah.ourproj ect .org/ art icle.php3?id_art icle=57. FAO. 2007. Urban Farming Against Hunger. FAO Newsroom. 1 February. ht t p:/ / www.fao.org/ newsroom/ en/ news/ 2007/ 1000484/ index.ht ml (accessed January 3, 2009). root in Portland and San Francisco. And in a nation with only 5% of its farmers under the age of 35, a quiet renaissance of young, smallscale farmers are going back to the land. Farm-to-school programs, farm-to-college programs, and institutional purchasing policies that prioritize local farmers are becoming easier to implement. Food banks are partnering with farmers to glean produce that normally gets let in the ield. Citizen-led food policy councils are helping local governments support local food systems. In times of global food and inancial crises, they see the local food system as a potential engine for local economic growth. Taken together, this outpouring of practical initiatives relects one of the necessary conditions for transforming the food system: alternatives that work. This is not a suicient condition, however. We will never end hunger or tackle the structural issues at the root of the food crisis by dint of a linear increase in the numbers of projects and initiatives. Giving these alternatives a fair chance also requires changing the laws and regulations that are currently holding them back. Industry is well aware of the political side of the food system and works tirelessly to prevent any changes that might beneit small farmers and local communities. Aside from campaign contributions (and other, less ethical means), corporations operate a three-way “revolving door” (boardroom–congressional commitee–lobbying irm) to maintain insider networks and build favorable political will for deregulation, subsidies, tax breaks, bailouts—whatever is needed to ensure corporate proits and strengthen their market power. Political will is not constructed by money and insider networks THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 169 alone. In democracies, political will also requires building a broad social consensus. Changing the social consensus regarding our food system will occur when people change the way they think about food and demand changes in the food system. Political will can then be constructed by applying widespread social pressure that is too strong for politicians to safely ignore. This kind of pressure comes from strong social movements whose political demands both resonate with the majority and activate the minority. In 2008 a coalition of over 50 anti-hunger, labor, religious, farm, and food advocates released a policy brief on the US food crisis and launched a Call to Action to end hunger on World Food Day. This was followed by a declaration of the US Working Group on the Food Crisis that relects the perspectives of thousands of grassroots organizations working to transform the food system and end hunger worldwide (see Appendix 7: US Call to Action). These demands call on the US government to stop catering to the interests of corporate lobbyists and to end hunger by supporting a food system that protects the environment and provides healthy food. Like the IAASTD, these groups seek support for locally controlled, sustainable food systems as a strategy to end hunger and poverty. Topping the list are demands to remove the volatility in food prices. Re-regulating the international inance sector’s investment in food commodities and overturning the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 would help take food prices out of the hands of speculators. Resurrecting publicly owned, strategic grain reserves and a guaranteed minimum loan rate to farmers would maintain an efective price loor for agricultural commodities by regulating supply, and would create an efective price ceiling to protect consumers from food price inlation. United States food and agriculture policies—especially the US Farm Bill—are in large part, food system policies for the world. Food and farm advocates are calling for changes to US food aid so that the World Food Program can purchase food locally and regionally from small-scale farmers at fair prices for distribution to those in need, rather than puting these farmers out of business by dumping US subsidized surpluses. Currently, the US agrofuels sector receives over three-quarters of all tax credits and two-thirds of renewable energy subsidies—dwarfing the money spent on wind and solar (EWG 2009). By 2010 ethanol 170 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 37 Food Policy Councils Across t he US people aren’ t wait ing for policy change t o come from t he t op. Local food policy councils are beginning t o t ackle food syst em issues at t he local level. Food policy councils (FPCs) st udy t he way t heir local food syst em works and recommend policies t o make t he syst em more equit able and sust ainable. No t wo FPCs are exact ly alike—some work at t he st at e level, ot hers at t he cit y, or even neighborhood level. The first food policy council, creat ed in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1982, emerged as a response t o a st udy about food access which argued for comprehensive food policy planning wit hin t he cit y (Wilson et al. 2004). The proposed council model provided a safe and healt hy way for communit ies t o address cit y policies, and coordinat e and ensure bet t er access t o healt hy food in t he cit y. From public t ransport at ion t o grocery st ores and school nut rit ion programs, t he changes in Knoxville were increment al. But t he pot ent ial for innovat ive and creat ive problem solving immediat ely appealed t o a wide range of polit ical and social act ivist s. Since Knoxville’s groundbreaking experiment , support for food policy councils has grown exponent ially. Throughout t he 1980s, local food policy act ivism gained t ract ion: t he Hart ford Food Syst em nonprofit , Rodale’s Cornucopia Proj ect and Cornell’s Cent er for Local Food and Agricult ure were founded; a Food Syst ems Council emerged in Onondaga Count y NY; a Philadelphia Food Task Force was commissioned; and t he US Conference of Mayors init iat ed a five-cit y proj ect t o develop food policy councils (Clancy 1997). In t he 1990s, t he USDA began funding food policy councils t hrough Communit y Food Proj ect s Compet it ive Grant s, and by 2007 t he American Planning Associat ion wrot e it s first ever policy guide on communit y and regional food planning. Now t here are almost 50 official councils in t he US (Communit y Food Securit y Coalit ion 2009), and st akeholders from across t he food syst em are increasingly collaborat ing wit h one anot her t o creat e win–win solut ions connect ing resources across food sect ors. Food policy councils have had some big successes. Some examples of t hese success st ories are: • New Mexico: Thanks t o t he New Mexico Food Policy Council, t he st at e commit t ed t o providing an addit ional t wo servings per week of fresh fruit s and veget ables in school meals wit h first preference given t o New Mexico-grown produce when available (NMFAPC 2009). • Toront o: In Toront o, t he food policy council t here helped t o creat e a peer nut rit ion program which gives educat ional programs in more t han THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 171 32 languages around t he cit y. Sixt een peer facilit at ors, called communit y nut rit ion assist ant s, st udy under professional nut rit ionist s and t hen share t heir knowledge in t heir communit ies (Moscovit ch 2006). The council also init iat ed a buy local campaign t o increase t he amount of fresh food local hospit als purchase from count y farmers, expanded communit y gardens, and launched Canada’s first food access grant s program t o help schools and social organizat ions buy kit chen equipment . • Connect icut : Food policy councils can also help hold t heir cit ies and st at es account able. In Connect icut , t he st at e’s goal t o preserve 130,000 acres of farmland lost moment um over several years, culminat ing in an ent ire year (1999) in which no farmland was preserved at all. The food policy council t here part nered wit h t he Working Lands Alliance and t he Save t he Land Conference t o secure development right s t o 12 farms in 2000, t ot aling 1,350 acres—more t han t he t ot al preserved during t he prior six years (CFPC 2007). Building on t his success, food policy councils are widening t heir reach. The nascent Food Policy Council in Oakland, California hopes t o st rengt hen t he local food syst em, capt uring more of t he $50 million spent on food in t he cit y each year wit hin t he local economy, creat ing j obs and encouraging local ownership of food-relat ed businesses. Ult imat ely, t he Oakland Food Policy Council hopes t o ensure access t o healt hy, affordable food wit hin walking dist ance of every Oakland resident , and source at least 30% of t he cit y’s food needs from wit hin t he cit y and immediat e region. CFPC. 2007. Farmland. Connect icut Food Policy Council. ht t p:/ / www.foodpc. st at e.ct .us/ farmland_preservat ion.ht m (accessed January 31, 2009). Clancy, Kat e. 1997. A Timeline of Local Food Syst ems Planning. In St rat egies, Policy Approaches, and Resources f or Local Food Syst em Planning and Organizing, edit ed by K. C. Kennet h A. Dahlberg, Robert L. Wilson, Jan O’ Donnell. ht t p: / / homepages. wmich. edu/ ~dahlberg/ ResourceGuide. ht ml (accessed May 11, 2009). Communit y Food Securit y Coalit ion. 2009. Council List . ht t p:/ / www.foodsecurit y.org/ FPC/ council.ht ml (accessed January 31, 2009). Moscovit ch, Arlene. 2006. Peer Nut rit ion Program: Developing a Model f or Peer-Based Programs Aimed at Diverse Communit ies Prepared f or Toront o Public Healt h and Healt h Canada. ht t p:/ / www.t oront o.ca/ healt h/ pn/ pdf/ pn_evaluat ion_report .pdf (accesed January 31, 2009). NMFAPC. 2009. Hist ory and Out comes. New Mexico Food and Agricult ure Policy Council. ht t p: / / www. f armt ot ablenm. org/ policy/ hist ory-and-out comes/ (accessed January 31, 2009). Wilson, L.C., A. Alexander and M. Lumbers. 2004. Food Access and Diet ary Variet y Among Older People. Int ernat ional Journal of Ret ail & Dist ribut ion Management 32 (2). 172 FOOD REBELLIONS! BOx 38 Fighting for Fair Food: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers As t he Coalit ion of Immokalee Workers (CIW) knows, when it comes t o t he fast food indust ry, “ image is everyt hing.” Behind t he McDonald’s million dollar advert ising budget and Taco Bell’s cheery TV ads is a t omat o field in Florida where seven cases of modern day slavery involving over 1,000 vict ims have been prosecut ed in t he past 11 years (Heuvel 2008). In addit ion t o out right forced labor, Florida’s t omat o indust ry has some of t he worst working condit ions and poorest pay in t he nat ion. Farm workers receive j ust $50 for harvest ing t wo t ons of t omat oes in a day (CIW 2009). The CIW began organizing for bet t er working condit ions in 1993. In 2001, t he coalit ion set t heir sight s high in a Campaign for Fair Food, and went aft er Yum Brands, t he parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut . Aft er a four-year sust ained boycot t involving hundreds of st udent and church groups, “ Boot t he Bell” campaigns on 350 college and high school campuses, and a “ Trut h Tour” of farm workers around t he count ry, Yum Brands became t he first corporat ion t o bargain direct ly wit h workers— commit t ing t o a penny-per-pound increase in t he price of t omat oes t o go direct ly t o worker pay raises, and fair labor st andards for it s suppliers. A penny-a-pound may not sound like much, but t hat single cent amount s t o a 75% wage increase—from $10,000 t o $17,000 a year (Heuvel 2008). The CIW set t heir sight s on McDonald’s next , and by 2007, days before t he CIW’s “ Trut h Tour” was due at company headquart ers in Chicago, McDonald’s had agreed t o t he penny-per-pound increase as well as a collaborat ive t hird-part y syst em for invest igat ing abuse in t he fields. In 2008 Burger King agreed not only t o t he penny-per-pound increase, but t o compensat e growers for payroll t ax increases due t o t he pay raises, and a zero t olerance policy t hat requires t he company t o immediat ely t erminat e cont ract s wit h growers involved in unlawful act ivit y such as forced labor. Subway, t he largest fast -food buyer of Florida t omat oes, signed on in will cost taxpayers more than $5 billion a year—more than is spent on all US Department of Agriculture conservation programs to protect soil, water and wildlife habitat (EWG 2009). This is even though corn ethanol produces more greenhouse gases than it captures and will never supply more than a fraction of our national fuel needs. Without a guaranteed fair price for their corn, farm lobbies have supported the agrofuels agenda because they see these fuel crops as a way to end low prices. Establishing a fair price to farmers would render both agrofuels THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 173 December 2008, and Whole Foods volunt arily agreed t o meet t he CIW’s st andards before t he campaign could even focus on t heir chain. The CIW cont inues t o st ruggle for bet t er working condit ions. On t he heels of t he Subway vict ory, four members of an Immokalee family were convict ed of modern-day slavery, beat ing t heir former employees, chaining workers by t he leg, locking t hem in t rucks, and forcing workers int o t he fields. In response t o t he case, Florida agricult ure spokesman Terrence McElroy dismissed t he syst emat ic inst ances of slavery in Florida saying, “ but you’ re t alking about maybe a case a year.” CIW launched an immediat e campaign in response, saying in an open let t er t o Florida’s governor: Tolerat ing a lit t le modern-day slavery is like t olerat ing a lit t le murder or accept ing a lit t le child abuse; in moral t erms, it makes Mr. McElroy an apologist for what is recognized as one of t he most heinous crimes of any kind. In t he same breat h as he t rivializes t he severit y and frequency of modern-day slavery, Mr. McElroy is quick t o defend Florida growers who have, for t oo long, prospered t hrough willful ignorance of condit ions in t heir own fields. (CIW 2008) Saying “ t he fast -food indust ry has spoken,” t he CIW is t urning t heir sight s t o t he supermarket and food service indust ries. In 2009 t he Campaign for Fair Food will be t arget ing companies like Publix, Safeway, WalMart , Sodexo and Aramark, t o demand t he same higher st andards (CIW 2009). CIW. 2008. An Open Let t er t o Charlie Crist . Coalit ion of Immokalee Workers. ht t p:/ / ciw-online.org/ Open_let t er_t o_Crist .ht ml (accessed December 17, 2008). CIW. 2009. Coalit ion of Immokalee Workers Online Headquart ers. ht t p:/ / ciwonline.org/ (accessed February 1, 2009). Heuvel, Kat rina Vanden. 2008. In t he Trenches and Fight ing Slavery. The Nat ion. December 28. ht t p:/ / www.t henat ion.com/ blogs/ edcut / 391546/ in_t he_t renches_and_fight ing_slavery?rel=hp_blogs_box (accessed January 31, 2009). and the US’s massive grain subsidies irrelevant and superluous. Demands for a freeze or an immediate repeal of biofuels mandates in the US, and a suspension of international agrofuels trade and investment, need to be coupled with demands for a fair market price to farmers and a demand that any tax incentives and subsidies for fuel crops go only to small-scale, decentralized, farmer-owned reineries. It is time to close the revolving door between agribusiness, lobby groups and government by reforming campaign inance and 174 FOOD REBELLIONS! lobbying laws. Just as the inance sector needs to be re-regulated, agrifoods monopolies need to be dismantled and regulated with stronger enforcement of antitrust laws to ensure fair competition in the food system. These demands join those to ensure local control and access to land, water and seeds at fair prices worldwide, and ensure that farmers keep their right to save seeds. There is no social, biological or economic reason why agroecological farming practices can’t become the standard worldwide. The US should approve and endorse the indings of the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), and implement the options for agroecological development domestically and internationally through the US Farm Bill and USAID. The government should support biodiverse, sustainable small- and mid-scale food production and urban farming by independent family farmers and small- to medium-sized cooperative businesses. This will require redirecting state, national and international agricultural policies, research, education and investments towards sustainable agroecological farming and independent community-based food businesses. Food systems need to be based on social and economic justice as well as the right to healthy food. This requires ensuring full labor rights for farmworkers and other wage earners in the US food system—including no exemptions to the National Labor Relations Act, and minimum wage increases to ensure a living wage so that everyone (including farmworkers, food processing workers, food service workers and consumers) can aford good, healthy food. The US must change its vote in the UN to uphold the human right to food. When grounded in that fundamental right, governments are obliged to protect people from laws, regulations and business ventures that undermine the right to food—such as free trade agreements and the unregulated spread of GMOs. It also would require the US to shore-up the national social safety-net for low-income people by raising beneits high enough so they can purchase fresh, healthy food. The food movements in the United States are working toward an economy that puts compassion and care for one another ahead of short-term corporate proits. They are not waiting for the big issues to be resolved to start ixing the food system. Communities and organizations are already hard at work laying the foundation for a world where the food system is a source of abundance, health, and justice for all. THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 175 “Algo se mueve”—Something’s Moving in Europe18 The growing impossibility of a digniied livelihood in the European countryside has provoked a widespread and active social response on the part of Europeans unwilling to sacriice their society and environment to corporate greed. Farmers’ unions, environmental organizations, consumers’ groups, fair trade organizations, and economic solidarity networks, among many others, have begun to work throughout Europe to denounce the impact of the EU’s agricultural policies and call for alternatives. Responses have varied by country according to the character of local organizations, but all are creating and strengthening alliances between the diferent social sectors that are negatively afected by the agrifood policies of the EU’s neoliberal Common Agricultural Policy. Together, they are creating a host of alternative practices and policies for sustainable production, distribution, and consumption. For example, in France solidarity networks are being forged between producers and consumers through Associations for the Maintenance of Smallholder Agriculture (AMAPs). Like community supported agriculture, the AMAPs establish solidarity contracts between groups of consumers and local agroecological farmers. The group pays in advance for produce that the farmer provides weekly. The irst AMAP was created in 2001 between a group of consumers in Aubagne and a farm in the Olivades region of Provence. Today, there are 750 AMAPs serving 30,000 families throughout France. These experiences in Europe date back to the 1960s, when Germany, Austria and Switzerland began to develop similar initiatives in response to growing agricultural industrialization. In Geneva, Les Jardins de Cocagne, a cooperative of producers and consumers of organic vegetables, now serves some 400 homes. In Britain, CSAs or “vegetable box schemes” began in the 1990s. At the beginning of 2007, there were some 600 CSA initiatives, up 53% from 2006. There are an equal number of farmers’ markets in the country (Soil