One of the most difficult problems that we are facing is feeding the world while at the same time protecting our planet. We are facing a situation where the manner in which food production is undertaken is undermining soil fertility, increasing carbon emissions, and pesticides and fertilisers are undermining water tables. In terms of the quantity of food being produced, we can easily feed the people on the planet as well as cover additional numbers. However, the manner in which food is being produced means that increasing numbers are living in food poverty; this is at the same time that there is massive waste of foodstuffs arising from the manner in which we produce, transport and distribute food. Additionally, rising prices of food are putting access to food out of reach of large numbers of people while cost of production of food is not rising. The problems that we are seeing arise due to political and economic decisions of governments and the economic system which prioritises profits over ensuring access to food for the majority. As such, the fundamental right to food is being undermined to fulfil the needs of a system based upon profitability.
Capitalism is a world system; the interrelationships between the centre (core) consisting of the advanced capitalist economies (those countries with full capitalist relations of production and distribution) and the periphery (developing capitalist economies often in a dependent relation with the advanced capitalist world) make up the world capitalist system (http://en.wikipedia.org/...). Emergent economies (or the semi-periphery) bridge the gap between the centre and periphery and are characterised by combinations of high levels of economic development with lesser capitalist development in the same country. In countries of the capitalist periphery, you find zones of capitalist penetration in export sectors existing alongside of lesser developed sectors of domestic production. In terms of regions, even in the centre economies, like the EU, there is a clear periphery consisting of both South Europe and Eastern Europe. In China, there is a clear core area along the coast, with much lower economic development as you move further inland. At this time, all countries are part of the world capitalist system composed of uneven and combined development within countries and regions (as such, discussions of first and third world do not express the realities of the world economy, as it appears as though these are separate worlds that do not interrelate) with various interrelationships and dependencies between countries, regions and sectors of the world capitalist economy.
This is an extremely large topic that can only be dealt with in a cursory manner in this piece. Moreover, I am an economist, but not someone that has a lot of knowledge of modern agricultural techniques of production, so I am hoping that others with more specialised knowledge can chime in. I would strongly encourage people to read the piece by War on Want.
In order to understand the situation, we need to do a bit of historical examination to trace the roots of the problem. Moreover, we need to examine alternative ways and tactics to produce food. I find myself returning to the topic that I had addressed partly in my first piece for daily kos (http://www.dailykos.com/...) which addressed the problem of rising food prices and decreased availability of land arising from the production of bio-fuels. That piece only partially addressed some of the problems that we are witnessing, but I find the original analysis cogent and will be reiterating it here.
There are three things that will be addressed in this discussion, the first concerns the historical dimension of the crisis, the second addresses the problems with the discussion of food security and compare that to food sovereignty, and the third addresses the implications of the choice of food sovereignty and how it implies different forms of policies than those addressed by the mainstream and different tactics to ensure food sovereignty.
I. Some Historical discussion:
“Global food prices have fallen slightly from their historic peak in February but a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, published in October 10, says that high, unpredictable prices are likely to continue. The global food price index produced by the FAO reached a historic peak of 238 points in February, well above the peak of 213.5 reached in 2008. Prices have since eased and in October the index registered 216 points. However it is still 5% higher than in October 2010. In 2009, for the first time in human history, over a billion people were officially classified as living in hunger, while another two billion live in perpetual food insecurity. So today, despite unprecedented wealth existing in the world, over 40% of all human beings are either permanently malnourished or suffering from varying degrees of food insecurity (Thompson, S, http://www.4edu.info/..., p.4).”
The roots of the problem of both rising food prices and rising numbers of people living in food poverty are both structural (general related to the system of production and profits as the basis of capitalist production rather than people’s needs) and cyclical (relating more to the overall economic crisis). Structurally, we need to examine the Green Revolution, neoliberal export-led growth and free-trade policies, the power of multinational agribusiness corporations all of which led to the removal of peasants from the land and production being undertaken upon large scale agricultural plots sometimes domestically owned by local MNCs and sometimes by international MNCs. Cyclically, we need to address the issue of speculation in food on the commodity and future exchange and its impact on food prices which was clearly present in 2008-9.
