TWN Info Service on Sustainable Agriculture
27 April 2023
Third World Network
www.twn.my
Dear Friends and Colleagues
Food sovereignty addresses poverty, hunger, inequality and climate change
The right to food is a fundamental human right. Yet, the current model of food production is failing to deliver this right, because although enough food is grown to feed the world’s population twice over, it is done so to maximise profits for the corporations which control the supply chains.
According to a recent report by War on Want, there are increasingly only two paths forward in a world swept and shattered by climate breakdown, famine, drought, and war, supply chain threats, political, economic, ecological, and social crises.
One is a path for the few: a continuation of Global North monopoly capital and endless corporate profit, facilitated by corporate-friendly national and international policies imposing a one-size-fits-all agricultural system across the planet. It means export-oriented, chemical-intensive agricultural production.
The alternative is a path and a world for the many, the peasant and popular path to development: the struggle for food sovereignty under the banner of networks and movements along with efforts to regain land from neocolonial control. It is the struggle for just national distributions of land, and for agrarian reform. Peasant agroecology as the basis of just, egalitarian, democratic national farming systems is absolutely central in moving towards food sovereignty. Food is not a commodity, and land is not a financial asset – both are fundamental human rights we must defend.
The crises of climate, inequality, injustice and poverty are closely interconnected. Addressing these multiple global crises requires true internationalism, a movement of movements which acknowledges diversity and the transformations needed towards a shared vision of the future of our food systems.
We reproduce below the Preface, and Conclusion and Recommendations of the report.
With best wishes,
Third World Network
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PROFITING FROM HUNGER
War on Want
waronwant.org/sites/default/files/2023-02/Profiting%20from%20hunger%20PDF%20download.pdf
Dec 2022
Preface
More than a decade has passed since the publication of War on Want’s 2011 report, ‘Food Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Global Food System’, which illustrated how corporate capitalism is driving global hunger; through the control of agricultural production, large-scale global trade and the widespread sale of agricultural ‘inputs’ such as genetically modified seeds and chemical fertilisers.
Since then, many of these problems have intensified and – at the same time – complex new challenges have emerged. The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, with its austerity measures imposed by international financial institutions on governments around the world, have exacerbated poverty and inequality in many Global South countries and increased their debt, deepening their economic crises. Meanwhile, mounting militarisation around the world has heavily impacted food and nutrition, disrupting food supply chains and destroying harvests.
On top of this, the world is now in the grip of the climate crisis, which is already having severe impacts particularly on countries of the Global South, causing frequent and intense climate disasters which are devastating the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. The level of disruption to global food production is one of the many challenges deeply connected to the worsening climate crisis and illustrates how unsustainable the current global industrial food system is.
1.5°C of global heating risks crop failure of staple crops in major food-producing countries. While increased heatwaves, droughts and floods from climate breakdown are already exposing millions of people to acute food insecurity. At the same time, the industrial model of food production, a legacy of colonialism extended further through the Green Revolution and neoliberal policies, is among the primary drivers of the climate crisis: between 21% and 34% of global greenhouse emissions are related to this rigged system of food production.
The recent Covid-19 pandemic represents another shock to the economic crisis that has been unfolding across the last decade. This structural crisis of neoliberalism is at the root of the economic and debt crisis of the countries in the Global South: it has caused widening inequality between countries and within countries. These worldwide macroeconomic and structural injustices are having concrete impacts on the most marginalised communities around the world, affecting the cost of primary goods such as food, fuel, and energy.
Today, the corporate food system, the same system responsible for approximately one third of global greenhouse emissions, is a major promoter of damaging false climate solutions, so-called ‘nature-based’ or ‘nature positive’ models. Multinational agribusinesses are peddling the concept that only through technological fixes, the digitalisation of agriculture and the acquisition of land for carbon markets, we will be able to come out of the climate crisis and stay below 1.5°C.
What is really being proposed by corporate agriculture is the further concentration of land into the hands of a few; and the continued dispossession of peasants, Indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, and other food producers in the Global South. If allowed, this could lead to new colonial-style land grabbing under the guise of climate solutions. All the way through the production chain, from seed to plate, the global food system is inextricably connected to the climate crisis, and tweaks to the current dominant model of food production will not meet these challenges. In fact, if left, multinational agribusinesses will continue to dominate and control climate responses to further their own agenda: radical alternatives are urgently needed.