Association 2005). In Belgium, where these alternatives have appeared more recently, some 200 homes periodically receive fresh fruit and vegetables through the solidarity purchasing groups called GASAP (Groupes d’Achat Solidaires de l’Agriculture Paysanne). In Spain, an AMAP-style initiative of agroecological cooperatives called Bajo el Asfalto Esta la Huerta (“Under the Asphalt lies the Garden”) operates in Madrid and environs. Ecoconsum Coordination reports 176 FOOD REBELLIONS! more than 70 similar cooperatives exist in Cataluña. Similar initiatives have existed in Andalucía since the 1990s. All these experiences show it is possible to produce, distribute and consume food based on ecological practices and social justice principles, maintaining a direct relationship between farmer and consumer. Similar initiatives rapidly spreading across Europe in the last few years include farmers’ markets, direct distribution, participatory certiication models, and urban gardens. These food networks are joining forces to politically roll back the EU’s neoliberal policies. In France, Minga, a grouping of 800 associations working on fair local and international trade, now coordinates with the Confédération Paysanne (farmers’ union) and other consumer, farmer, and agroecological organizations. In Spain, the Plataforma Rural, a diverse, broad-based coalition that brings together farmers, consumers, environmental groups and NGOs, works to create stronger linkages between the rural and urban, to improve rural life, and to promote local, socially responsible, and ecological agriculture. The Plataforma Rural carries out uniied campaigns against GMOs, large supermarket chains, the CAP and agrofuels, as well as campaigns in favor of food sovereignty, responsible tourism, and quality public services in rural areas. In Europe, one of the principal reference networks is the Via Campesina European Coordination, which brings together organizations and farmers’ unions from Denmark, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Malta, and Turkey. Its objective is to ight the current agricultural policies promoted by the EU within the framework of the CAP, to move toward a diverse, land-based, smallholder agriculture and a more vibrant rural world. The European Coordination of Via Campesina works with other social movements within the European Social Forum and with other uniied campaigns against the CAP and GMOs. One important challenge in Europe is to increase the connections and coordination between the distinct networks that are part of the alternative globalization movement (“Another World is Possible”) and those groups working for food sovereignty. The International Food Sovereignty Forum, celebrated in Mali in 2007, in which networks of women, campesinos, ishermen, consumers, and pastoralist organizations all participated, is a good example. Countries including Hungary and Spain are moving in this direction, by holding national forums. THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY 177 Activists and practitioners in Europe are beginning to coordinate action strategies in favor of food sovereignty at the local, national, and continental levels. As these networks bring in new players, they gather strength. The task is not easy, but food sovereignty movements and anti-globalization movements are steadily building a common front behind a call popularized by La Via Campesina: “Globalize struggle, globalize hope.” 10 Epilogue The food crisis seems to have slipped from the headlines, surfacing only briely in inal statements at high-level meetings, or when droughts, lack of credit, or market volatility lead to renewed fears of food shortages. Worse, these fears are self-fulilling, because the longer that eforts to end hunger focus on the supericial efects rather than the root causes, the more our food systems are volatile, vulnerable, and subject to crash. Poverty and injustice—not a shortage of food—are still the primary causes of hunger. Unless we transform our food systems to make them more equitable, democratic, and sustainable, they will not be able to withstand the waves of environmental and inancial shocks rocking the planet. Our food systems will break down and food will routinely be both expensive and in short supply, puting it increasingly out of reach of the world’s poor, leading to more food riots, political and environmental instability, and sufering. This imminent disaster scenario is completely avoidable. Despite the global inancial crisis, the world has more than enough infrastructure, resources, knowledge, and institutional capacity to put a permanent end to hunger. But decades of failed summits and portentous declarations show that all the technology, inancing and good intentions in the world cannot solve the food crisis unless they lead to the transformation of the food system. Unfortunately, the High-Level Ministerial Meeting on Food Security for All held in Madrid, Spain, January 26–27, 2009—a followup to the Rome Food Summit just four months earlier—produced no new ideas or further funding commitments. Despite the strong interventions of groups like La Via Campesina, the ETC Group, FIAN and others at Madrid’s roundtable discussions, the experts running the meeting focused on the symptoms rather than the causes of the food crisis. The heavily trumpeted “New Global Partnership for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition”—a thinly veiled move by agribusiness and the G8 to move the global governance of food EPILOGUE 179 and agriculture out of the FAO and into the World Bank—failed to launch because Southern governments refused to approve a partnership upon which they had not been consulted. This is a blessing. It is signiicant that the human right to food was recognized at the ministerial meeting. However, the human right to food is still not considered as a means to address the food crisis. As a result, the right to food is still lacking clear accountability mechanisms to protect smallholders’ land rights in the face of land grabs and agrofuel expansion; for protecting the world’s half-billion agricultural workers—including women and children—from industrial labor abuse; or for protecting producers and consumers from inancial speculation in global commodities markets. The failed food summits and the weak multilateral responses from governments have resulted in a lack of inter-governmental coordination and a lack of global leadership on the food crisis. The new Green Revolution’s champions are moving quickly to ill the multilateral void by inancing high-level policy papers to counter the IAASTD’s trenchant indings and transformational proposals. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the Chicago Council of Global Afairs to produce a quick, six-month white paper (timed to inluence the new Obama administration within its irst 100 days) entitled Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Hunger and Poverty: The Chicago Initiative on Global Agricultural Development. The report was writen primarily by Robert Paarlberg, a professor of political science and author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa. Paarlberg is a tireless advocate for the biotechnology industry and ierce opponent of agroecological approaches to food production. The Chicago Initiative’s report took just six months and a handful of policy experts to prepare (compared to the IAASTD’s four years and 600 scientists). It is a platform for redirecting the US’s foreign aid to support the research and extension of genetically engineered crops into Asia and Africa. The report has already been used as a policy blueprint by the Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act, a policy proposal to the US Congress to “improve the efectiveness and expand the reach of U.S. agriculture assistance to the developing world.” The new bill stands to completely overhaul the way the US ofers agricultural development and food aid to the developing world. While the bill permits some local purchase, the bill also mandates funding for genetically modiied crop research as a major underpinning of its global food security strategy. 180 FOOD REBELLIONS! The policy strategy to advance the new Green Revolution in Africa and Asia contrasts starkly not only with the more rigorous IAASTD, but also with the fresh initiatives coming out of the global South, such as the sweeping Food Sovereignty Law announced by Ecuador to guarantee “permanent self-suiciency in healthy, nutritious, and culturally appropriate forms of food for all persons, communities, and peoples.” Ecuador’s food sovereignty law was discussed and debated for months by representatives from government, academia, industry, farmers’ organizations, and civil society groups. It speciically privileges smallholders, agroecology, and redistributive approaches to production, and declares the nation GM-free (future introduction of GM seeds is to be assessed on a case-by-case basis and requires both presidential and full congressional approval). To oversee implementation, the law sets up a permanent Consultative Body for Food Sovereignty made up of six representatives from peasant organizations, indigenous organizations, small and medium producer organizations, and six representatives from the executive branch. To ensure permanent policy discussion, deliberation and debate, the law also establishes a National Conference on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty made up of civil society organizations, consumer groups, universities and polytechnical schools, research centers and producers’ organizations. The contrast between the corporate-driven, GM approach to ending hunger and poverty, and the socially driven food sovereignty approach to ensuring healthy food and sustainable livelihoods could not be more stark. That industry and big philanthropy would enroll government to advance its approach to the food crisis is sadly not new. That peasant, indigenous and civil society groups would reach a social consensus with their democratically elected government to make sure citizens control their own food, is unprecedented and a sign that the global transformation of our food systems is indeed underway. The transformation of our food system is a relection of deep social changes coursing through our societies. Our challenge is to cultivate these changes in ways that bring about the transformations we need in time to avert catastrophe and put us irmly on the path to ending hunger. This will only be possible if we unlock the tremendous transformative capacity of people, their movements, their innovations, their solidarity, compassion, creativity, and their ability to work, organize, and mobilize for change. EPILOGUE 181 The transformation of our food system is not limited by a lack of money, technology, or even good will, but by the lack of political will on the part of governments. As long as global leaders address only the proximate rather than the root causes of the crisis, as long as they rely on technical ixes to avoid structural changes and bow to the power of monopolies over the power of people, we will fall farther and farther behind in our eforts to end hunger. Therefore, for every action, declaration, announcement, project and investment we need to ask: Does this build the movement we will need to force politicians to address the root causes of the food crisis? Will this help or hinder the deep transformations we need to make in our food systems? Does this unleash widespread human potential to equitably and sustainably manage our food resources, or does it concentrate power in the hands of an unaccountable corporate elite? The transformation of our food systems will occur when the desire for change becomes irresistible. As more and more people see alternatives working on the ground, and as more people hear the voices of others demanding and obtaining transparency, accountability, equity and sustainability, hope and action will overcome fear—the root cause of fatalism, cynicism and apathy. They will join the food sovereignty movement, and drag their elected oicials with them, along the people’s pathway out of poverty and hunger. Other Food Systems are Possible Transforming the global food system means changing the way we produce and consume. It also means changing the ways we make decisions. This requires a fundamental shit in the balance of power within the world’s food systems so that the diverse interests of the planet’s majorities are served irst. This shit is already underway, evident in the political spaces where decisions over food are made— and in the physical places where food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed. Food sovereignty represents a substantive shit away from the structural violence of the Green Revolution, the social injustice and structural racism of the industrial agrifoods complex, and a shit towards democratizing our food systems. This movement is horizontal, decentralizing the power of decision and action by localizing it in favor of the poor and underserved. It is also vertical, shiting our understanding of food systems from the corporate logic of exclusive boardrooms, expert institutions and 182 FOOD REBELLIONS! high-level summits, towards the socially constructed logic of the majority, actively forged from the ground up. While the logic of the majority is evident in the growing practice of food sovereignty, the diversity of cultures, social contexts, physical environments and economic conditions all put local eforts for food sovereignty at a disadvantage when constructing the political will of the majority. Without political will, calls for sustainable agriculture, fair trade and locally managed food systems—widespread as they may be—will always be dominated by industrial agrifood corporations who are able to buy political will at the centers of power in Washington DC, Chicago, New York, Tokyo, London, Rome, in Davos, and in the capital cities of the global South. The political will of the majorities can be constructed in many ways and in many spaces: in the community and the market, and inside government and multilateral institutions. Strategies for constructing political will may range from lobbying and informed engagement, to protest and constructive resistance. Historically, the political will of the majorities has always been built on the power of strong social movements. The labor movement, the anti-slavery, and colonial independence movements, the civil rights movements, women’s sufrage and liberation, and the anti-globalization movements are notable examples. Strong social movements can persuade entrepreneurs to invest responsibly in isolated communities; convince politicians to listen to progressive lobbyists; force international inance institutions to stop bad projects; and trump abuses of power. Movements for food sovereignty can open political spaces at many levels to establish supportive institutions, policies, and projects for equitable and sustainable food systems. The growing convergence in diversity of food sovereignty movements relects the increasing strength of social justice movements around the globe.19 Though some people from food security movements might not choose to use the term “food sovereignty,” their demands are strikingly similar to food sovereignty movements elsewhere. The demands for political and economic democracy grounding these movements are very close to the demands of many social justice movements worldwide. Indigenous rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, even the rights of the homeless are all strengthened by food sovereignty because control over one’s food is essential to control over one’s self. In this sense, the strength and spread of food sovereignty movements will depend on their Eric Holt -Giménez EPILOGUE 183 Pedro Sanchez explains t hat t he farmer-t o-farmer movement walks on t he legs of innovat ion and solidarit y, works wit h t he hands of product ion and prot ect ion, has a heart t o love t he land, eyes for a vision of a sust ainable fut ure, and a mout h wit h which t o speak ability to use the present moment of crisis to both advance practical alternatives locally, and to converge socially—across boundaries and sectors, with other movements. The women and men of Latin America’s Campesino a Campesino Movement describe their movement as a person, a peasant. This peasant-in-movement walks on two legs: one of innovation, the other of solidarity. He and she work with two hands: one to produce food, the other to protect the environment. The movement has a heart that throbs with life and loves family, community, farming, and nature. Two eyes provide a clear vision for a fair and sustainable future in which peasants do not have to choose between starving or exploitation, and are not made to disappear under the wheels of modernization. In this vision they are a respected, integrated part of a world in which progress is measured by the values of all those things one loves. And, they have a voice to speak, to make their demands heard, and to lend their wisdom, opinions, doubts, fears, hopes and dreams to the next chapters in the continuing saga of agriculture and society. This is a metaphor for food sovereignty as a way of living. It tells us that sustainability depends on balancing the work of food production with environmental protection. It recognizes that the processes of agroecological innovations critical for adaptation need to coevolve with the social innovations that equitably link 184 FOOD REBELLIONS! producers and consumers. These are a source of great enthusiasm and need to be shared widely in the spirit of solidarity and good will. Amplifying the voices of the world’s smallholders and of underserved communities around the world is fundamental for creating the social force needed to tip the political will of our societies and institutions toward the sustainable transformations we seek. Finally, the motivation and the vision for these transformations, coming from the heart and searching out new possibilities for a better future, are essential for keeping hope strong in our movements. Hope and enthusiasm are literally priceless. They can’t be bought, subsidized, programmed or substituted. No real or lasting change can come about without them. The world’s food systems are being transformed from the ground up by people, communities and organizations for whom losing hope is not an option. The food crisis has brought us together. We can end the injustices that cause hunger. There has never been a beter time. Appendix 1 Civil Society Statement on the World Food Emergency No More “Failures-as-Usual”! Historic, systemic failures of governments and international institutions are responsible. National governments that will meet at the FAO Food Crisis Summit in Rome must begin by accepting their responsibility for today’s food emergency. At the World Food Summit in 1996, when there were an estimated 830 million hungry people, governments pledged to halve the number by 2015. Many now predict that the number will instead increase by 50% to 1.2 billion, further threatened by unpredictable climate chaos and the additional pressures of agrofuel production. In the midst of collapsing farm and ish stocks, skyrocketing food and fuel prices, new policies, practices and structures are required to resolve the current food emergency and to prevent future—and greater—tragedies. Governments, including those in the global South, and intergovernmental organisations must now recognize their part in implementing policies that have undermined agricultural productivity and destroyed national food security. For these reasons, they have lost legitimacy and conidence of the world’s peoples that they can make the real, substantial changes necessary to end the present food crisis; to safeguard peoples’ food availability and livelihoods; and to address the challenges of climate change. The emergency today has its roots in the food crisis of the 1970s when some opportunistic OECD governments, pursuing neoliberal policies, dismantled the international institutional architecture for food and agriculture. This food crisis is the result of the long standing refusal of governments