A. Structural causes for rising food prices:
1) Neoliberal economic policies:
The push by the World Bank and IMF towards export-led production in the capitalist periphery has severely affected the production of food in the capitalist periphery. Export-led growth (or development) policies essentially are the use of export to enable "economic development" ... except that this is based upon free trade arguments, free-trade zones (no taxes are paid in these for a designated period of time; profits are repatriated), privatisation of natural resources like water and minerals (public-private partnerships and privatisation of the resources themselves), food production (removal of subsidies for producers as well as elimination of tariffs against import), and energy provision rather than enable domestic development and development of the domestic market). It leads to an essentially dependent development on the international market (as that is how you are supposed to develop surpluses for industrial development purposes). There is always the danger that the developing economy (depending on resources) winds up in primary goods exports (raw materials, agricultural export, extractive industries) as that is the "comparative advantage" of the country. Invariably, to attract MNCs investment in free-trade zones, wages are kept low and unions are kept weak. Add to this the high levels of exploitation both in free-trade zones and domestic production and you wind up with a combined and uneven development (with highly developed industries for export and low levels of domestic industrial and agriculture as the promised economic development somehow never quite makes it to the sectors producing for domestic markets).
“Over the last thirty years, virtually all the countries of the poor south have been forced to follow the prescriptions of the IMF and the rules of the WTO. The conditions they have had forced on them have always been a mixture of the same toxic ingredients; liberalising trade, the dismantling of tariffs on food imports, reduction of the role of the state through deregulation and privatisation and the reorientation of national economies towards the global market. The Agreement on Agriculture, forced on the developing countries as part of the Uruguay Round and policed by the WTO, committed countries to opening their agricultural markets through tariff reductions on food imports and the abolition of subsidies to farming communities. This was reinforced by a range of bilateral free trade agreements (Thompson, Sean, http://www.4edu.info/..., p.6).”
There are several parts of this process.
First, there is the forced removal of subsidies for food production in favour of free-trade in foodstuff. This means that domestic producers are now competing against countries where food production is heavily subsidised (e.g., US and EU). Since the subsidies exist in the advanced capitalist world and are given irrespective of whether or not the good is sold at a profit, these countries can actually sell goods below the cost of production without effecting profitability in the early stages of penetration of the market. This undercuts domestic producers who can not compete with the initial cheaper prices of food from the US and EU.
Under IMF and World Bank demands in exchange for loans this process has enabled advanced capitalist countries to penetrate food production in the periphery undercutting subsistence farmers and peasants and forcing them off the land (they either wind up working for these MNCs as farm labour or migrate to urban areas).
Secondly, there is also enabled the creation of free-trade zones (owned by MNCs) where food production is not done to fulfil the needs of the domestic market, but rather the needs of advanced capitalist countries. These free-trade zones are owned by international and domestic MNCs. Shift in production of domestic subsistence crops towards luxury food stuff for export has decreased the amount of food available for consumption in these countries. In all these cases, domestic food production was undermined and countries that were self-sufficient in food production have wound up dependent upon the import of food from the US.
Third, international aid agencies like USAID have brought in foodstuffs and distributed this for free in a period of crisis which then undercuts domestic production. In Haiti, NGO’s have distributed food aid sometimes during harvest season which has pushed down market prices pushing agricultural producers out of production. In one case, relating to the French NGO Initiative Development (ID) in 1993, the fall in food prices was tracked from original price of 13 gourdes per mamit to 5 in the period from April 15th-June18th 1993; the same tactic of delivering food aid during harvest time was seen as well in 1996, and 1999 [see Schwartz, T (2010) Travesty in Haiti, p. 101, see also appendix C and D; this not only applied to ID, but also CARE, PISANO and Agro Acton Aleman (AAA), see also the excellent piece by Allie123 discussing this chapter: http://www.dailykos.com/...]. US PL480 and USAID’s primary concerns were not providing humanitarian aid, but rather promotion of US foreign policy, business and agribusiness.
According to Schwartz, in 2000, on its own web-site, USAID’s stated reasons for food aid were: 1) expand US trade; 2) develop and expand export markets for US agricultural businesses; and 3) foster and encourage the development of US overseas enterprise (Schwartz, 2010, appendix D).”
Invariably, this process leads to increased dependency upon advanced capitalist countries for food and makes domestic food prices dependent upon the booms and busts of the international market upon which these countries are now dependent for food.
Notorious cases of this situation can be found in Egypt, Haiti and Mexico.
Egypt is one of the first examples of the impact of dangers of export-led growth policies in agriculture and the impact of free-trade policies. Under Nasser, domestic agricultural production increased using different agricultural cooperatives and following a land reform. Under Sadat’s infitah (“open-door”) policies, cooperatives were destroyed, food subsidies lifted, agricultural production was shifted towards exports, the same continued under Mubarak; insufficient domestic food production relative to rising population, concentration of land holdings and dependence upon foreign food imports have been the result of this so-called liberalisation imposed upon Egypt. (see: http://www.photius.com/..., http://www.photius.com/..., http://www.photius.com/... and http://www.photius.com/...).