However, there is hope. A growing movement of peasants and food producers around the world are reclaiming an alternative food system based on the principles of food sovereignty: ‘the fundamental right of all peoples, nations and states to control food and agricultural systems and policies, ensuring everyone has adequate, affordable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food’. The food sovereignty movement not only provides a response to poverty, hunger, and inequality, but a real solution to cool the planet. Food sovereignty can take different shapes: from struggles for the right to land and agrarian reform in the face of land grabbing and displacement, to the fight for the right to use peasant-owned and traditional seeds. It can take the form of peasant agroecology – a science, a social movement, and a way of life – to local and low-cost climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. It has meant intensive work for the recognition of a UN framework and legal instrument to defend people’s rights over their land, seeds, water and other natural resources; and daily struggles for better working conditions for farmworkers in export-oriented farms in the Global South, and in poultry factories in the Global North.
War on Want has been at the forefront of the fight against poverty, hunger, and inequality since its founding more than 70 years ago. Today, we are still working with our partners around the world to bring forward a different model of food production and distribution, based on the principles of food sovereignty. The right to food is a fundamental human right, which protects the rights of all people to live in dignity; free from hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. Yet, the current model of food production is failing to deliver this right, because although enough food is grown to feed the world’s population twice over, it is done so to maximise profits for the corporations which control the supply chains. Grain sits rotting in agricultural silos while people go hungry.
Meeting the challenge of keeping global heating to 1.5°C means a transformation of our global systems, including the food system. War on Want is at the forefront of advocating for a radical Global Green New Deal to transform our global economy away from systems of limitless extraction and exploitation, towards those of care and repair. A radical Global Green New Deal for food means a transition to the model of food sovereignty as the only pathway to keep global heating to within 1.5°C, respect planetary boundaries and undo historical injustices rife within the global food system.
‘Profiting from hunger: popular resistance to corporate food systems’, will cover some of the most important changes and challenges of this decade. It will show the alternatives that peasant movements around the world are building – those who produce 70% of the world’s food on less than 30% of the world’s arable land – in response to the intersecting crises of climate, neocolonial corporate control, poverty, and inequality.
Food is not a commodity, and land is not a financial asset – both are fundamental human rights we must defend.
[….]
Conclusion and recommendations
There are increasingly only two paths forward in a world swept and shattered by climate breakdown, famine, drought, and war, supply chain threats, political, economic, ecological, and social crises.
One is a path for the few: a continuation of Global North monopoly capital and endless corporate profit, facilitated by corporate-friendly national and international policies imposing a one-size-fits-all agricultural system across the planet. It means export-oriented, chemical-intensive agricultural production. It is the path of sending pineapples from Philippines plantations, produced by farm labourers making four dollars a day, to supermarkets in the Global North where a single pineapple sells for four dollars. This means poverty, exploitation, and the poisoning of the countryside across the Global South.
From Moroccan agricultural workers in strawberry farms to Bangladeshi farmers struggling with salt-soaked fields, to Sri Lankans pushing back against monocrop plantations of palm oil replacing sustainable rubber polycrops; people across the Global South face a world-straddling northern-controlled network of supermarkets and processed foods, looking, smelling, and tasting the same.
The alternative is a path and a world for the many, the peasant and popular path to development: the struggle for food sovereignty under the banner of networks and movements such as La Via Campesina, along with efforts to regain land from neocolonial control. It is the struggle for just national distributions of land, and for agrarian reform. It means the fundamental reworking of national agricultural technologies to make them independent, or less dependent, on imported capital-intensive inputs. Food sovereignty and peasant agroecology also cools the heating planet.
Agroecology must be seen not only as a technical solution to the food, farming and climate crises, but a political, social and technical solution; resting on the autonomy and creative ingenuity of peasant smallholders and their capacity to resist monopoly capital and work outside of transnational monopoly supply and value chains.