and intergovernmental organisations to respect, protect and fulil the right to food, and of the total impunity for the systematic violations of this right among others. They adopted 186 FOOD REBELLIONS! short-term political strategies that engineered the neglect of food and agriculture and set the stage for the current food emergency. As a consequence, the UN agencies and programmes and other international institutions, dominated by a small group of donor countries, are badly governed, grossly ineicient, competitive rather than cooperative and incapable of fulilling their (conlicting) mandates. The structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the free trade paradigm have undermined local and national economies, eroded the environment and damaged local food systems leading to today’s food crisis. It has facilitated the development of corporate oligopolies and break-neck corporate concentration along the entire food chain; allowed predatory commodity speculation and inancial market adventurism; and enabled international inance institutions and bilateral aid programmes to devastate sustainable food production and livelihood systems. Social movements and other civil society organisations have joined together to determine a new approach to the dysfunctional global food system. We are developing the following global plan of action for food and agriculture and would be willing to discuss this plan with governments and intergovernmental organisations that will be atending the Rome Food Summit—the “High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy.” We are prepared to work with commited governments and United Nations organisations that share our concerns and are dedicated to end the food emergency and develop food sovereignty. We declare a People’s State of Emergency for the ongoing food crisis. In a State of Emergency, people and governments can suspend any legislative or regulatory measures that could imperil the Right to Food and can also abolish any private arrangements considered damaging to Food Sovereignty. Any public or private measures that might restrict the ability of peasant and small-producers to get domestic food to market can be cancelled. Debt cancellation is urgently needed if the global South is to address the immediate and ongoing food emergency. We believe the current food emergency and the ongoing threat of climate change are suicient grounds for declaring a State of Emergency. APPENDICES 187 • We call on the Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice to investigate the contribution of agribusiness, including grain traders and commodity speculators, to violations of the right to food and to the food emergency. High production input costs and food prices during the current food emergency are in some measure due to historic agribusiness proits and the actions of commodity market speculators. The oligopolies and speculators, who operate throughout the food chain, must be investigated and suspected criminal behaviour must be brought to justice. The UN Human Rights Council should undertake the necessary investigations. National governments should not hesitate, wherever other governments have failed in their international obligations, to challenge abuses through the International Court of Justice. At the national level, anti cartel and monopoly laws should be strengthened. The Human Rights Council should support governments to guarantee that their public policies respect, protect and promote the right to adequate food, in the context of the indivisibility of rights. • We demand an immediate halt to the development of land for producing industrial agrofuels for cars, planes and energy production in power stations, including the use of so-called biomass “waste.” The sudden sharp increase in large scale industrial agrofuel production threatens local and global food security, destroys livelihoods, damages the environment and is a signiicant factor in the steep rise in food prices. This new enclosure movement—converting arable, pastoral, and forest lands to fuel production—must be rejected. The Rome Food Summit should endorse the proposal of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for a ive year moratorium on the expansion of large scale industrial production of agrofuel in order to resolve conlicts with food production, develop rules for agrofuel production and to evaluate proposed agrofuel technologies. • We call for a new and truly cooperative global initiative in which we are full participants in the process of policy change and institutional correction. We will not stand aside to watch the rich and the incompetent destroy our lives and our earth. We will ight for food sovereignty including the right to food, for sustainable food production and for a healthy biologically-diverse environment. To achieve this: 188 FOOD REBELLIONS! 1. We call for the establishment of a UN Commission on Food Production, Consumption and Trade. This Commission must have a signiicant and substantive representation of small-scale food producers and marginalized consumers. The Secretary-General’s recently convened Task Force ofers a clear and welcome political signal that the food emergency transcends individual institutions and demands urgent global action. However, the Task Force is dominated by the failed institutions whose negligence and neoliberal policies created the crisis. Those whom the governmental and intergovernmental systems have damaged—those we must feed and those who must feed us—are once again, excluded. The Task Force should end its work at the conclusion of the Rome Food Summit and the new, inclusive, Commission must begin its work immediately thereater. Membership: The Commission should expand upon the format established by the Brundtland Commission 20 years ago which opened the way for the environmental summits that followed. In forming the Commission, the Secretary-General should be mindful of the indings of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) whose recently completed report was approved by nearly 60 governments, as well as the outcomes of FAO agrarian reform (ICARRD) conference and process. Mandate: The mandate of the new Commission must include all forms of—and constraints to—food production; all aspects of— and barriers to—safe, adequate, afordable and culturally appropriate food; and a full analysis of the entire food chain in consideration of changing climatic conditions. The Commission should provide an interim report to the UN General Assembly and the governing bodies of FAO, IFAD and WFP by the end of 2008 and provide a inal report, with recommendations, to these organisations in the inal quarter of 2009. 2. We must fundamentally restructure the multilateral organisations involved in food and agriculture. Several food-related multilateral institutions have been criticised for their governance and program failures. Notably, Independent External Evaluations (IEE) of FAO and IFAD have exposed serious systemic shortcomings. In particular, the IEE of FAO shows that the senior management of FAO—while recognizing the urgent need for change—does not believe that the governments or the institution is capable of APPENDICES 189 • • • 3. substantive changes. The evaluation of CGIAR is ongoing and is exposing major governance failures that cannot be resolved within the CGIAR framework. Last year, the World Bank undertook an internal evaluation of its agricultural work in Africa and was deeply and appropriately self-critical. It is because of this that civil society is convinced that the Secretary-General’s Task Force must evolve into the wider Commission outlined above. In order to facilitate the Commission’s work, civil society recommends three immediate decisions: The Rome Food Summit should agree to undertake a meta-evaluation of the major food and agricultural institutions (FAO, IFAD, WFP and CGIAR) by the end of 2008. Based on this meta-evaluation, FAO’s biennial budget for regional conferences should be adjusted to allow the convening of regional food and agricultural conferences, equally involving all the major multilateral institutions, in the irst half of 2009. These meetings must ensure the full and active participation of representatives of peasant and small-scale farmers, pastoralists and isherfolk. Building from the meta-evaluation and regional conferences, the Commission—by the end of 2009—must submit its report including a new architecture for the UN’s food and agricultural work. Without prescribing the integrity of the process described above, we are convinced that responsibility for international policies and practices related to food and agriculture must reside with a single agency within the community of agencies of the United Nations where the principle of “one nation—one vote” must prevail. We call for a local and global paradigm-shit towards Food Sovereignty. Food production and consumption are fundamentally based upon local considerations. The answer to current and future food crises is only possible with a paradigm-shit toward comprehensive food sovereignty. Small-scale farmers, pastoralists, isherfolk, indigenous peoples and others have deined a food system based on the human right to adequate food and food production policies that increase democracy in localised food systems and ensure maximisation of sustainable natural resource use. Food Sovereignty addresses all of the continuing issues identiied by the 1974 World Food Conference. It focuses on food for people; values food providers; localises food systems; assures community and collective control over land, water and genetic diversity; honors and builds local knowledge and skills; and works with 190 FOOD REBELLIONS! nature. Food sovereignty is substantially diferent from existing neoliberal trade and aid policies purporting to address world ‘food security.’ These policies are exclusionary; insensitive to those who produce food; silent on where and how it is grown or consumed; and have—since the 1970s—been proven failures. Governments and international institutions must respect and adopt food sovereignty. 4. We believe that the Right to Food prevails over trade agreements and other international policies. In the current food emergency, trade negotiations related to food and agriculture must halt and work should begin on a new trade dialogue under UN auspices. The structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the free trade paradigm have undermined local and national economies, eroded the environment and damaged local food systems leading to today’s food crisis. Neoliberal trade policies have also strengthened multinational agribusinesses and encouraged windfall profiteering. Food dumping and artiicially low-priced food exports have also destroyed local systems and must end. The international inance institutions and the WTO have forced the global South to close marketing boards and shutdown mechanisms for market stabilisation and price guaranties for food producers. Governments have been forced to abolish food reserves and eliminate import controls. Yet, state intervention in the market is necessary to fulill the right to food, secure food production and the economy of small scale food producers. Therefore, FTA, EPA and WTO negotiations on the Agreement on Agriculture must be ended. These negotiations are hurting the vast majority of food producers. A new approach to international food and agricultural trade is urgently needed. This approach must be based on the right of countries to decide their level of self suiciency and support for sustainable food production for domestic consumption. Discussions leading to a new trade regime based on the diverse needs of people and societies and the preservation of the environment should take place within the UN system. 5. We insist that the right of governments to intervene and regulate in order to achieve food sovereignty, be reinstated. National governments have to take up their responsibility, control and push back elites and make food production for domestic consumption their priority. Countries have to raise their level of self suiciency APPENDICES 191 • • • • • • • • • 6. in food as far as possible and to achieve this the following measures must be taken: Respect, protect and fulil the right to adequate food, among other rights; Increase the budget support of peasant based food production; Implement genuine agrarian reform to give landless and other vulnerable groups access to land and other productive resources; Guarantee credit access to peasants and other small-scale food producers; Abolish all barriers preventing peasants and small-scale farmers from saving and exchanging seeds between communities, countries and continents; Strengthen peasant led research and support autonomous capacity building; Improve infrastructure so that peasants and small-scale producers can reach local markets; Develop strategies with peasant and other appropriate organisations to manage speciic hazards and emergencies; Guarantee marginalised consumers access to domestic food and— if not available—to food brought in from adjacent surplus regions. We reject the Green Revolution models. Technocratic technoixes are no answer to sustainable food production and rural development. Industrialised agriculture and isheries are not sustainable. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) clearly shows the need for a major change in the current research and development model. This report shows that governments (South and North) have wilfully and tragically neglected agriculture and rural development, especially small scale farming and artisanal isheries since the last global food crisis. This atitude appears to be changing as the current emergency unfolds. However, the new interest in agriculture remains fundamentally lawed as private US foundations partner with global agribusiness to press national governments and international research systems to pursue a socalled “green revolution” in Africa and elsewhere based upon technological quick-ixes and failed market policies rather than social policy decisions. Governments, research institutions and other donors must learn from this study; change direction; and support small scale sustainable crop and livestock production and isheries based on the expressed needs of local communities. 192 FOOD REBELLIONS! The farmer/isher-led programs will lead to local and national self-reliance. Speciically, governments atending the Third HighLevel Forum on Aid-Efectiveness in Ghana in September [2008] should reject the philanthro-capitalist directed models for a new green revolution and should reairm the central role of people and governments in seting the policy and practical framework for development. 7. We support an inclusive strategy for the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity that prioritises the participation of small-scale farmers, pastoralists and isherfolk. Biological diversity in agriculture is a prerequisite for securing food supplies. The huge loss in diversity, the use of GMOs and the patenting of seeds and genes make food production vulnerable. To support small-scale farmers that develop resilient, biodiverse production systems, we must work together to safeguard agroecosystems, species and genetic diversity that can adapt on-farm to new threats such as climate change. The Rome Food Summit should challenge governments, FAO, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Crop Diversity Trust to provide massive and immediate inancial support for in situ and on-farm conservation through farmer-led crop and livestock conservation and improvement. 8. We will participate in the development of a comprehensive local/ global strategy to respond to climate change. Climate change is already causing major losses in food production and is devastating the lives of millions of people including those of migrants. The future is uncertain but most studies assume that climate change will be more damaging to people and food systems in tropical and subtropical countries than those in temperate zones. There is an urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emission by at least 80 per cent by 2030. This is primarily the responsibility of the industrialised countries. The global South must also adopt diferent policies and practices for energy production. In agriculture, the high input fossil fuel-driven industrial model for production and transport is a major cause of CO2 emissions. The development of peasant led sustainable food production, based on the sustainable use of local resources is a key solution to reduce these emissions. In addition, however, the polluting industrial countries must accept responsibility for the destruction of our environment and food systems and must pay reparations at levels, not less than 1 per cent of their APPENDICES 193 annual GDP, that will help to alleviate damage and further development of sustainable and adaptable food and energy systems. Social movements and other civil society organisations who are prepared actively to pursue the agenda we have described, at local, national and global levels, are invited to sign up to this statement. For more information and to sign up, see www.nyeleni.eu/ foodemergency. This statement was prepared by members of the IPC, the International Planning Commitee for Food Sovereignty. The IPC is a facilitating network in which key international social movements and organisations collaborate around the issue of food sovereignty: these include ROPPA, WFFP, WFF, La Via Campesina, and many movements and NGOs in all regions (see: www.foodsovereignty.org/new/focalpoints.php). The IPC is coordinating a Parallel Forum to the FAO Food Summit in Rome. Further details The International Planning Commitee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) includes organisations that represent small farmers, isherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, women, youth, agricultural workers’ trade unions and NGOs. www.foodsovereignty.org.new/ (English, Français, Español, Italiano) La Via Campesina is the international movement of peasants, small and medium sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers active in more than 56 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. www. viacampesina.org (English, Français, Español) ROPPA Le Réseau des orgnisations paysannes et de producteirs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA). www.ropa.info (Français) Appendix 2 Land, Territory and Dignity Forum, Porto Alegre, March 6–9, 2006 For a New Agrarian Reform based on Food Sovereignty! Final Declaration We are representatives of organizations of peasants, family farmers, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, artisanal isherfolk, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, rural women, rural youth, and defenders of human rights, rural development, the environment, and others. We come from the whole world, to participate in the “Land, Territory and Dignity,” to defend our land, our territory, and our dignity. States and the international system have not been capable of defeating poverty and hunger in the world. We reiterate our call to our governments, to the FAO (with its founding mandate), to the other institutions of the United Nations system, and to the other actors who will be present in the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD), and on our societies, to decisively commit themselves to carrying out a New Agrarian Reform based on Food Sovereignty, the Territories and the Dignity of the Peoples, which guarantees us, as rural women, peasants, family farmers, indigenous peoples, communities of artisanal isherfolk, pastoralists, landless peoples, rural workers, afrodescendents, Dalit communities, unemployed workers and other rural communities, efective access to and control over the natural and productive resources that we need to truly realize our human rights. We call the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD), the States and the FAO to assume a real political will need to eradicate the hunger and poverty that millions of women and men are facing all over the world [sic]. If this Conference fails to recognize the proposals put