Our Current Food System Is Broken and Unjust—we Need a Paradigm Shift That Values Nutrition As a Human Right
Author: Dr. Robert Biel | March 22, 2017
There is a sense that the world food system has reached an impasse. Hunger afflicts at least an eighth of the world population, mostly in the global South, but also in the North where austerity policies—which respond to crisis by prioritizing the interests of the wealthy—leave working people hungry. What is even more serious is that even this damaged ‘food security’ cannot be guaranteed into the future. International institutions now recognize that something fundamental must change, a realization embodied in the notion of paradigm shift and further concretized in the form of sustainable intensification.
Such recognition is all the more significant since, for most of its history, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tended to be somewhat unwilling to offend corporate interests. Within the UN system it was mostly the two successive Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler and Olivier de Schutter, who pushed for a more radical and systemic critique. The latter notably placed his authority behind agroecology, a term that implies bringing farming back to an understanding of natural systems, and that forms an important point of reference for this book.
A landmark in official critiques of the ruling food paradigm was the publication of Save and Grow, A New Paradigm of Agriculture—A policymaker’s guide to the sustainable intensification of smallholder crop production, which argued specifically for a revitalization of small farms and a recognition of their dignity and essential contribution. Expanding on this, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) further stated: “The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a ‘green revolution’ to an ecological intensification’ approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high-external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agroecological system…”
This and similar statements embody a welcome reflection on what the shift may entail: terms like ‘mosaics’ and ‘regenerative’ imply a change in how we think, moving away from linear and reductionist approaches and towards a systems perspective.
These ideas are stimulating. Nevertheless, we should ask whether the new paradigm is correctly framed. Not everyone, even among those critical of the old paradigm, would accept that it is, particularly the assumption that the answer is ‘intensification,’ which could imply a merely quantitative solution and contradict the more qualitative issues raised. Indeed, the notion of a ‘new paradigm’ entered the debate quite some time ago, precisely in relation to quality issues. The emphasis on quality arose as a critique of earlier mainstream policies, targeting mainly quantity, which often were critically labelled ‘productivist’ and were typified by the now-discredited Green Revolution in which hybrid crop strains were bred only for quantity of yield.