Until the 1980s, Haiti was self-sufficient in food production. Following the overthrow of Baby Doc Duvalier in 1986, liberalisation of the economy became a priority. Cheap food from the US began flooding into the country driving out domestic agricultural producers, traders and millers. By the end of the 1990s, rice imports were greater than domestic rice production; the same thing happened in poultry production (see, p. 10).
Following the signing of the NAFTA agreement, employment in agriculture in Mexico fell from 8.1 m in the early 1990s to 6 m in 2006. Once self-sufficient in food, Mexico now imports 40% of the food it consumes. Large amounts of corn imports from the US are genetically modified and are contaminating native varieties, see pp. 8 and 9).
2) Biofuel Production:
There is a direct linkage between rising prices of oil and the shift towards increasing production of crops used in bio-fuel production (see, e.g., http://www.4edu.info/...). Given the rising price of petrol, many people, governments and extra-governmental agencies have advocated the movement towards increased production of biofuels as an alternative to oil-based fuel sources. In fact, the European Union has proposed a mandatory policy advocating that 10% of all member states' transport fuels are derived from biofuels.
We also have seen increased production of biofuels from developing economies like Brazil and Indonesia. Biofuels are also less polluting than traditional oil-based fuels. Many have seen this as a potential way to move away from a resource-constrained fuel (i.e., non-sustainable) to others that are producible and would be less devastating for the environment.
While clearly biofuels are a positive step from traditional oil-based fuels, there are substantive difficulties indicated given the rising price of foodstuffs. We can clearly see that the use of land for production of biofuels means that land is no longer in production of food-stuff for the domestic market.
According to Oxfam:
“Biofuel mandates and support measures in rich countries are driving up food prices as they divert more and more food crops and agricultural land into fuel production. Meanwhile sugarcane ethanol from Brazil, production of which has a far less significant impact on global food prices, is excluded through the use of tariffs.
The World Bank estimates that the price of food has increased by 83 per cent in the last three years. For the world’s poor people, who may spend 50–80 per cent of their income on food, this is disastrous. Oxfam estimates that the livelihoods of at least 290 million people are immediately threatened by the food crisis, and the Bank estimates that 100 million people have already fallen into poverty as a result. Thirty per cent of price increases are attributable to biofuels, suggesting biofuels have endangered the livelihoods of nearly 100 million people and dragged over 30 million into poverty (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/..., p.3).”
There are additional problems in shifting production towards biofuels as a substitute for petroleum; production of biofuels is neither cheap nor, at the moment, particularly efficient in terms of resource usage. Even with subsidies, to completely replace the use of petroleum, the amount of land needed to be withdrawn from food production is substantial:
“Moreover, the costs of using biofuels to improve fuel security are prohibitively expensive. The European Commission’s own research body has estimated that the EU’s proposed 10 per cent biofuel target will cost about $90bn from now until 2020, and will offer enhanced fuel security worth only $12bn. Policies to reduce demand for transport fuels, such as regulation to improve vehicle efficiency, are far safer and more cost effective (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/..., p.3).”
From a more recent publication:
“In 2010 worldwide biofuel production (ethanol and bio diesel) reached 105 billion litres, up 17% from 2009, which represented 2.7% of the world's fuels for road transport. Earlier this year, the IEA published a report suggesting that biofuels have the potential to meet more than a quarter of world demand for transportation fuels by 2050. However, even this optimistic projection came with a number of significant caveats. The first of these was that biofuels are so expensive to produce that even with the current patchwork of subsidies it would be 2030 before they could compete with conventional oil. But the most important is the issue of land. Reaching the 2050 goal would require about 100 million hectares in order to produce the feedstock required, with another 125 million hectares for the biomass needed to generate heat and power for production ‐ around the combined area of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The report says, with masterly understatement "This poses a considerable challenge given competition for land and feedstocks from rapidly growing demand for food and fibre" (Sean Thompson, http://www.4edu.info/..., p. 3).”
The shift towards biofuel production is proving problematic from the point of view of the poor in countries of the capitalist periphery. Given the quantity of existent arable land, increasing production of biofuels will necessarily entail decreases in food production. Moreover, in order to produce sufficient amounts to make production worthwhile, small landholders are being "bought out" or dispossessed in order to ensure plantations of sufficient scale to ensure sizeable crop and profitability.