forward by our Parallel Forum the Conference cannot be considered successful. APPENDICES 195 Food Sovereignty and Agrarian Reform The new agrarian reform must recognize the socio-environmental function of land, the sea, and the natural resources, in the context of food sovereignty. We understand that food sovereignty implies policies of redistribution, equitable access and control over natural and productive resources (credit, appropriate technology, etc.), by rural women, peasants, indigenous peoples, communities of artisanal isherfolk, rural workers, unemployed workers, pastoralists, Dalit communities and other rural communities; rural development policies based on agroecological strategies centered on peasant and family agricultural and artisanal ishing; trade policies against dumping and in favor of peasant and indigenous production for local, regional and national markets; and complementary public sector policies like health care, education and infrastructure for the countryside. The use of natural resources should primarily be for food production. The new agrarian reform must be a high priority on the public agenda. In the context of food sovereignty, agrarian reform beneits all society, providing healthy, accessible and culturally appropriate food, and social justice. Agrarian reform can put an end to the massive and forced rural exodus from the countryside to the city, which has made cities grow at unsustainable rates and under inhuman conditions; would help provide a life with dignity for all members of our societies; would open the way toward a more broad-based and inclusive local, regional and national economic development, that beneits the majority of the population; and could put an end to unsustainable practices of intensive monoculture that make wasteful use of water and poison our land and water with chemicals, and of industrial ishing that over-exploits and exhausts our ishing grounds. It is necessary new ishing policies that recognize the rights of ishing communities and stop depleting life in the sea [sic]. For all these reasons, agrarian reform is not just needed in the so-called “developing countries,” but also in Northern, so-called “developed” countries. Food sovereignty is based on the human rights to food, to selfdetermination, on indigenous rights to territory, and on the rights of rural peoples to produce food for local and national markets. Food sovereignty defends an agriculture with farmers, isheries with artisanal ishing families, forestry with forest communities, and steppes with nomadic pastoralists… Furthermore, agrarian reform should guarantee rights to education, 196 FOOD REBELLIONS! to healthcare, to housing, to social security and to recreation. Agrarian reform should assure the creation of the spaces where we maintain our culture, to provide a home to children and youth, so that our communities can develop their full diversity and so we can construct a citizenship on the basis of our relationship to the land, the sea, the forests… Role of the State The State must play a strong role in policies of agrarian reform and food production. The State must apply policies that recognize rights and democratize access to land, to coastal areas, forests, and so on, especially in cases where access to these resources are concentrated in the hands of a few. Furthermore, the State should guarantee community control over natural resources by peasant, isherfolk, pastoralist, and forest communities, and by indigenous peoples, such that they can continue to live and work in the countryside and on the coasts, by means of collective and community rights. Agrarian reform should create jobs with dignity and strengthen the rights of rural workers. States have the right and the obligation to deine, without external inluences, their own agrarian, agricultural, ishing and food policies in such a way as to guarantee the right to food and the other economic, social and cultural rights of the entire population. The small-scale producers must have access to credit at low interest rates and adapted to local conditions, to fair prices and market conditions, and to technical assistance for agro ecological forms of production. Research and systems of support for collection of harvests and distributing them to local and regional markets must have strong state support and must work for the common good. Recognition of the Concept of Territory The concept of territory has been historically excluded from agrarian reform policies. No agrarian reform is acceptable if it only aims at the distribution of land. We believe that the new agrarian reform must include the Cosmo visions of territory of communities of peasant, the landless, indigenous peoples, rural workers, isherfolk, nomadic pastoralists, tribes, afro-descendents, ethnic minorities, and displaced peoples, who base their work on the production of food and who maintain a relationship of respect and harmony with the Mother Earth including the oceans. All of the original peoples, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, APPENDICES 197 tribes, isherfolk, rural workers, peasants, the landless, nomadic pastoralists and displaced peoples, have the right maintain [sic] their own spiritual and material relationships to their lands; to possess, develop, control, and reconstruct their social structures; to politically and socially administer their lands and territories, including their full environment, the air, water, seas, ice loes, lora, fauna and other resources that they have traditionally possessed, occupied and/or utilized. This implies the recognition of their laws, traditions, customs, tenure systems, and institutions; as well as the recognition of territorial and cultural borders of peoples. This all constitutes the recognition of the self-determination and autonomy of peoples. The expression of gender and youth in the struggle for agrarian reform We recognize the fundamental role of women in agriculture and ishing and in the use and management of natural resources. There can be no genuine agrarian reform without gender equity, thus we demand and we commit ourselves to ensuring that women receive full equality of opportunities and rights to land and natural resources that recognize their diversity, and that past discrimination against rural women and the social disadvantages they have faced be redressed. We also recognize that without young people who stay in the countryside there is no future for our societies. The new agrarian reform must give priority both to women’s rights and to guaranteeing a future with dignity for today’s rural youth. We demand that governments honor their commitments and obligations that they assumed in various international conferences such as the Bejing Conference and the World Conference on Racism. Their commitments to gender equality and racial diversity that are upheld in the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Peasant Charta that was adopted in the World Conference On Agrarian Reform and Rural Development. We demand the implementation of a redistributive agrarian reform which will allow women and youth access to and jurisdiction over land and natural resources and guarantee the representation of women and youth in the decision making mechanisms concerning management at all levels, local, national and international. It is indispensable to have adequate inancial resources for capacity building and education in sexual and reproductive health. 198 FOOD REBELLIONS! No to the Privatization of the Seas and the Land, No to the Dominant Model of Production and Development Together with the privatization of land and coastal areas we are seeing the privation of biodiversity. Life is not a commodity. We will continue to resist the neoliberal policies implemented by our governments and imposed by the World Bank, the WTO and other actors. These destructive policies include so-called land administration, cadastre, delimitation, titling and parceling of lands, and the policies of decollectivization, all with the goal of privatization of land in individual hands; the promotion of markets for buying, selling and renting of lands, “land banks,” the end of land distribution programs; the return of reformed lands to former landlords, the reconcentration of land; the privatization of water, the sea, seeds, forests, ishing areas, and other resources, as well as services of extension, credit, transport and marketing, roads, healthcare, education, and so on, and the dismantling of public sector support for peasant production and the marketing of their products. We roundly oppose the introduction of transgenic seeds and the suicide or “terminator” seed technology, that expropriates control over seeds from rural communities and transfers it to a handful of transnational corporations. The privatization of natural resources and technologies has increased the inequality between men and women, casts [sic], ethnicities, classes and generations. These policies are perpetuating displacement, persecution and criminalization of these already marginalized groups. By the same token, we will continue to resist the dominant model of production and development, with its processes of neoliberal globalization, the transformation and insertion of farming, ishing and forestry into the production chains of transnational corporations, industrial agriculture, forestry and isheries (contract production, export monocultures, plantations, big-boat ishing, biofuels, genetic engineering and GMOs, nanotechnology). Investments in mining, agribusiness, biopiracy, green neoliberalism, infrastructure mega projects, are destroying our territories and agriculture, our isheries and are causing displacement of local people and rootlessness from the countryside and costal areas as “Reconstruction” programs ater natural disasters, wars and free trade policies (WTO, FTA, CAP, Farm Bill and so on) are also doing. APPENDICES 199 Agricultural policies inancing the dumping exports of agrarian and ishing products must be replaced by policies realizing food sovereignty which respect the endogenous development of peoples. We recognize and value initiatives like ALBA for the regional integration and the exercise of food sovereignty. In this context agrarian reform and rural development should be an integral part of these initiatives. Criminalization and repression of social movements We reject and condemn the repression that we face, that any person who ights for agrarian reform faces, in almost all countries in the Americas as in Asia, in Europe, in Africa. We denounce the militarization and military occupation in Iraq, South Korea, Palestine that displace our peoples and steal them [sic] their territories; the so-called “war against terrorism” that serves as a pretext to repress us, and the criminalization (labeling us as “criminals”) of our movements. To ight for our rights and dignity is an obligation; and it is our human right to do so. We demand that the States establish mechanisms for protection of life and security of persons who struggle to protect their land, water and natural resources. States must guarantee efective legal mechanisms for punishing those who are guilty of such crimes. Land Occupations, and the Recovery and Defense of Territories. Social mobilization as a strategy of struggle and construction of proposals We defend our actions of land occupation and the recuperation and active defense of our land, territories, seeds, forests, ishing grounds, housing, etc., as necessary and legitimate to realize and defend our rights. If our day-by-day experience in the struggle for human dignity has taught us anything, it is that direct actions like land occupations, and recuperations and active defense of territories, are absolutely necessary in order to move governments to fulill their obligations and implement efective policies and programs of agrarian reform. We pledge to keep carrying out these non-violent actions for as long as is necessary to achieve a world with social justice, which gives each and everyone the real possibility of having a life with dignity. Without the mobilization and full participation of social movements, there will be no genuine agrarian reform. 200 FOOD REBELLIONS! Food sovereignty is not just a vision but is also a common platform of struggle that allows us to keep building unity in our diversity. We believe that access and control over natural resources, food production, and the increase of decision-making power are three main themes that bring us together. Agrarian reform and food sovereignty commit us to a larger struggle to change the dominant neoliberal model. We must build alliances with other sectors of society, a citizens’ power that can guarantee deep agrarian reforms. We commit ourselves to promote joint actions, articulations, exchanges, and all the forms of pressure that are underway, especially through the international campaigns that our organizations and networks are carrying out or developing. We are convinced that only the power of organized peoples and mobilization can achieve the needed changes, thus our principal task is to inform, raise awareness, debate, organize and mobilize with the people. We call on all the actors and forces present here to keep building our unity, and we will carry these conclusions back to debate with our social bases, and will use these ideas to confront the policies of international bodies like the FAO, and our governments. We ask that the International Planning Commitee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) give priority in its work to the follow-up of these conclusions. Land, sea, and territory to airm our dignity. Land, sea, and territory for dreams. Land, sea, and territory for LIFE. htp://www.foodsovereignty.org/new/documents.php Appendix 3 ROPPA—Pan-African Farmers’ Platform FINAL DECLARATION Faced with the alarming situation that has struck the African populations, the networks of farmer and agricultural producer organizations of Southern Africa (SACAU), Central Africa (PROPAC), Eastern Africa (EAFF) and West Africa (ROPPA) met in Addis-Ababa, Ethiopia, from 21st to 23rd of May 2008, to share information and exchange ideas on the current state of African agriculture and possible solutions. Considering that networks of African farmer organizations all have the same mission, i.e. to defend and promote the interests of agricultural producers; Noting that these African agricultural producers share the same geographical space and natural resources: land, water, forests; Noting also that, although they represent the demographic majority of the African population, these family farm households and agricultural producers still sufer the consequences of agricultural and rural policies that do not relect the realities they live and the preoccupations they continually proclaim; Noting also that, thanks to the sweat of their labor, which is badly remunerated thanks to constantly decreasing agricultural prices, the States—on the contrary—have been able to harvest signiicant wealth which has very oten been invested elsewhere than in the rural areas; Noting inally that, today—as yesterday—these agricultural producers are the main victims of conlicts, disasters and crises such as the current one on food; The networks of African farmer and agricultural producer organizations reviewed the diferent factors that are at the origin of the food and agricultural crisis in Africa. 202 FOOD REBELLIONS! It must be recognized that, despite eforts to promote regional integration, most of the actions and initiatives are seriously behind schedule. On the contrary, despite the aspirations of NEPAD, Africa continues to be oriented more towards the outside than inwardly. African agriculture has thus encountered a failure in which all of us have participated: we Africans in the irst instance, African political leaders and farmers’ organizations, as well as our partners and the bilateral and multilateral cooperation programs. The farmer organization networks consider that the present situation of African agriculture is bad. However, they judge that this is not a fatality and that the situation of food price increases is not necessarily an unfavorable factor. Seizing the current opportunity for African farmers to obtain a better remuneration for their products, however, requires that our States, our Regional Economic Communities and the AU urgently engage in a dialogue involving all of us, here in Africa and not elsewhere. The farmer organization networks also noted that over more than ive years they have strengthened their mutual knowledge and have built up a real spirit of solidarity through concerted action, in particular while working together to improve the feasibility of the NEPAD and to warn the world of the threats which the EPAs might pose for the future of African agriculture. These challenges have convinced them that the progress of African agriculture can only be lasting if the farmers’ organizations can act at continental level [sic]. The four networks of farmer organizations airm, through this declaration, their total engagement to assume this historic necessity by deciding, here in Addis Ababa, to establish a “Pan African Platform for the Farmer of Africa”. The farmer organization networks have established a steering commitee composed of the 4 presidents of the 4 sub-regional farmer organization networks and have designated Mr. Mamadou Cissokho as facilitator. This new instrument, in our eyes, brings a strong value added to the pursuit of the mandates and the activities of our local, national and sub-regional organizations. It also constitutes a powerful lever to promote a resurgence of African agriculture so that it can fulill the functions of any agriculture worthy of its name. APPENDICES 203 Conclusion Convinced that there are no alternatives to the mobilization of our own human resources and our own inancial resources, however modest they may be, and conscious of the fact that our continent— despite the negative image of the outstretched hand, of sufering, of misery that is projected to us every day—possesses natural resources, high quality human resources, and positive values that are applicable to all of humanity, we commit ourselves, in the context of the Pan-African platform of farmers organizations, to save our lives, our families, our nations and Africa, our continent. We the undersigned Mrs Fanny Makina Vice President SACAU Mr Philip Kiriro President EAFF Mrs Elizabeth Atangana President PROPAC Mr Ndiogou Fall President ROPPA This date: 23rd May, 2008, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Appendix 4 Declarations of the African Organizations—Planet Diversity, May 12–16, 2008 We, the African civil society organizations meeting under the umbrella of Planet Diversity and the Meeting of Parties (MOP 4) in Bonn, Germany from 12–16 May 2008, United in the idea of Food Sovereignty in Africa, have shared and exchanged experiences and views with other civil society groups from Latin and North America, Europe and Asia, Having analysed the state of African agriculture in the face of several threats: strong pressure from seed manufacturers to introduce GMOs into African agriculture under the guise of modern biotechnology, the efects of climate change, agrofuels, along with initiatives such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), all of which are aimed at commercializing agriculture at the expense of sustainable development. Reairming that food sovereignty is an inalienable right, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1969). We therefore call upon our governments to reassert their sovereignty and their duty to set in place policies and safeguards to protect the genetic heritage of the continent and the rights of Africa’s farmers, We hereby declare: 1. That GMOs pose a risk to the environment, to health, to the genetic resources and the agrarian systems that produce them, and also threaten the social and cultural systems that manage them. Consequently, We are in total opposition to any experimentation with, and development of GMOs on our continent 2. That modern conventional agricultural methods have thus far failed to feed the population, or