Price fluctuations are a catastrophe in the Global South, and are very difficult for low-income and poor households in the Global North. Localising farming systems and restructuring social power into the hands of smallholders is key. For example, Zimbabwe, underwent radical anti-racist agrarian reform in the face of Global North sanctions, with agricultural plots redistributed from white settlers and given to black landless rural workers or urban dwellers – resulting in record harvests. Agrarian reforms imply a role for everyone, involving solidarity with peasants and poorer communities in the Global South brave enough to challenge landed power and take over land for their own use, including to feed their families and their people.
Yet, such struggles are just the beginning, and not the end. Peasant agroecology as the basis of just, egalitarian, democratic national farming systems is absolutely central in moving towards food sovereignty.
As peasant agroecology is a key to social and ecological development, it is also a key in tackling the climate crisis. With the food system responsible for almost one third of global emissions, a solution to the climate crisis must be connected to the agricultural and land management sector.
Our current global food system illustrates how closely interconnected the crises of climate, inequality, injustice and poverty are. The model of large scale, destructive agribusiness treats food as a commercial commodity to be traded for profit. It serves the interests of multinational corporations, and not the basic right of everyone to enough nutritious food to sustain a dignified life. A just transformation of the global food system to one based on the model of food sovereignty is crucial to address the root causes of the climate crisis, to ensure equality, and to bring an end to poverty and hunger.
These are the connections between the struggle for nationally based food-sovereign peasant agroecology and a peasant path to development, and a larger project for a Global or People’s Green New Deal to address the multiple global crises of inequality, poverty and climate breakdown.
Such a programme requires true internationalism, a movement of movements which acknowledges diversity and the transformations needed towards a shared vision of the future of our food systems.
This includes demands which go beyond ‘net zero’ to real zero emissions by 2030, with a goal of trying to limit the increase in average global temperatures to 1.5°C. That means the Global North must reach real zero by 2030, and the Global South by 2050; recognising that the Global South needs to continue to develop its industry and infrastructure. Solving the climate crisis must not come at the expense of the Global South’s right to development, or for states to provide decent lives for their people, and to eliminate poverty.
It requires:
- Delivering on the promised demands for US$100 billion in annual, new, and additional climate finance, as a floor goal and not as a ceiling; and to commit to new finance goals which reflect the reality that the cost of addressing the climate crisis in the Global South is far in excess of US$1 trillion annually, roughly equivalent, in fact, to annual US military spending.
- Agreeing on a global goal for adaptation that can support countries with their own self-determined plans for adaptation to the changing climate and ensuring that adequate financial and technological support is made available, if it is needed, wanted, and desired – without falling into the old trap of a renewed technological dependency of the Global South on the Global North, using the climate crisis to create new structures of oppression and exploitation.
- Reparations for climate damages, additional public finance in compensation to those already suffering the brunt of climate breakdown today. By climate reparations, we mean that countries must stop doing harm, by rapidly cutting their carbon emissions; repair harm, by providing technology and finance to support people around the world to adapt to the crisis; and compensate for harm that cannot be repaired, via payments to Global South countries for loss and damage.
- Recognising the existence of climate debt, part of the broader ecological debt linked to colonialism and capitalism. And that means recognising that people in states that depend on oil and gas exports, be they Trinidad and Tobago or Venezuela, have their own special needs for a just transition.
- Investing in real solutions: this means rejecting carbon off-setting, saying no to carbon markets, and yes to non-market cooperative approaches based on hard and constantly lowering caps on emissions, in order to reach genuine zero.
- Furthermore, it means anti-imperialism: real commitment to the political sovereignty of Global South countries, so that popular struggles for food sovereignty have the space to evolve. That means first of all cutting out the Global North policies which trample or seek or recolonise southern states: from the US-Saudi war on Yemen, to Global North sanctions which besiege countries opposing the northern imperialist agenda. Only if states can choose their own policies can they fight for climate debt on the world stage.
We need to be asking if any proposed measures will keep us below 1.5°C, whether they will allow humanity to thrive within planetary boundaries, whether they will undo or transcend historical injustices and power imbalances linked to colonialism and neocolonialism, and whether they will guarantee that everyone has a right to a dignified life.