Decreased production of foodstuff despite already rising prices increases the problems for the poor. Rising prices of agricultural goods essentially mean a decrease in real wages especially for the poor. Given money wages, high prices of foodstuff means that more of your income is spent on food; this means that both the quantity and variety of consumption will decrease. This will also affect the further development of internal markets and domestic demand for goods as demand for additional goods becomes further constrained due to rising food prices.
3) Land Grabs:
While land grabs have existed for quite some time (think of the history of colonialism), they are becoming an increasing problem affecting food production in the periphery. The fact that the World Bank is assisting this does not help matters:
“And they are being aided in their efforts by the World Bank. Since the 2008 crises, the World Bank Group boasts that it ‘has incentivized and facilitated’ land grabs in several countries in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. Through its private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), as well as its Foreign Investment Advisory Service and program to Remove Administrative Barriers to Investment, the World Bank says it has ‘worked to reform land laws and offer tax holidays that attract investors to farmland, while also providing technical assistance and advisory services to the governments of developing countries that are in need of foreign direct investment.’ The Bank estimates that in 2009 alone, foreign investors acquired approximately 56 million hectares of farmland—"an area about the size of France"—by long-term lease or purchase in developing countries (http://www.4edu.info/..., p. 8).”
There are several things going on at the same time. One problem is the granting of land to private companies for the purposes of developing agro-industrial plantations and mining projects. According to
War on Want, in Cambodia, more than half of the country’s arable land was granted in this manner supposedly to develop Cambodia’s comparative advantage. This has led to the eviction of rural and indigenous communities and serious environmental damage (
http://www.waronwant.org/...,
p. 20).
A factor in this is the increasing use of land for biofuel production. An additional problem is land-grabs by wealthier countries currently dependent upon food import buying land in countries in the periphery for food production in their countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia has purchased land in Ethiopia) or preparing for future food insecurity (e.g., China in Algeria and Zimbabwe and is currently in negotiations with the Philippines; in fact, China is offering access to technology, training and infrastructure development funds in exchange for land).
Finally, financial institutions (e.g., Goldman Sachs) themselves have begun buying up large tracts of land expecting the value of land to rise in the future (think of the impact of global warming). Land grabs force peasants off the land, removing land out of both production of domestic food and is also affecting historical grazing areas (http://www.waronwant.org/...,
pps. 20-22).
3) Green Revolution:
The techniques encouraged by the Green Revolution favoured large-scale agricultural enterprises. Agricultural output has been based upon usage of hybrids (which progressing lose their productivity and fertility over the years and as such seeds cannot be saved and reused over time; this led to a dependence upon agribusiness for yearly seeds and capital outlays for fertilisers and pesticides). While the Green Revolution promised that new techniques, large scale farming units, new forms of plants would ensure food security, the results have been less than positive as an understatement. According to War on Want, per capita food production increased by 8% in South America and 9% in South Asia between 1970 and 1990, but the number of hungry people rose by 19% and 9% respectively in those regions (http://www.waronwant.org/..., p. 3).
“If it had not been for the increase in productivity made possible by the Green Revolution, many countries (such as Brazil) would have been forced to redistribute land away from large unproductive estates to smallholders, because this would have been the only way to ensure a regular supply of food for the expanding urban populations. In other words, the very dynamic of capitalist development would have required agrarian reform. This changed with the Green Revolution, as the theory was that relatively few big farmers could now produce enough to feed the cities. Smallholders, who could not produce cash crops as cheaply, began to move in their droves to the cities. (Sean Thompson, http://www.4edu.info/..., p. 7).”
Moreover, while production increased, so did prices due to costly inputs. Monoculture leads output far more vulnerable to insect infestations which can destroy whole harvests. This then requires usage of pesticides. Pesticides and chemicals affect not only the soil and its fertility, they poison the water table and create pollution; additionally, they are dangerous leading to illness and disease of farm labourers and peasants. Given the reliance of the Green Revolution upon monoculture of goods in a large agricultural enterprise, that meant that these large scale enterprises needed to be created. This also led to expropriation of the peasantry from land resulting either in migration to urban areas in search of jobs and the commensurate rising numbers of unemployed people or those employed in the informal sectors (leading to high levels of exploitation); those remaining in rural areas wound up working the land as agricultural labourers rather than subsistence producers.