preserve the ecological balance. We have witnessed the introduction of ineicient, destructive and unethical technologies in an atempt to mitigate this failure of modern agriculture. Based on our conviction that the full APPENDICES 205 potential of ecological and biological agriculture has not been achieved, We implore our governments and decision makers to promote sustainable agrarian systems, based on agro-ecological methods and the protection of the rights of peasant farmers and of traditional seed production 3. That GMOs cannot feed the world. This is a fallacy, a commercial response that trivialises the real problems of agriculture on the continent. Furthermore, Africa should not be used as the Petri dish for privatization and the irreversible poisoning of the environment. Africa is poor and has no means to mitigate the damage. We demand a general moratorium on behalf of the entire continent 4. That we are opposed to the idea of a global seed and gene bank. This kind of centralisation will open the door to genetic piracy and thet of the continent’s genetic resources. We advocate for community and national management of seed/ gene banks 5. That we vociferously condemn the establishment of AGRA in Africa as the driving force of a green revolution and demand that this alliance dedicate itself to the promotion of sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for the continent We, Africa civil society organizations celebrate our diversity with our peers from all over the world, and commit ourselves to work together to protect our agricultural and cultural diversity. We will develop the synergies necessary to build a strong and lasting network to protect this diversity. Whenever necessary, we shall avail balanced information, we will propose viable alternatives, and we will continue to pressurize those responsible for the planet’s future to protect our heritage for future generations. Signed this 15th Day of May, 2008 By the Networks: COPAGEN AREA-ED Africa Biosafety Center (ABC) ABN PELUM Les Amis de la terre (Friends of the Earth) Appendix 5 Africa: 25th FAO Africa Conference—African Women’s Statement 2008-06-19 Mr. Chairman, Honourable Delegates; We are women’s representatives from diferent organisations in Africa, representing farmers, Community Based Organisations, Landless Peoples Movements, Pastoralists and Youth, from Western, Southern and Eastern Africa, meeting in Nairobi from June 16–18, 2008, to share our diverse experiences on women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in Africa and governments’ extent of implementation of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) Declaration in Africa and the current food crisis. It is widely acknowledged that improved women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources, is a key factor in eradicating hunger and rural poverty. This has been restated in the framework of international commitments at the World Food Summit 1996 and its Plan of Action; in the Voluntary Guidelines on the Implementation of the Right to Food unanimously adopted by FAO Council; and most recently at the FAO’s 32nd Commitee on Food Security in October 2006. However there has not been concerted international action to address the question of women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in Africa. “The overall situation is that in the face of increased competition and conlict over land rights for mining, development, logging and other economic activities and as a result of trends towards marketbased land reforms, and environmental and health disasters, African women are fast losing their already precarious access to land and resources. HIV-positive women or widows and children orphaned by HIV and AIDS risk losing all claims to family land and natural resources,” notes Annete Mukiga from Rwanda Women’s Network. APPENDICES 207 We note that the world is in a food crisis that is linked to a record increase in prices of 83%—a situation not seen in the last ity years. For years, African governments, advised by international inancial institutions and donors, have dismantled public support to agriculture and neglected the small farmers, particularly women farmers, who feed their people. As Isabella Wandati of Butere Focus on Women’s Development, Kenya, notes: The targets and goals to eradicate hunger and achieve food security will not be attained unless governments and international organisations take specific action to end the persistent discrimination against women in matters of access to, ownership and control over land and natural resources in Africa. Because women produce up to 80% of the food in developing countries, yet now comprise 60% of those suffering from hunger. We are cognisant of the fact that the ICARRD Declaration in Africa will be implemented through the African Union’s (AU), United Nation’s Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Africa Development Bank (ADB)-led Africa Land Policy and Land Reform Framework and Guidelines currently being developed to: ensure secure land rights; increase productivity; improve livelihoods; enhance natural resource management; and contribute to a broadbased economic growth. As Fatou Bah from the National Youth Association for Food Security in The Gambia points out: Improved women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources are key to the achievements of these aims. The process and content of the above Africa Framework and Guidelines must fully adhere to African governments commitments in the ICARRD Declaration 2006 and the African Union’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa 2003 on women’s rights to land and natural resources to realize its aims. 208 FOOD REBELLIONS! Recommendations 1. To FAO and African Governments on implementation of ICARRD To implement existing commitments as part of the follow up to the ICARRD Declaration March 2006 at continental, regional and national levels through concrete measures: • Uphold equal citizenship rights for both women and men by eliminating all discriminatory cultural, religious and traditional laws on succession and inheritance included in statutory law at national level that exclude African women from citizenship on an equal footing with African men, as a irst step to ensuring women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in Africa; • Support the establishment of a reporting, monitoring and evaluation mechanism for member states managed collaboratively by FAO, the African Union and regional economic communities regarding the implementation of ICARRD follow up; • Fund agrarian reform and agricultural development through the development of long-term strategies linking all concerned ministries at national level-Agriculture, Land, Environment, Livestock and Natural Resources; • Support establishment of gender disaggregated data-base, at national, regional and continental levels, to measure the ICARRD Declaration’s implementation progress in order to inform policies, programmes and processes for women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in Africa. 2. To FAO and African Governments to implement the measures below in the implementation of ICARRD in Africa through the African Land Policy and Land Reform Framework and Guidelines: • Convene a continental round table on women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in Africa in 2008 to develop indicators and benchmarks for the AU Land Framework and Guidelines before their adoption by the AU Heads of States Summit in 2009. Problems of women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in APPENDICES 209 Africa are in many national contexts complex and sensitive issues. There is a need for policy makers and governments and civil society (particularly organisations of rural women farmers) in Africa to come together to assess the extent of the challenges and share possible ways forward at the sub-regional level and resolve collective action; • Mainstream women’s rights in the Drat AU Land Framework and Guidelines. Women’s access, control and ownership over land/ natural and productive resources need to be treated comprehensively in each of the aspects of the land question in line with government commitments on women’s rights including the ICARRD Declaration 2006 and the African Union’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa 2003. Conclusion Women’s access, control and ownership of land/natural and productive resources in Africa intersect with other problems such as discriminatory inheritance paterns, agriculture and food insecurity, violence against women, the appropriation and privatization of communal and indigenous lands and other natural resources, as well as gendered control over economic resources and the right to work. This inter-sectionality highlights the need for governments to secure women’s rights to access, control and own land/natural and productive resources, in order to lessen the threat of discrimination, diferent forms of violence and HIV/AIDS, denial of political participation, and other violations of their economic and human rights. There is also need to ensure gender responsive land and environmental law to facilitate women’s access to resources. The measures we have recommended above will be key to securing those rights. Coast Women’s Rights (COWER), Kenya Rwanda Women’s Network(RWN), Rwanda Plateforme Sous Regionale Des Organisations Paysannes D’Afrique Central (PROPAC), Cameroon National Youth Association for Food Security (NYAFS)/IFSN, The Gambia Kenya Food Security Network (KEFOSPAN), Kenya Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) Eastern African Farmers Federation(EAFF), Tanzania 210 FOOD REBELLIONS! National Women’s Farmers Association (NAWFA), The Gambia Network of Ethiopian Women’s Associations (NEWA), Ethiopia Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), Uganda Community Land and Development Foundation (COLANDEF), Ghana La Via Campesina, South Africa Network of Organisations Working on Food Sovereignty (ROSA), Mozambique Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum(ESAFF), Zambia Shelter Forum, Kenya Food Rights Alliance-Uganda Volunteer Eforts for Development Concerns, Uganda ACORD International ActionAid International Appendix 6 High-Level Meeting on Food Security, Madrid, January 26–27, 2009 Final declaration of farmers and civil society organisations SURPRISE ENDING IN MADRID! NO CONSENSUS ON A G-8 DRIVEN PARTNERSHIP AGAINST HUNGER … FOR NOW As representatives of peasant farmers and other small scale food producers, together with organisations that support them,* we want to express the following: We gathered in Madrid with low expectations. We were extremely unhappy with the process and the contents of this conference. Although WE are the ones who produce most of the world’s food, we had not been ofered a serious space to give our opinion on what should be done, either in the preparatory process or in the conference programme itself. As a consequence, the meeting was not focussed on the crucial question of how to solve the dramatic food crisis that we are facing, but rather on a discussion by donors about how to spend their money. Without serious questioning the real structural causes behind the food crisis, any discussion about more or less aid money targets symptoms rather than addressing the real issues. This explains the simplistic `more of the same’ recipes to solve the crisis presented in Madrid: more fertilizer, more hybrid seeds and more agrochemicals for small farmers. This approach has already 212 FOOD REBELLIONS! been a total failure in the past, and has been the source of elimination and sufering of millions of small producers, environmental destruction and climate change. It is also clear that none of the actors here were prepared to deal with the crucial and conlictual issue of how local food producers are being denied access to land and territories, which constitutes the single most important threat to local food production. Many of the communally held land territories are now under threat from privatisation and land grabbing by transnational corporations to plant agrofuels or other commodities for the international markets. We need fundamental agrarian and aquatic reforms to keep land in the hands of local communities to be able to produce food. But several factors combined to squash the organizers’ hope of ending the conference with the triumphal proclamation of an ethereal Global Partnership for Agricultural and Food Security crated by the G8 with agribusiness corporations panting to take up residence. One factor was the fact that many developing country governments rejected a proposal on which no one had bothered to consult them. Another was the strong stand taken by FAO to keep global governance of food and agriculture centred in the Rome-based UN agencies. And our participation—both within the conference and in actions outside—helped to remind delegates that there can be no successful approach to the food crisis that does not build on the alternatives that millions of small food producers are developing day by day. The solution to the food crisis exists, and is being fought for in many communities. It is called food sovereignty. An approach oriented towards peasant-based agriculture and artisanal isheries, prioritizing local markets and sustainable production methods and based on the right to food and the right of peoples to deine their own agricultural policies. To be able to achieve this, we need to: • Reinstate the right of governments to intervene and regulate in the food and agricultural sector. The right to food, as already accepted by the UN, should be the central cornerstone on the basis of which the solutions to the food crisis are to be constructed. • Dominate the disastrous volatility of food prices in domestic markets. National governments should take full control over the import and export of food in order to stabilize local markets. • Reject Green Revolution models. Industrialized agriculture and isheries are no solution. • Set up policies to actively support peasant-based food production APPENDICES 213 and artisanal ishing, local markets and the implementation of agrarian and aquatic reform. • Stop corporate land grabbing for industrial agrofuels and commodity production. We need one single space in the UN system that acts in total independence of the international inancial and trade institutions, with a clear mandate from governments, decisive participation by peasant, isher-folk and other small scale food producers, and a transparent and democratic process of decision making. This has to be the unique space where food and agriculture issues are discussed, where policies and rules are set. We see the proposed Global Partnership as just another move to give the big corporations and their foundations a formal place at the table, despite all the rhetoric about the ‘inclusiveness’ of this initiative. Furthermore it legitimates the participation of WTO, World Bank and IFM and other neoliberalism-promoting institutions in the solution of the very problems they have caused. This undermines any possibility for civil society or governments from the Global South to play any signiicant role. We do not need this Global Partnership or any other structure outside the UN system. The batle was won in Madrid, but we have no illusions that the promoters of the Global Partnership have given up the ight, and we will continue to engage them. * These include Via Campesina, COAG, and many NGOs. The organisations present at the Madrid meeting presented a detailed statement with our assessment and proposals “Accelerating into disaster—When banks manage the food crisis.” It can be downloaded from the website of the IPC, which has facilitated our participation in this conference: www.foodsovereignty.org Appendix 7 US Call to Action As a result of decades of misguided policies and the recent sharp rise in food prices, a billion people around the world face hunger and food insecurity. Dangerous volatility in the inancial system puts these people at even greater risk. We, the undersigned, call on people across the United States to use our political power and actions to ight for food system changes that: 1. Stabilize prices for farmers and consumers globally: • Regulate the inance sector’s investment in food and energy commodities. • Establish and strengthen publicly-owned domestic, regional, and international strategic food reserves. • Suspend international trade and investments in industrial-scale biofuels (a.k.a. agrofuels). • Reform food aid. • Expand fair trade, not so-called free trade. 2. Rebalance power in the food system: • Reduce the political inluence of agribusiness corporations on public policy. • Strengthen antitrust enforcement in agribusiness. • Convene multi-stakeholder, representative food policy councils at state and local levels. 3. Make agriculture environmentally sustainable: • Support family farming with agroecological practices through purchasing and procurement. • Halt expansion of government supported biofuels programs, mandates, and tax incentives and other subsidies unless they only support sustainable, domestic production. • Direct state and national farm policy, research and education, and investment toward biodiverse, agroecological farming and sustainable food businesses. • Guarantee the right to healthy food by building local and regional food systems and fostering social, ecological and economic justice. APPENDICES 215 • Call on the US to join the community of nations supporting the human right to food. • Support domestic food production and independent community-based food businesses in the United States and around the world. • Establish living wages, so that everyone can aford healthy food. • Implement full workers’ rights for farmworkers and other food system workers. • Strengthen the social safety net for low-income people across the US. • Create a solidarity economy that puts people before proit in the United States and around the world. You can take action in many ways, in your community or across the country: • Contact your elected oicials to demand policies that support a fair food system. • Write op-eds and leters to the editor of your newspaper. • Host an event to educate and mobilize your community between World Food Day (October 16) and Thanksgiving. • Join local or national organizations working for a fair food system. • Get involved with the US Working Group on the Food Crisis. htp://www.usfoodcrisisgroup.org/ Appendix 8 Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture We, the undersigned, believe that a healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent challenges of our time. Behind us stands a halfcentury of industrial food production, underwriten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories. Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity. These realities call for a radically diferent approach to food and agriculture. We believe that the food system must be reorganized on a foundation of health: for our communities, for people, for animals, and for the natural world. The quality of food, and not just its quantity, ought to guide our agriculture. The ways we grow, distribute, and prepare food should celebrate our various cultures and our shared humanity, providing not only sustenance, but justice, beauty and pleasure. Governments have a duty to protect people from malnutrition, unsafe food, and exploitation, and to protect the land and water on which we depend from degradation. Individuals, producers, and organizations have a duty to create regional systems that can provide healthy food for their communities. We all have a duty to respect and honor the laborers of the land without whom we could not survive. The changes we call for here have begun, but the time has come to accelerate the transformation of our food and agriculture and make its beneits available to all. We believe that the following twelve principles should frame food and agriculture policy, to ensure that it will contribute to the health and wealth of the nation and the world. A healthy food and agriculture policy: 1. Forms the foundation of secure and prosperous societies, healthy communities, and healthy people. 