Solutions do exist
More than 400 experts spent the past four years gathering the best ideas on how to ensure that agriculture addresses world hunger. In April 2008 they laid out their analyses and findings in the International Assessment of Agricultural Science, Knowledge and Technology for Development (IAASTD). Endorsed by 58 countries, this rigorous report calls for investment in small-scale, ecological farming; emphasizes the need for fair trade; and urges policies that protect peoples’ rights to democratically determine food and agricultural policies. For detail go to: UN Assessment
Recent commentary and calls to action
Open letter to Obama - broad coalition calls for economic reform to include sound farm & food policy, 12/15/08 (PDF)
Call to Action in the U.S. and around the world
"Farmer in Chief" - an open letter to the next President - by Michael Pollan, New York Times, 10/12/08 (PDF)
- Food is for eating, not profiteering
- Winner and losers in the world food system
- Fix the food system - a global call to action
- Civil society demands food justice in Africa
- Solutions - the UN Agriculture Assessment
Unchecked profiteering in both capital and agricultural commodity markets has created inflationary “bubbles” where market prices are divorced from real-world indicators of value. But whereas the United States Treasury and Federal Reserve have enormous cash reserves to tap, international grain reserves were dismantled in the 1990s. Today, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates, the world’s grain reserves would only last 53 days.
If the bad news is that the global food system is even less resilient than the global financial system, the good news is that ways of understanding and fixing the food system have already been identified. Over the past many months, the contributing causes of the ongoing crisis have been largely identified: the diversion of cereal crops to agrofuel production; floods and drought exacerbated by climate change; high oil prices; increased meat consumption worldwide; and speculative trading on food commodities markets.
At the root of this series of triggers is a relatively new system for producing and distributing food in a globalized market.
Winners and losers in the world food system
Over the last four decades, international development projects and trade policy regimes have effectively dismantled agricultural self-sufficiency and smallholder farming in the global South while positioning large agribusiness corporations to profit from controlling more and more of the world’s food system. Today, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge and Cargill control 90% of the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Monsanto controls one-fifth of seed production while Bayer Crop Science, Syngenta, and BASF control half of the total agro-chemical market. This kind of corporate consolidation pays handsomely. Since the beginning of the world food crisis in 2005, ADM’s profits have soared 73%, Cargill’s are up 138%, and Bunge’s increased by 105%.
Meanwhile, food prices have skyrocketed in the last few years to unprecedented and unsustainable levels: the World Bank reports an 83% jump in three years; the FAO, a 45% spike in a recent nine-month period; and The Economist’s food-price index peaked in 2008 at its highest level since it began reporting on prices in 1845.
The net result is that the world’s poor have been priced out of the food market, throwing nearly a billion people who already had insufficient access to food into acute crisis. In Haiti, Morocco, Guinea, Mexico, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan, people have taken to the streets in mass protests. Governments are resorting to rationing, price freezes, and halting exports of key food staples such as rice in increasingly desperate attempts to stem the tide of growing domestic unrest. The world’s collective social fabric is on the line, and for good reason.