B. Cyclical Causes:
Speculation on Commodity and commodity futures markets during 2008 certainly led to rising food prices; now this is cyclical and can be addressed easily. In fact, this was discussed at the G20 and laws preventing this from happening regularly are being explored. As an interesting aside, it is the G20 rather than the G7 or G8 where serious international policy discussions are held these days (due to the presence of China, India, Brazil, South Korea, etc.); reflecting the transformation in power of the semi-periphery and the weakening of the traditional centre economies.
On June 23, 2011, French President Nicholas Sarkozy said the following:
”Volatility, let us be absolutely clear about this, is a scourge. Volatility is a scourge for small farmers and for consumers, as well as for the stability of states; volatility is a threat because it endangers agricultural productivity for years to come: What farmer can commit himself to major investment when he is at risk of losing a third of his income the following year? What businessman would risk investing in such an unstable market? (http://www.hagstromreport.com/..., see also: http://articlesofinterest-kelley.blogspot.com/...).”
For supporters of the manner in which the current system operates, the question of food security is the primary concern. But irrespective of all the strong words, action taken at the
G20 in 4, November 2011 was a bit more limited (as an understatement):
“The communiqué also said that the International Organization of Securities Commissions will monitor the implementation of derivatives market reforms in the United States and the European Union to “oversee and prevent abuse and market manipulation. The communiqué also said that the G20 had endorsed “a common regulatory and supervisory framework for commodity derivatives markets,” including “tighter oversight (stricter reporting obligations) and greater powers for the market authorities. It advocates, in particular, the setting of an ex-ante position limits to limit the hold an investor can have over a market in order to more efficiently combat market manipulation (http://www.hagstromreport.com/...).”
However, the structural reasons for rising food prices will not be affected by the curbs introduced on speculation in the food markets no matter how coherent they are in tacking speculation in commodity, futures and derivative markets; these arise from the manner in which food production occurs and from other things that are closely tied to the neoliberal free-trade and export-led growth perspective as well as rising prices of oil which we raised above.
II. Food Sovereignty vs Food Security:
Food security is the dominant mainstream approach to dealing with poverty and hunger. This term is defined as existing “when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (Trade Reforms and Food Security: Conceptualizing the linkages, Rome: UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 2003, ch. 2 as cited in http://www.waronwant.org/..., p. 29).”
There are many problems with the above approach. It addresses the problem of food provision as a social welfare problem but does not address where it is produced, who produces it or the conditions under it is produced (see, http://www.waronwant.org/...,
p. 29).
As such, it concentrates on the simple fact that people have enough food to eat rather than a problem that address the needs, demands and control over the production of food. As is often the case, this approach tends to view neoliberal free trade as a way of ensuring that the needs of the population for food are met. In this case, neither the control of people of what they eat, how food is produced, nor the needs of a population are the central concern. Food insufficiency is treated as something which can be addressed through aid and free trade rather than deriving out of the political and economic choices of governments, NGOs and inter-governmental agencies in collusion with MNCs (both in the centre and peripheral countries). Clearly the current system is not working: irrespective of increased food production, more people than ever are classified as food poor (add numbers). Even worse, the reasons for food poverty stem from the very policies that Aid Agencies, the IMF, World Bank, International Development agencies have been advocating.
The notion of food sovereignty was defined in 2007. It begins with the very simple acceptance of the notion of the right to food (water, sanitation and energy). From the acceptance of the right of people to food, it is able to directly address the problems that we are seeing where food production and agricultural production is done to ensure profits rather than the needs of people. It deliberately addresses the problems of hunger from the point of view of the production of food and the decisions of peasant producers and local consumers in achieving control of food production and distribution (http://www.waronwant.org/...,
p. 30). It aims to eliminate food dependency on advanced capitalist countries and the international market for food, reintroduce domestic food production under the hands of peasants, calls for land reform to ensure equal access to land,
III. New Tactics::
Food is a right, it is not something that should be subjected to the market and produced for profits. People have the right to choose what to eat and how to produce it; this should not be dictated by MNCs and the need for profits.
There are seven principles of Food sovereignty as advanced by La Via Campesina:
1. Food is a basic human right: Everyone must have access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain a health life with full human dignity;
2. Agrarian Reform: A genuine agrarian reform is necessary, which give landless and farming people –especially women – ownership and control of the land they work and returns territories to indigenous peoples. The right to land must be free of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, race, social class or ideology; the land belongs to those who work it;
3. Protecting Natural Resources: Food sovereignty entails the sustainable care and use of natural resources, especially land, water, seeds and livestock breeds;
4. Reorganising Food Trade: Food is first and foremost a source of nutrition and secondarily an item of trade. National agricultural policies must prioritise production for domestic consumption and food self-sufficiency. Food imports must not displace local production nor depress prices;
5. Ending the Globalisation of Hunger: Food sovereignty is undermined by multilateral institutions and speculative capital. The growing control of MNCs over agricultural policies has been facilitated by the economic policies of multilateral organisations such as the WYO, World Bank and IMF.