2. Provides access to afordable, nutritious food to everyone. APPENDICES 217 3. Prevents the exploitation of farmers, workers, and natural resources; the domination of genomes and markets; and the cruel treatment of animals, by any nation, corporation or individual. 4. Upholds the dignity, safety, and quality of life for all who work to feed us. 5. Commits resources to teach children the skills and knowledge essential to food production, preparation, nutrition, and enjoyment. 6. Protects the inite resources of productive soils, fresh water, and biological diversity. 7. Strives to remove fossil fuel from every link in the food chain and replace it with renewable resources and energy. 8. Originates from a biological rather than an industrial framework. 9. Fosters diversity in all its relevant forms: diversity of domestic and wild species; diversity of foods, lavors and traditions; diversity of ownership. 10.Requires a national dialog concerning technologies used in production, and allows regions to adopt their own respective guidelines on such maters. 11.Enforces transparency so that citizens know how their food is produced, where it comes from, and what it contains. 12.Promotes economic structures and supports programs to nurture the development of just and sustainable regional farm and food networks. Our pursuit of healthy food and agriculture unites us as people and as communities, across geographic boundaries, and social and economic lines. We pledge our votes, our purchases, our creativity, and our energies to this urgent cause. htp://fooddeclaration.org/ Acknowledgements This book was made possible by the contributions and hard work of many friends and colleagues. Speciic sections were writen by Miguel Altieri, Walden Bello, Roland Bunch, George Naylor, Dori Stone, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Molly Anderson, Ivete Perfecto, Brahm Ahmadi, Anim Steel, Esther Vivas, Priscilla Claeys, José Maria Tardin, Isabella Kenield, Alex Perroti and Tanya Kerssen. Food First associates Rick Jonasse, Karla Pena, Ellen Parry Tyler, Amanda El-Khoury, Jasmine Tilly, Mihir Mankad, Tamara Watnem, Kurt Eulau, Ashley Elles, Ingrid Budrovich, Heidi Conner, Juliana Mandell, Meera Velu and Alethea Harper all contributed to background research and writing. Many thanks to Marilyn Borchardt, William Wroblewski and Martha Katigbak-Fernandez, who provided essential review and editing. Notes 1. Further, the FAO estimates that while cereal consumption by India will increase 2.17% this year to 197.3 million tons, in the US cereal consumption will increase five times as much (11.8%), from 277.6 million tons to 310.4 million tons, bringing its global share to a record high of nearly 15% (Financial Express 2008). In regards to grain-fed meat, China feeds 17% of its grain to animals, while 70% of US grain goes to feed livestock (Delgado et al. 1999). 2. Per capita meat consumption in India and China in 1993 was 4 and 33 kg/year, respectively. In the US it was 118 kg/yr—compared to 76 kg/yr in the developed world and 11 kg/yr in the developing world. The rate of meat consumption, however, was higher in the global South, doubling in ten years, compared to flat growth in the North. However, per capita meat production doubled in China, increased by 25% in India and over 30% in the developing world overall. Increase of meat production in the developed world rose only 1.1%. Grain fed livestock grew at 4% a year in developing countries and only 0.7% in developed countries (Delgado et al. 1999). 3. According to the FAO, “The global cost of imported foodstuffs in 2008 is forecast at US$1,035 billion, 26% higher than 2007’s peak. This figure is still provisional as FAO’s food import bill forecasts are conditional on developments in international prices and freight rates, which remain highly uncertain. Among economic groups, the most economically vulnerable countries are set to bear the highest burden in the cost of importing food, with total expenditures by lesser developed countries and low-income food dependent counties anticipated to climb by 37–40% from 2007, after already rising 30% and 37%, respectively, in 2007. The sustained rise in imported food expenditures for both vulnerable country groups is a worrisome development because by the end of 2008, their annual food import basket could cost four times as much as in 2000. This is in stark contrast to the trend prevailing for developed countries, where year-to-year import costs have risen far less” (FAO 2008d). 4. The term “Green Revolution” comes from a meeting of the Society for International Development in Washington DC in 1968. 220 FOOD REBELLIONS! Referring to record yields in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Turkey, William Gaud, director of USAID announced, “These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.” A perfect Cold War sound bite, the term quickly spread worldwide (see http://www.agbioworld. org/biotech-info/topics/borlaug/borlaug-green.html). 5. Globalization, Development, and Democracy: Lessons from the Global Food Crisis, by Walden Bello, (Keynote speech at the 2008 CASID annual conference, Vancouver, June 6, 2008). 6. Adapted from Esther Vivas, The CAP, Alternatives and Resistance: Something is Moving in Europe, email message, January 27, 2009. 7. HLTF participation has included: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); International Monetary Fund (IMF); United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS); United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); United Nations Development Program (UNDP); United Nations Environment Program (UNEP); Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF); World Food Program (WFP); World Health Organization (WHO); World Bank; World Trade Organization (WTO); Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA); Department of Political Affairs (DPA); Department of Public Information (DPI); Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO); the Special Adviser on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 8. Adapted from M. Jahi Chappell, Shattering Myths: Can Sustainable Agriculture Feed the World?, Food First Backgrounder, vol. 13, no. 3, fall, 2007. 9. Adapted from Miguel Altieri, “Small farms as a planetary ecological asset: Five key reasons why we should support the revitalization of small farms in the Global South,” http://www. foodfirst.org/en/node/2115. NOTES 221 10. “The most notable and problematic (effect) is the tendency of drought-tolerant GM lines to not perform as well under favorable conditions. This appears to be the case for CIMMYT’s GM wheat and Monsanto’s GM corn. The flaw is a profound one. It amounts to shifting the yield losses experienced in dry seasons onto the good years.” From the Australian government’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC 2008). 11. Adapted from Marcia Ishii-Iteman, Ivette Perfecto, and Molly Anderson with Phana Nakkharach, New Era for Agriculture?, Food First Backgrounder, vol. 14, no. 2, summer, 2008. 12. Unfortunately, thus far only six of the 53 countries are presently spending 10% of their national budgets on agriculture. This may decrease rather than increase as a result of the global financial crisis. 13. Sections adapted from Holt-Giménez, Out of AGRA: The Green Revolution Returns to Africa, Development 51(4): 464–71, 2008. 14. See http://www.pelum.net/. 15. See http://www.leisa.info/. 16. The projected expansion of Gates’ funding has been put on hold—the foundation will increase its giving only slightly (from $3.3 to $3.8 billion) and is not likely to be expanding in the immediate future (Gates 2009). 17. The different interpretations of “agroecology” and “biodiversity” are good examples of this problem. For AGRA the former means producing hybrid seeds that fit local agroecosystems and the latter means diversity of single crop varieties. These interpretations are not likely to meet the needs or demands of ecological farmers who depend on a rich mix of flora and fauna on and around the farm to ensure healthy agroecosystem functioning. In AGRA’s “integrated soil management” program, fertilizers purchased with “smart subsidies” come first. Cover cropping, composting and other soil building practices will supposedly follow, but it is not clear what means will be used (like fertilizer’s subsidized credit) for farmers to undertake this hard work. For ecological farmers, soil building and conservation comes first— often making fertilizers unnecessary. Past experiences world-wide indicate that as long as subsidies for fertilizers are available, most 222 FOOD REBELLIONS! farmers avoid the hard work of soil building. This often leads to the total destruction of the soil—often to the point that even fertilizers cease to function (Gliessman 1998). 18. Adapted from Esther Vivas, The CAP, Alternatives and Resistance: Something is Moving in Europe, email message, January 27, 2009. 19. “…Convergence with diversity [recognizes] the diversity, not only of movements which are fragmented but of political forces which are operating with them, of ideologies and even visions of the future of those political forces; and that this has to be accepted and respected” (Kothari and Kuruvilla 2008). Acronyms AATF AGRA AoA CAFTA–DR CAP CFA CGIAR CIMMYT CIW CSA DFID EU FAO FTA GATT GDP GMO HYV IAASTD IFC IFPRI IISD IMF IPCC IRDP IRRI LDCs NAFTA NASA NGOs African Agricultural Technology Foundation Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa Agreement on Agriculture Central American Free Trade Agreement (including the Dominican Republic) Common Agricultural Policy (European Union) Comprehensive Framework for Action Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center Coalition of Immokalee Workers community supported agriculture British Department for International Development European Union Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations free trade agreement General Agreement on Tarifs and Trade gross domestic product genetically modiied organism high-yielding hybrid varieties International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development International Finance Corporation International Food Policy Research Institute International Institute for Sustainable Development International Monetary Fund United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change integrated rural development projects International Rice Research Institute less developed countries North American Free Trade Agreement National Aeronautics and Space Administration non-governmental organizations 224 FOOD REBELLIONS! OECD OPEC PRSC RFA RFS SAP UNDP USDA WTO Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Poverty Reduction Social Credit Renewable Fuels Association Renewable Fuels Standard structural adjustment program United Nations Development Program US Department of Agriculture World Trade Organization Glossary agrofuels—biologically-based fuels produced on a centralized, industrial scale, mostly for use as a liquid vehicle fuel. Agrofuels can be made from corn, soy, sugarcane, canola, jatropha, palm oil, or socalled “second generation” crops such as swtichgrass, Miscanthus (canary grass), trees, and corn stover. The term contrasts with “biofuels,” which refers to local, decentralized, farmer-owned, and smallscale fuels of a similar nature. agroecology—the science of sustainable agriculture; a scientiic discipline that uses ecological theory to study, design, manage and evaluate agricultural systems that are productive but also resource conserving. Agroecology links ecology, culture, economics, traditional knowledge and integrated management to sustain agricultural production and healthy food and farming systems. agroforestry—a dynamic, ecologically based, natural resource management system that, through the integration of trees in farm and rangeland, diversiies and sustains production for increased social, economic and environmental beneits.i Archer Daniels Midland—ADM is the second largest grain trader in the world, a major food processor, and the second largest ethanol producer in the US. ADM has been called the “largest recipient of corporate welfare in U.S. history” by the conservative Cato Institute. Blair Commission for Africa—an initiative of the British government to spur development in Africa. bushel—the unit of measurement in which corn and other commodities are most oten traded. One bushel of corn = 56 pounds or 25.4 kg. Cargill—the world’s largest grain trader and the largest privately held company in the US. community food security—a condition in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community selfreliance and social justice.ii conditionality—in reference to loans from international inancial institutions, this is a set of stipulations a nation must meet in order to qualify for inancial assistance. Oten loans are conditioned on structural adjustment and market liberalization. 226 FOOD REBELLIONS! crop board—an independent government body that markets and regulates the price of crops. Doha round —the current round of WTO negotiations, which began in 2001 in Doha, Qatar. The negotiations have stalled over disagreements on agricultural import rules. dumping – export of overproduced and/or subsidized commodities, oten from industrial Northern countries, distributed below the cost of production, most oten in the global South. emerging economy—used to describe a nation in the process of rapid industrial growth, such as China, India and Brazil. food justice—a movement that atempts to address hunger by addressing the underlining issues of racial and class disparity and the inequities in the food system that correlate to inequities in economic and political power. food policy councils—a group of stakeholders that examine how the local food system is working and develop ways to ix it. food security—according to the FAO, “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to suicient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”iii food sovereignty—people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to deine their own food and agriculture systems; the democratization of the food system in favor of the poor. futures—standardized legal agreements to transact in a physical commodity at some designated future time. genetic engineering—experimental or industrial technologies used to alter the genome of a living cell so that it can produce more or different molecules than it is already programmed to make.iv global South—formerly referred to as the “third world,” the nations of Africa, Central and South America, and much of Asia with comparatively litle economic power. GMO—an acronym for genetically modiied organism, a plant or animal with permanently, artiicially modiied genetic material derived across species boundaries. In reference to agriculture, this refers to proprietary, modiied crop varieties. Green Revolution—largely funded by the Ford and Rockefeller GLOSSARY 227 Foundations, the Green Revolution refers to the process of industrialization in agriculture initiated in the 1950s and 60s, from the development and widespread adoption of high-yielding varieties, synthetic fertilizers, chemical herbicides and pesticides. grain reserves—a stock of grain maintained in years of good harvest to bufer against shortage and regulate price volatility. hedging—a mechanism to ofset the risk of an asset’s changing price. hypermarket—a large retailer that combines a supermarket and a department or general merchandise store under one roof. Hypermarkets like WalMart, Carrefour, Target, K-mart, and Costco, oten covering 14,000m2 (150,000t2), survive on high-volume, low margin sales, and oten put local retailers out of business. industrial agrifood complex—describes the skewed power structure of the global food system, currently dominated by large grain traders, chemical and biotechnology companies, transnational food processors, and global supermarket chains, at the expense of small farmers who produce most of the world’s food. index investors—type of speculator that seeks long-term investments by hoarding commodities futures contracts for extended periods and beting on the continued rise of commodities prices. industrial feedlot—a type of a conined animal feeding operation, where animals are fatened on grains and soy before slaughter for meat. informal sector—economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by the government. intercrop—a technique employed in traditional and ecological agriculture that involves the planting of multiple varieties and crop species in one agricultural area. landraces—a population of plants, typically genetically heterogeneous, commonly developed in traditional agriculture from many years, even centuries, of farmer-directed selection, and speciically adapted to local conditions.v Local landraces are a reservoir of genetic diversity in agriculture. marketing board—an independent government body that markets and regulates the price of crops. Maseca—the largest producer of tortillas and corn lour in Mexico and the US. 228 FOOD REBELLIONS! Millennium Development Goals—a set of eight goals elaborated at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 and to be completed by 2015: end poverty and hunger, universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal heath, combat HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability, and global partnership. millennium villages—villages in Africa that receive targeted investments in agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure to display possible ways of meeting the Millennium Development Goals. monocrop or monoculture—the practice of cultivating a single variety of genetically uniform plants over a large agricultural area. National Labor Relations Act—also known as the Wagner Act. This 1935 US federal law protects the rights of workers in the private sector to organize into labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, strike, and advocate for themselves. The act established the National Labor Relations Board. participatory crop breeding—programs for crop varietal improvement wherein farmers have a level of involvement in selecting traits. pastoralist—a farmer who primarily engages in the raising of livestock on pasture. peasant land invasions—a form of non-violent direct action employed by farmers’ groups wherein land owned by elites or corporations is peacefully taken over as a form of protest. polyculture—the practice of growing many diferent species or different varieties of crops in a single space, modeling the diversity of natural ecosystems. public–private partnerships—a government service or business venture funded and managed jointly by government agencies and business. smallholder—a farmer with relatively few planted acres that relies primarily on family labor. sovereign wealth fund—a state-owned investment fund composed of inancial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, or other inancial instruments funded by foreign exchange assets. SWFs tend to have a higher tolerance for risk than traditional foreign exchange reserves. structural violence—a constraint on human potential due to political or economic forces.vi Sources of structural violence can include unequal access to resources, political power, education, food, and GLOSSARY 229 health care, as well as racism, sexism, religious discrimination, and other forms of oppression. Structural violence oten leads to physical acts of violence. supplemental food assistance programs—subsided food beneits from the government, such as food stamps in the United States. transgenic—an organism that contains genes that have been moved across species lines into the germ line of a host.vii Via Campesina—an international movement of peasant farmers’ organizations that advocates for food sovereignty. World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group—the internal assessment and accountability organization within the World Bank. World Development Report—an annual report on development economics put out by the World Bank. Notes i. Definition by Dr Robert Leakey in Leaky, R. 1996. Definition of Agroforestry Revisited. Agroforestry Today 8(1). ii. Definition by Mike Hamm and Anne Bellows. www.foodsecurity. org. iii. http://www.fao.org/spfs/en/. iv. Definition taken from Altieri, Miguel. 2004. Genetic Engineering in Agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books. v. Definition taken from Altieri, Miguel. 2004. Genetic Engineering in Agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books. vi. Adapted from Johan Galtung’s original definition in Galtung, J. 1969. Violence, Peace and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167–91. vii. Definition taken from Altieri, Miguel. 2004. Genetic Engineering in Agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books. Annotated bibliography Altieri, Miguel. 1987. Agroecology: The Scientiic Basis of Sustainable Agriculture. Boulder CO: Westview Press. Agroecology explains the key principles of sustainable agriculture and gives examples of management practices that really work. Drawing case studies from sustainable rural development, Altieri gives a vision for how a truly ecological agriculture can sustain us. Altieri, M. 2004. Genetic Engineering in Agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books. In Genetic Engineering In Agriculture, acclaimed agroecologist Miguel Altieri answers the big questions surrounding genetically modiied crops, explaining exactly what GM crops are, who they beneit, and what we stand to lose from their widespread adoption. Altieri, M., Peter Rosset and Lori Ann Thrupp. 1998. The Potential of Agroecology to Combat Hunger in the Developing World. Oakland: Food First Books. Agroecology—the study of agricultural systems using ecological principles—is presented as a way to resolve hunger, inequality and sustainable development in the developing world. Bello, Walden. 2001. The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance. Oakland: Food First Books. A collection of essays by third world activist and scholar Walden Bello on the myths of development as prescribed by the World Trade Organization and other institutions, and the possibility of another world based on fairness and justice. Borras Jr., Saturnino M. 2004. La Vía Campesina; An Evolving Transnational Social Movement. Amsterdam: The Transnational Institute. Focusing on the global campaign for agrarian reform, Borras looks at the development of Via Campesina, their agendas, alliances, strategies, and accountability to people on the ground. Bunch, Roland. 1985. Two Ears of Corn: A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement. Oklahoma City: World Neighbors. The classic manual for sustainable agricultural development. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 231 Cook, Christopher. 2004. Diet for a Dead Planet. New York: The New Press. In what Mother Jones magazine called a “far-reaching take-down of the American food industry,” Christopher Cook outlines how deregulation, corporate control, and misplaced subsidies are destroying the American food system. Daño, Elenita. 2007. Unmasking the Green Revolution in Africa: Motives, Players and Dynamics. Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network. Asking whether the African Green Revolution is actually a cover for corporate interests, Daño explores the forces behind the African Green Revolution, and presents alternative solutions to food-security and rural development needs in Africa. De Schuter, Olivier. 2008. Building Resilience: A Human Rights Framework for World Food and Nutrition Security. Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development. Geneva: Human Rights Council, United Nations. De Schuter analyses the current food crisis from a human rights perspective. Exploring the risks and opportunities of the food crisis, he presents why a human rights framework should be adopted to respond to food security. Desmarais, Annete. 2006. Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Desmarais, a former grain farmer and long time participant in Via Campesina, explains the development of the revolutionary peasant movement to maintain one’s land, culture and food community. Edwards, Michael. 2008. Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism. London: Demos and the Young Foundation. The non-proit world is increasingly utilizing business methods and models. Edwards analyses this new phenomenon, and questions the motives and outcomes behind the American philanthropy sector. Evans, A. 2009. The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Food Security for the 21st Century. London: Royal Institute of International Afairs at Chatham House. htp://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/iles/13179_ r0109food.pdf (accessed 5 May 2009). Evans presents ten steps he deems necessary to prevent even higher global food prices, and pushes for puting the global food crisis at the forefront of the international political agenda. 232 FOOD REBELLIONS! Funes, Fernando, Luis García, Martin Bourque, Nilda Pérez, Peter Rosset. 2002. Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba. Oakland: Food First Books. Ater the fall of the Soviet Union, fertilizers, farm machinery, pesticides and fuel disappeared from the Cuban countryside nearly overnight. In this book Cuban authors, for the irst time in English, tell the story of the transformation of Cuban agriculture from industrial agriculture to the world’s leader in sustainable farming. Goldman, Michael. 2005. Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press. Goldman looks into the “green neoliberalism” grounding the World Bank’s environmental projects. Halweil, Brian. 2004. Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. New York and London: Norton and Worldwatch. Brian Halweil discusses the growing local food movement that is “rediscovering homegrown pleasures” and changing the way we eat. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey looks at the modes and mechanisms through which industrial nations dominate the global South. The New Imperialism takes on the US imperial tradition, militarism, domestic policies, the sagging economy, the war in Iraq, and the logic of power. Havnevik, K., Deborah Bryceson, Lars-Erik Biregard, Proper Matondi and Atakilte Beyene (eds) 2007. African Agriculture and the World Bank: Development or Impoverishment? Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. An exploration of the impact of the World Bank’s combination of structural adjustment policies and development projects on Africa’s agriculture. Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement. Oakland: Food First Books. In 1978 Eric Holt-Giménez, then a volunteer teaching sustainable agriculture in Mexico, invited a group of visiting Guatemalan farmers to teach a course in his village—this and other eforts marked the beginning of a broad-based farmer’s movement. Writen with dozens ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 233 of farm leaders, this book chronicle 25 years of the continent’s farmerto-farmer movement for sustainable agriculture. Holt-Giménez, Eric. 2008. The World Food Crisis—What’s Behind It and What We Can Do About It. Food First Policy Brief No. 16. Oakland: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Spurred by the current food crisis, this article covers the many factors—from the Green Revolution to agrofuels—that have created an unjust and broken food system. The report delves into the political and economic causes of the current global food crisis, and ofers suggestions for reforming the international food system to permanently resolve the food crisis. Holt-Giménez, Eric, Miguel Altieri and Peter Rosset. 2006. Ten Reasons Why the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ Alliance for Another Green Revolution Will Not Solve the Problems of Poverty and Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa. Food First Policy Brief No. 12. Oakland: Institute for Food and Development Policy. A report on the potential efects of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, “Ten Reasons” argues that, in addition to the long-term consequences of the Green Revolution, there remain speciic issues of hunger and poverty in Africa that cannot be solved with another Green Revolution. The ten reasons illustrate the ongoing Green Revolution’s negative impacts on local farming communities as well as its rejection of viable alternatives to decrease hunger and poverty in Africa. Ishii-Eiteman, M., Molly Anderson with Phana Nakkharach and Ivete Perfecto. 2008. ‘New Era for Agriculture.’ Food First Backgrounder 14(2). New Era for Agriculture presents the indings of reports from the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which suggests the need for many drastic changes in the global food system, including a move towards food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture. Kimbrell, A. (ed). 2002. The Fatal Harvest Reader: the Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Washington DC: Island Press. Fatal Harvest gives a view of our current destructive agricultural system and a vision for a healthier way of producing our food in a collection of essays from writers and scholars such as Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Jim Hightower and Gary Nabhan. 234 FOOD REBELLIONS! Lappé, Frances Moore, Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset. 1998. World Hunger: Twelve Myths. New York: Grove Press. World Hunger exposes the myths around the root causes of hunger, poverty and injustice, and calls for a renewed sense of public and political will to bring an end to hunger in a world of plenty. Mousseau, F. 2005. Food Aid or Food Sovereignty? Ending World Hunger in our Time. Oakland: The Oakland Institute. Analysing the current international food aid system, this report ofers suggestions for reforming the system towards food sovereignty, rather than aid, to more efectively combat world hunger. Patel, Raj. 2007. Stufed and Starved. London: Portobello Books. Tracing the global food chain, Patel exposes the unjust irony of our modern food system: we now have massive health epidemics of both starvation and obesity. Patel uncovers the truth behind corporate control over our food, and ofers solutions to regain a more equitable and healthy food system. Perfecto, Ivete and John Vandermeer. 2005. Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Political Ecology of Rainforest Destruction. Oakland: Food First Books. Vandermeer and Perfecto expose the political, international, and economic forces driving rainforest destruction, and present democracy, sustainable agriculture, and land security as solutions to deforestation. Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin Press. Pollan’s best-selling personal account of four very diferent meals uncovers surprising facts about growing, creating, and eating food. Prety, Jules. 1995. Regenerating Agriculture; Policies and Practice for Sustainability and Self-Reliance. London: Earthscan Publications. Prety provides a thorough account of alternative, sustainable agricultural practices as means for economic, environmental and social improvements. Rapley, J. 1996. Understanding Development: Theory and Practice in the Third World. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. Understanding Development chronicles the history of thought and practice in third world development over the past 50 years. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 235 Richards, Paul. 1985. Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: Ecology and Food Production in West Africa. London: Hutchison. Richards critiques the top–down model of agricultural research and highlights case studies of complex, ecologically sustainable peasant agricultural systems in Africa. Rosset, Peter. 2007. Food Is Diferent: Why We Must Get The WTO Out of Agriculture. Halifax and London: Fernwood and Zed Books. Food Is Diferent exposes the ways in which the World Trade Organization (WTO), in promoting the globalization and free trade of food, destroys farmers and local communities by introducing cheaper foreign food into local markets and eliminating local food production and livelihoods. Through intimate examples and detailed economic explanations, Peter Rosset illustrates the need for a return to food sovereignty in order to combat the destruction of local and sustainable farm systems caused by the principles and practices of the WTO. Shiva, Vandana. 1991. The Violence of the Green Revolution. London: Zed Books. Vandana Shiva shows how the long-term negative efects of the Green Revolution outweigh the short-term yield increases in the fertile region of India known as the Punjab. Shiva lays out the long-term impacts of the Green Revolution—from increased pests and diseases, to water scarcity, greater inequality, and social conlict—which embed a structural violence against the people and the land of Punjab. Winnie, Mark. 2008. Closing the Food Gap. Boston: Beacon Press. Closing the Food Gap outlines the food policy reform that is needed to achieve food security for all income levels, and ofers suggestions for “projects, partners and policy” for the American food system. Wright, Angus and Wendy Wolford. 2003. To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil. Oakland: Food First Books. Filled with personal stories from within Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), To Inherit the Earth provides the historical, political and environmental story of the struggle and success of an agrarian reform movement to secure over 20 million acres of farmland. References Abugre, Charles. 1993. 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April 2, 2008. htp://web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21711307~pagePK:3 4370~piPK:42770~theSitePK:4607,00.html>> (accessed January 30, 2009). Index AATF see African Agricultural Technology Foundation ADM see Archer Daniels Midland Africa agrarian question 131–3 agroecology 147–56 biotechnology 140–4 civil society organizations 204–5 ending hunger 130–1, 156–8 Green Revolution 136–47 organic agriculture 148–9 Pan-African farmers’ platform 201–3 population growth 30 seed development 138, 139 small farms 112, 132–3 structural adjustment programs 45–9 sustainable agriculture 150–1, 152–3 urban agriculture 167 women 46, 131, 206–10 African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) 140–1, 142, 144 African Harvest Biotech Foundation 144 AGRA see Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa agribusiness global companies 20–1 opposition to 84–6 agricultural land, foreign ownership 96–7, 130–1 agriculture Africa 45–9, 131–58 agroecological 99–111 climate impacts 3, 14–15, 121–7 development policies 24, 26–37, 37–45, 94–6 Green Revolution 24, 26–37 NAFTA impacts 56–7 organic 102, 103, 107, 111, 148–9 overproduction 24–5 sustainable 99–127, 150–1 traditional methods 117–18, 120–1, 126–7 urban 156–7, 165–8 World Bank policies 37–49, 94–6 agroecology Africa 147–56 biodiversity 119–20, 126 Brazil 104–6 deinitions 102 productivity 103–11 science of 99–103 small farms 112–27 agrofuels 68–80 environmental impacts 76–7 impact on food prices 15–16, 76 land availability 79, 80 second generation 77–80 United States 169, 172–3 Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) 93, 137–47 biotechnology 144–5 future of 145–7, 151–6 participation 154–5 policy advocacy 138–9 Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS) 138, 139, 141 soil health program 138 Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) 20, 72, 74–5, 76, 134 Asia, small farms 112 Associations for the Maintenance of Smallholder Agriculture (AMAPs), France 175 Bajo el Asfalto Esta la Huerta (BAH), Spain 167, 175 bananas, genetically modiied 142 bean production, traditional methods 120–1 254 FOOD REBELLIONS! Benin, World Bank policies 44 Bhopal disaster 35 biodiversity, small farms 119–20, 126 biodynamic agriculture 102 biotechnology African crops 140–4 Green Revolution 135 Brazil agroecology 104–6 agrofuel production 70–1 Bunch, Roland 150 Burkina Faso, genetically modiied crops 142 Butz, Earl 60 CAFOs see conined animal feedlot operations CAFTA-DR see Central AmericaDominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement Cambodia, land grabs 96 Campesino a Campesino 114–16, 183 Cancun, Mexico, trade talks protests 51, 52 CAP see Common Agricultural Policy Cargill 20, 72, 76, 78, 134–5 Center for Information on Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA) 150 Central America, traditional methods 117–18, 120–1 Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) 41, 58 CFA see Comprehensive Framework for Action CGIAR see Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research Chicago Initiative on Global Agricultural Development 179 Chile, import surge 43 China Doha trade talks 54–5 meat consumption 11, 14 chinampas, Mexico 118 CIMMYT see International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat civil society organizations, Africa 204–5 climate change 3, 14–15, 121–7 Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) 172–3 Cold War 26 Colombia, agrarian reform 45 commodity prices, speculation 16–18 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 66–7, 175 community supported agriculture (CSA) United Kingdom 175 United States 65, 161, 165, 166–7 Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) 133 Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA) 94–8, 127, 131 conined animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) 12–13 Connecticut, food policy council 171 Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) 108, 135, 136 Conway, Gordon 137 CSA see community supported agriculture Cuba, urban agriculture 156–7, 158 De Schuter, Olivier 93 debt, India 32–4 Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture 216–17 deforestation, agrofuels 71, 76 de-peasantization 45 developing countries see global South INDEx 255 development policies Africa 30 agriculture 24, 26–37 diet, health impacts 3 Doha round, trade talks 51–2, 54–5, 86 dumping, food surpluses 24–5, 44, 134 DuPont 18, 71–2, 139 ecological agriculture see agroecology economic crisis, global South 36–7 Ecuador, food sovereignty law 180 Egypt, genetically modiied crops 142 ELAA see Latin American School for Agroecology energy use, global 79, 80 environmental impacts, biofuels 76–7 ethanol production 68–80, 169, 172–3 Ethiopia export crops 47 Tigray Project 152–3 Europe, food sovereignty movement 2, 175–7 European Union (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 66–7, 175 trade liberalization 47 FAO see Food and Agriculture Organization farm laborers, United States 172–3 farmers agrofuel production 72–5 debt 32–4 sustainable agriculture 111–27, 152–3 United States 64–6 see also smallholders feedlots 12–14, 61 inancial crisis 4, 91–3 Florida, tomato industry 172–3 food, right to 100–1, 174 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Africa Conference (2008), African Women’s Statement 206–10 Food for the Cities program 167–8 High-Level Conference on World Food Security (Rome, 2008) 9, 90, 92, 94, 134–5 High-Level Ministerial Meeting on Food Security for All (Madrid, 2009) 178, 211–13 Initiative on Soaring Food Prices 87 food aid 24–5, 26, 87, 88–90 food banks, United States 62–3 food crisis, causes of 6–10, 19–22, 81–2 “food deserts”, United States 8, 62, 73, 160, 165 food industry, monopolies 18–19, 20–1 food insecurity, United States 8, 9, 62–3, 73 food policy councils (FPCs), United States 170–1 food prices agrofuel impacts 69–70 causes of inlation 10–18 response to 87, 169 rising 6, 9–10 food production agroecological 107, 111 increasing 7–8 small farms 112–27 Food Project, United States 162, 164, 165 food riots 6–7, 9 food security, small farmers 112 food sovereignty Africa 132 deinition 86 Europe 175–7 movements for 2–3, 84, 86, 181–4 United States 159–74 food system global 20–1, 23 politics of 168–9 256 FOOD REBELLIONS! transformation of 84–6, 98–129, 178–84 United States 159–74 FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) 97–8 France, Associations for the Maintenance of Smallholder Agriculture (AMAPs) 175 free trade, deinition 49 free trade agreements (FTAs) 25, 55–9 frjol tapado 120 Gates Foundation 138–9, 140–1, 144–5, 153, 179 General Agreement on Tarifs and Trade (GATT) 50 genetically modiied