6. Social Peace: Everyone has the right to be free from violence. Food must not be used as a weapon.
7. Democratic Control: Smallholder farmers must have direct input into formulation agricultural policies at all levels (http://www.waronwant.org/..., p. 29).
Tactics
a.
Access to land; in order to ensure food sovereignty, people need access to land on which to produce their subsistence. Land reform needs to be undertaken ensuring access to land for peasant producers in the periphery. Production can be undertaken both in traditional ways or using cooperatives and communal models.
b. Permaculture in urban areas (http://incite-focus.org/...). In Cuba following the collapse of the USSR production of food was in serious danger and highly dependent upon chemicals for pesticides and fertilisers; the Cuban government advocated food production in Urban areas.
“The response from the government moved along basic survival strategies from urban communities. Agriculture, in a few years, moved from large export-oriented, chemical dependent monoculture to small-size, urban-based organic food production. Having an orchard at home or in an empty plot in the neighbourhood became the norm. Most of these drastic changes were supported by the government, and soon urban agriculture became national policy. Today, urban agriculture in Cuba produces 70 percent of the country's food needs (http://www.thepolisblog.org/....”
A similar programme has been developed in Rosario, Argentina (http://www.thepolisblog.org/...). In the advanced capitalist world, another example of this has been a large permaculture movement in Detroit (http://www.wiserearth.org/...; http://permaculture.org.au/...).
c. Production of organic foodstuffs and the revival of traditional crops using historical techniques rather than imported varieties. Organic foodstuffs are less damaging to the environment and to peasant producers. The limited number and varieties of crops now produced for supermarkets has taken out of production and our diets traditional crops that were adapted over time for production in different places; many of these are now being re-introduced in the UK (for example).
d. Local and regional markets rather than markets for international production. Shifting to use of local and regional markets and consumption of local and regional products will not only discourage waste, it will encourage local production, and also cut down on environmental and ecological damage caused by the current system.
The industrial food system discards (in the journey from farms to traders, food processors, stores and supermarkets) between a third and a half of all the food that it produces. This is enough to feed the world’s hungry six times over (http://www.waronwant.org/..., p. 5).
The manner in which food is produced, processed, packaged and transported is extremely wasteful involving large amounts of transportation between countries.
Transporting food consumes huge amounts of energy. […] It is estimated that altogether – including cropping, livestock, transport, fertiliser and land use change – agriculture is responsible for 30% of the global emissions that cause climate change (http://www.waronwant.org/...,
p. 24).
Some conclusions:
This diary is only a taster if you don’t mind the pun; given space constraints, I have not been able to even address production of meat, GM crops and pesticide and chemical usage and the control of the industry by a small group of MNCs. The current and (looming) food crisis will require us to develop new ways of food production in order to ensure that the needs of people are covered as opposed to the needs for profits and profitability of the capitalist economic system. The discussion of alternative methods and tactics of food production is beginning to take hold and a movement (both in the advanced capitalist countries and in the periphery) is developing to ensure that food production is based upon the human right to food rather than the demands of international capital to profits.
References
Oxfam (2008) “Another Inconvenient Truth: How Biofuel Policies are Deepening Poverty and Accelerating Climate Change” (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/...), June 25th.
Schwartz, T. (2010) Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian missions, orphanages, food aid, fraud and drug trafficking.
Sean Thompson (2011) “The return of the food and energy crisis: structural problems and/or financial speculation?”, November, http://www.4edu.info/...
War on Want Report: Food Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Global System, http://www.waronwant.org/...
International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook: 2011, International Energy Agency, 2011.
Upcoming Diaries:
Dec 4: T'Pau--"Miliary Democracy" as a tool to reclaim power.
Dec 11: Don Mikulecky--Sustainable Systems and Why Capitalism is not One of Them
Dec 18: T'Pau--"Nullification and States Rights" as a way to reclaim our power.
Dec 25: Blue Dragon--"Teaching from Radical Texts in the College Setting." (She is using Shock Doctrine in her class.)
Jan 1: T'Pau: "The Power Behind Resolutions" and an exciting announcement.
Jan 8: Geminijen: Cooperatives Changing Relationship to Unions, Part III
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