organisms (GMOs) Africa 140–4 agrofuels 77, 78 climate change impacts 124–5 Europe 67 impacts on biodiversity 119–20 Ghana agricultural imports 41 export crops 47 global South economic crisis 36–7 food deicit 21–2 food imports 42–4 urban agriculture 167–8 GMOs see genetically modiied organisms grain production, prices 61, 64–6, 76 green manure 111, 120–1 Green Revolution 24, 26–37, 103, 134–5 Africa 136–47 greenhouse gases agricultural emissions 15, 121 agrofuel emissions 76 Growing Power, United States 166 Guatemala, ecological agriculture 110 Gulf States, land grabs 96 Gutal, Shalmali 98 Haiti economic crisis 38–9 food riots 6, 39 health, diet impacts 3 High-Level Conference on World Food Security (Rome, 2008) 9, 90, 92, 94, 134–5 High-Level Ministerial Meeting on Food Security for All (Madrid, 2009) 178, 211–13 High-Level Task Force (HLTF), United Nations (UN), 93–4 high-yielding varieties (HYVs) 27, 134 Hof, Dena 52 human rights, food 100–1, 174 hunger causes of 7–10 ending of 130–1, 156–8 gendered 10 Green Revolution impact 27 timeline 9 IAASTD see International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development IFC see International Finance Corporation IMF see International Monetary Fund import surges 42–4 India Doha trade talks 54–5 Green Revolution 32–5 meat consumption 11 indigenous agricultural techniques 118, 126–7 Indonesia, deforestation 71 integrated rural development projects (IRDPs) 31 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science INDEx 257 and Technology for Development (IAASTD) 127–9, 179 International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) 26, 124, 139, 140 International Finance Corporation (IFC), livestock production 12, 14 International Food Sovereignty Forum 176 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis 85–6 Poverty Reduction Growth Facility 90 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 25 International Planning Commitee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), Civil Society Statement on the World Food Emergency 90, 185–93 International Potato Center 140, 145 International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) 26, 109, 139, 145 International Service for Acquisition of Agricultural Biotechnology Applications 144 IRDPs see integrated rural development projects IRRI see International Rice Research Institute irrigation, intensive 34 Agroecology (ELAA) 105–6 Lee Kyung Hae 52 livestock, development projects 12–13 Knoxville, Tennessee, food policy council 170 Kuwait, land grabs 96 Madagascar, rice production 109–10, 147 maize, genetically modiied 140, 143 Malawi, structural adjustment 47, 48 Malaysia, deforestation 71 Manor House Agricultural Center, Kenya 149 Mavera corn 78 meat consumption, impact on food prices 11–14 Mexico Green Revolution 28–9 NAFTA 56–7, 58 tortilla crisis 76 traditional methods 118 Millennium Development Goals 8, 9, 94 Moldova, World Bank policies 44 monopolies, food industry 18–19, 20–1 Monsanto 20, 72, 77, 78, 129, 139, 140 Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), Brazil 104–6 Mucuna pruriens (velvet bean) 120–1 multinational corporations agrofuels 71–2, 78 biotechnology 140–1, 142–4 grain price impacts 76 Green Revolution beneits 134–5 Mwamba, Simon 154–5 land grabs 96–7, 130–1 Land, Territory and Dignity Forum (Porto Alegre, 2006) 194–200 Latin America Campesino a Campesino 114–16, 183 small farms 112 Latin American School for NAFTA see North American Free Trade Agreement Naylor, George 53 neoliberalism 37 New Global Partnership for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition 178–9 New Mexico, food policy council 170 258 FOOD REBELLIONS! New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 137 Nicaragua, trade liberalization 41 nitrogen, green manure 111 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 55–8 Oakland, California, food policy council 171 obesity 3, 160 oil price, impact on food prices 11 organic agriculture 102, 103, 107, 111 Africa 148–9 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 26 organoponicos, Cuba 156–7 overproduction 24–5 Paarlberg, Robert 179 Pakistan, land grabs 96 Pan-African farmers’ platform, declaration 201–3 participation, agricultural development 154–5 Participatory Land Use Management (PELUM) network 147 People’s Grocery, United States 166–7 permaculture 102 Philippines, rice imports 42–3 Plataforma Rural, Spain 176 politics, food system 168–9, 182 polyculture, productivity 113, 116–17 population growth global 7 sub-Saharan Africa 30 potatoes, genetically modiied 142–3 poverty cause of hunger 7–8 structural adjustment as cause of 48 privatization, agriculture 40, 46–7 Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS) 138, 139, 141 Program for a Green Revolution in Africa (ProAGRA) 140 Punjab, agrarian crisis 32–5 racism, US food system 160–4 Real Food Challenge 163 Renessen 78 renewable energy 75–7 Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) 74–5 Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) 74 rice ecological agriculture 109–10 genetically modiied 143 Philippines 42–3 Rockefeller Foundation 28, 137, 154 Sauer, Carl 28 Seatle, protests 50 seed development, Africa 138, 139 Senegal, import surge 43 Shiva, Vandana 34–5 smallholders Africa 132–3 biodiversity 119–20, 126 climate change 121–7 productivity 113, 116–17 sustainable agriculture 111–27, 152–3 traditional methods 117–18, 126–7 see also farmers social justice movements 166, 182–3 sorghum, genetically modiied 140 South see global South South America, urban agriculture 167–8 Soviet Union, food-for-oil program 26 Spain Bajo el Asfalto Esta la Huerta (BAH) 167, 175 food justice movements 176 speculation, impact on food prices 16–18 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 25, 37–45 INDEx 259 Africa 46–9 Student Farmworker Alliance 163 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee (SNCC) 163 subsidies 24–5, 73 Sudan, land grabs 96, 97, 130 suicides, farmers 32, 35, 52 surplus production 24–5 sustainable agriculture Africa 150–1 agroecology 99–103 Ethiopia 152–3 Latin America 114–16 productivity 103–11 small farms 112–27 sweet potato, genetically modiied 140 switchgrass 77–8 Syngenta 72, 77, 129, 139 Tanzania, World Bank policies 44 Tigray Project 152–3 tomatoes, genetically modiied 142 Toronto, food policy council 170–1 trade, global 49–54 United Nations (UN), High-Level Task Force (HLTF) 93–4 United States agribusiness 3, 20–1 agricultural policy 60–4 agrofuels 15, 69–70, 74–5, 169, 172–3 Call to Action 169, 214–15 commodities market 16–18 community supported agriculture (CSA) 65, 161, 165, 166–7 Farm Bill 9, 60–4, 169 farm laborers 172–3 inancial crisis 91–2 food aid 88 Food, Conservation and Energy Act (2008) 64 “food deserts” 8, 62, 73, 160, 165 food insecurity 8, 9, 62–3, 73 food justice movement 2, 159–74 food policy councils (FPCs) 170–1 food system 159–74 free trade agreements (FTAs) 58–9 Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act 179 NAFTA 55–8 overproduction 24–5 Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) 74–5 structural racism 160–1 subsidies 47, 73, 169 urban agriculture 165–8 unregulated market 61 urban agriculture Cuba 156–7, 158 Spain 167 United States 165–8 Uruguay Round, trade talks 50 velvet beans 117, 120–1 Via Campesina Brazil 104–6 Europe 176 food sovereignty 2 WTO protests 53 Vivero Alamar, Cuba 156–7 vulnerability, climate change 123–5 Washington Consensus 37 water resources, depletion 34 weather hazards, vulnerability 123–5 WFP see World Food Program women Africa 46, 131, 206–10 Green Revolution impacts 31 hungry 10 working conditions, farm laborers 172–3 World Bank agricultural development policies 37–45, 94–6 260 FOOD REBELLIONS! crisis 85–6 global food policy 87, 90 livestock projects 12–13 Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs) 44 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 25, 46–9 World Development Report 2008 44, 45, 48, 94–5 World Food Conference (1974) 9 World Food Program (WFP) 88–9, 90–1 World Food Summit (1996) 9, 185, 206 World Trade Organization (WTO) 25, 49–54, 62, 85–6 Yara Fertilizer 138, 139, 144, 145 Yemen, World Bank policies 44 youth, food justice movement 163–4 About the authors Eric Holt-Giménez is executive director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy. He is the author of Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, which chronicles two and a half decades of farmers’ movements in Mexico and Central America. Trained in political economy and agroecology, Eric has worked as a rural organizer, trainer, researcher, and professor of development studies in countries of Latin America, Asia, Africa and the United States for over 30 years. Raj Patel is an activist, academic, and author of the critically acclaimed Stufed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Batle for the World Food System. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and works with the South African Shackdwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. He is also a fellow at Food First and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has degrees from Cornell, the London School of Economics, and Oxford University. More books from Pambazuka Press Available at www.pambazukapress.org Ending Aid Dependence Yash Tandon ‘The message of this book needs to be seriously considered and debated by all those that are interested in the development of the countries of the South. If this means the rethinking of old concepts and methods of work, then let it be so’ Benjamin W. Mkapa, former President of Tanzania (1995–2005) Developing countries reliant on aid want to escape this dependence, and yet they appear unable to do so. This book shows how they may liberate themselves from the aid that pretends to be developmental but is not. ISBN: 978-1-906387-31-0 September 2008 £9.95 158pp Where is Uhuru? Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa Issa G. Shivji Edited by Godwin R. Murunga The neoliberal project promised to engender development and prosperity and expand democratic space in Africa. However, several decades on its reforms have delivered on few of its promises. Whether one is examining the rewards of multiparty politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the processes of land reform, women’s rights to property or the pan-Africanist project for emancipation, Issa G. Shivji, Mwalimu Nyerere Professor of African Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, illustrates how these have all sufered severe body blows. Where, indeed, is Uhuru? ISBN: 978-1-906387-46-4 April 2009 £16.95 257pp Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Coloniser? Edited by Hakima Abbas and Yves Niyiragira This book ofers a critical analysis of aid to Africa. The authors examine the framework of aid from ‘traditional’ Western donors while investigating how the emergence of new donors to Africa has changed the international aid discourse. The uniquely African perspectives in this book provide both a framework for reshaping aid and an alternative development paradigm rooted in Africa’s selfdetermination. Contributing authors to this volume include Samir Amin, Patrick Bond and Demba Moussa Dembele. ISBN: 978-1-906387-38-9 July 2009 £12.95 The Crash of International Finance Capital and its Implications for the Third World Dani Wadada Nabudere This book irst appeared in 1987 following the Black Monday crash. With new material on contemporary conditions in the global economy, this re-issue argues that capitalism exists in a permanent state of crisis, a crisis which will ultimately escalate into a megacrisis for which world leaders will have litle in the way of a solution. Are we in that crisis now? ISBN: 978-1-906387-43-3 September 2009 £16.95 SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa Edited by Sokari Ekine Activists in Africa are using mobile technology to organise and document their experiences so the phones’ capabilities are having a dynamic inluence on their aims and strategies. This book’s authors – activists, academics and technology specialists – look at inequalities in access to technology based on gender and rural and urban usage, and consider how mobile phones’ increasing integration with the internet helps activists internationalise their struggles. ISBN: 978-1-906387-35-8 October 2009 £9.95 More books from Food First Beyond the Fence A Journey to the Roots of the Migration Crisis Dori Stone This book examines how U.S./Mexico policy affects families, farmers, and businesses on both sides of the border, exposing irretrievable losses, but also hopeful advances. Companion DVD, Caminos: The Immigrant’s Trail, with study guide. Paperback, $16.95 Agrofuels in the Americas Edited by Rick Jonasse This book takes a critical look at the recent expansion of the agrofuels industry in the U.S. and Latin America and its effect on hunger, labor rights, trade and the environment. Paperback, $18.95 Alternatives to the Peace Corps A Guide to Global Volunteer Opportunities, Twelfth Edition Edited by Caitlin Hachmyer Newly expaned and updated, this easy-to-use guidebook is the original resource for finding community-based, grassroots volunteer work—the kind of work that changes the world, one person at a time. Paperback, $11.95 Campesino a Campesino Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture Eric Holt-Giménez The voices and stories of dozens of farmers are captured in this first written history of the farmer-to-farmer movement, which describes the social, political, economic and environmental circumstances that shape it. Paperback, $19.95 Promised Land Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform Edited by Peter Rosset, Raj Patel and Michael Courville Agrarian reform is back at the center of the national and rural development debate. The essays in this volume critically analyze a wide range of competing visions of land reform. Paperback, $21.95 Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance Transforming Food Production in Cuba Edited by Fernando Funes, Luis García, Martin Bourque, Nilda Pérez and Peter Rosset Unable to import food or farm chemicals and machines in the wake of the Soviet bloc’s collapse and a tightening U.S. embargo, Cuba turned toward sustainable agriculture, organic farming, urban gardens and other techniques to secure its food supply. This book gives details of that remarkable achievement. Paperback, $18.95 The Future in the Balance Essays on Globalization and Resistance Walden Bello. Edited with a preface by Anuradha Mittal A collection of essays by global south activist and scholar Walden Bello on the myths of development as prescribed by the World Trade Organization and other institutions, and the possibility of another world based on fairness and justice. Paperback, $13.95 Views from the South The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries Edited by Sarah Anderson Foreword by Jerry Mander. Afterword by Anuradha Mittal This rare collection of essays by activists and scholars from the global south describes, in pointed detail, the effects of the WTO and other Bretton Woods institutions. Paperback, $12.95 Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, Third Edition George A. Collier with Elizabeth Lowery-Quaratiello Foreword by Peter Rosset The classic on the Zapatistas in its third edition, including a preface by Rodolfo Stavenhagen. Paperback, $16.95 America Needs Human Rights Edited by Anuradha Mittal and Peter Rosset This anthology includes writings on understanding human rights, poverty and welfare reform in America. Paperback, $13.95 The Paradox of Plenty Hunger in a Bountiful World Edited by Douglas H. Boucher Excerpts from Food First’s best writings on world hunger and what we can do to change it. Paperback, $18.95 Education for Action Undergraduate and Graduate Programs that Focus on Social Change Fourth Edition Edited by Joan Powell An updated authoritative and easy-to-use guidebook that provides information on progressive programs in a wide variety of fields. Paperback, $12.95 We encourage you to buy Food First Books from your local independent bookseller; if they don’t have them in stock, they can usually order them for you fast. To find an independent bookseller in your area, go to www.booksense.com. Food First books are also available through major online booksellers (Powell’s, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble), and through the Food First website, www.foodfirst.org.You can also order direct from our distributor, Perseus Distribution, at (800) 343-4499. If you have trouble locating a Food First title, write, call, or e-mail us: Food First 398 60th Street Oakland, CA 94618-1212 USA Tel: (510) 654-4400 Fax: (510) 654-4551 E-mail: foodfirst@foodfirst.org Web: www.foodfirst.org If you are a bookseller or other reseller, contact our distributor, Perseus Distribution, at (800) 343-4499, to order. Films from Food First The Greening of Cuba Jaime Kibben A profiling of Cuban farmers and scientists working to reinvent a sustainable agriculture based on ecological principles and local knowledge. DVD (In Spanish with English subtitles), $35.00 America Needs Human Rights A film told in the voices of welfare mothers, homeless men and women, low-wage workers, seniors, veterans and health care workers. DVD, $19.95 Caminos: The Immigrant’s Trail Juan Carlos Zaldivar Stories of Mexican farmers who were driven off their land, forced to leave their families and risk their lives to seek work in the U.S. DVD and Study Guide, $20.00 How to Become a Member or Intern of Food First Join Food First Private contributions and membership gifts fund the core of Food First/ Institute for Food and Development Policy’s work. Each member strengthens Food First’s efforts to change a hungry world. We invite you to join Food First. As a member you will receive a 20 percent discount on all Food First books. You will also receive our quarterly publications, Food First News and Views and Backgrounders, providing information for action on current food and hunger issues in the United States and around the world. If you want to subscribe to our Internet newsletter, People Putting Food First, send us an e-mail at foodfirst@foodfirst.org. All contributions are tax deductible. You are also invited to give a gift membership to others interested in the fight to end hunger. www.foodfirst.org Become an Intern for Food First There are opportunities for interns in research, advocacy, campaigning, publishing, computers, media and publicity at Food First. Our interns come from around the world. They are a vital part of the organization and make our work possible. To become a member or apply to become an intern, just call or visit our website: www.foodfirst.org. Agriculture / Social Movements / Environment Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice The real story behind the world food crisis and what we can do about it. In this very timely book, two of the most prominent critics of the global food system dissect the causes of hunger and the food price crisis, locating them in a political economy of capitalist industrial production dominated by corporations and driven by the search for proits for the few instead of the welfare of the many. The picture that emerges is a political economy of global production that is failing badly to feed the world and is itself contributing to the spread of inequalities that promote hunger. Professor Walden Bello, University of the Philippines At a time of economic crisis, sustainable agriculture and the economic empowerment it can generate will be key to the survival of the many African families headed by women. Professor Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Challenge for Africa (Heinemann, 2009) At long last, a book which confronts the real issues. It is vital reading for all concerned with the right to food. Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Food Rebellions! provides an analysis that is clear, documented and searing in its challenge to the powers that be. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, president of the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations Cover photos Top: EPA/Kena Betancur Bottom: Leonor Hurtado