Tag Archive for: Food Sovereignty

World Hunger: Ten Myths

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Authors: Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins

In troubled times, all of us seek ways to make sense of the world. We grasp for organizing beliefs to help us interpret the endlessly confusing rush of world events. Unfortunately, however, the two of us have come to see that the way people think about hunger is the greatest obstacle to ending it. So in this Backgrounder we encapsulate 40 years of learning and in-depth new research to reframe ten such ways of thinking explored in our latest book World Hunger: 10 Myths. We call them “myths” because they often lead us down blind alleys or simply aren’t true.

Myth one: too little food, too many people

Our response: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third. Even after diverting roughly half of the world’s grain and most soy protein to animal feed and non-food uses, the world still produces enough to provide every human being with nearly 2,900 calories a day. Clearly, our global calorie supply is ample.

Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third.

Increasingly, however, calories and nutrition are diverging as the quality of food in most parts of the world is degrading. Using a calorie-deficiency standard, the UN estimates that today roughly one in nine people is hungry—about 800 million; but adding measures of nutrient deficiencies as well, we estimate that a quarter of the world’s people suffer from nutritional deprivation.

Food scarcity is not the problem, but the scarcity of real democracy protecting people’s access to nutritious food is a huge problem. So, fighting hunger means tackling concentrated political and economic power in order to create new equitable rules. Otherwise hunger will continue no matter how much food we grow.

Keep Reading on Food First

Peasant Agriculture is a True Solution to the Climate Crisis

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Climate disruptions this year have again caused widespread hunger, migration and the worsening of living conditions for millions of rural families, especially women and youth. While small farmers around the world continue to produce the food most people eat, glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, species of plants and animals are disappearing daily, islands and nations are being reclaimed by oceans, soils are eroding and forests igniting, and catastrophic events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis are becoming commonplace. Meanwhile, the global food system imposed on people by Transnational Corporations (TNCs) is both a total failure and one of the main causes of the human-induced climate crisis – dependent on fossil fuels to produce, transform and transport, it is responsible for an estimated 44 to 57% of all global greenhouse emissions1. Instead of nutritious food for the world’s people, TNCs have produced hunger and obesity, land grabs and rural displacement, and a climate crisis they now hope to cash in on with false solutions sold at the United Nations.

Some twenty years since Rio (’92) and Kyoto (’97), governments have met over and over again for their Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change). They have continuously failed to protect and advance people’s most fundamental human rights – including the Right to Food – sending delegation upon delegation to climate talks that prioritize private interests over public welfare. Previous agreements and negotiations have moved from compulsory or binding accords to simple pledges that are not even likely to be kept. At the same time, TNCs have secured the political support of co-opted governments to get their interests inserted as bottom-line strategies into the agreements. Carbon markets, so-called “Clean Development Mechanisms” (CDMs), REDD and REDD+, bioenergy and agrofuels, as well as agribusiness’ proposed “climate-smart agriculture” package, are just a few of the misleading proposals now on the table. Instead of solving the problem, these false solutions only serve to worsen them. Instead of capping emissions, they create artificial markets and opportunities for the grossest of polluters to continue polluting and do little to reduce the effects of climate disruptions. By pushing the interests of capitalism and the privatization of nature, TNCs are putting the lives of ordinary people, small-scale farmers, peasants and indigenous communities – who work with nature to secure our livelihoods – into ever greater jeopardy.

Some twenty years since Rio (’92) and Kyoto (’97), governments have met over and over again for their Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change). They have continuously failed to protect and advance people’s most fundamental human rights – including the Right to Food – sending delegation upon delegation to climate talks that prioritize private interests over public welfare. Previous agreements and negotiations have moved from compulsory or binding accords to simple pledges that are not even likely to be kept. At the same time, TNCs have secured the political support of co-opted governments to get their interests inserted as bottom-line strategies into the agreements. Carbon markets, so-called “Clean Development Mechanisms” (CDMs), REDD and REDD+, bioenergy and agrofuels, as well as agribusiness’ proposed “climate-smart agriculture” package, are just a few of the misleading proposals now on the table. Instead of solving the problem, these false solutions only serve to worsen them. Instead of capping emissions, they create artificial markets and opportunities for the grossest of polluters to continue polluting and do little to reduce the effects of climate disruptions. By pushing the interests of capitalism and the privatization of nature, TNCs are putting the lives of ordinary people, small-scale farmers, peasants and indigenous communities – who work with nature to secure our livelihoods – into ever greater jeopardy.

Keep Reading on La Via Campesina

Food and Climate: Connecting the Dots, Choosing the Way Forward

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Food & Climate: Connecting the Dots, Choosing the Way Forward, outlines the climate requirements for successful food production, and examines two competing food production methods – industrial and organic – to reveal how they contribute to climate change, how resilient they are in the face of escalating climate shocks, and how organic and related agricultural systems can actually contribute to solving the climate crisis.

In this report, Center for Food Safety examines how industrial agriculture – the dominant method of food production in the U.S. – externalizes many social and environmental costs while relying heavily on fossil fuels. Organic farming, by comparison, requires half as much energy, contributes far fewer greenhouse gasses, and, perhaps most surprisingly, is more resilient in the face of climate disruption.

Food & Climate: Connecting the Dots, Choosing the Way Forward also recommends that government agricultural policies and regulations be designed to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and toxic chemicals and calls on the public to pressure elected officials to act now to slow down climate change. The report rallies individuals to work toward a stable climate and an abundant food supply three times a day by choosing climate-friendly “cool foods.”

Download the Report from the Center for Food Safety

Soil Carbon Sequestration in Conservation Agriculture: A Framework for Valuing Soil Carbon as a Critical Ecosystem Service

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Conservation agricultural systems sequester carbon from the atmosphere into long-lived soil organic matter pools – while promoting a healthy environment and enhancing economically sustainable production conditions for farmers throughout the world. Soil organic carbon is fundamental to the development of soil quality and sustainable food production systems. Soil, soil organic carbon, and soil quality are the foundations of human inhabitation of our Earth. We must enhance the ability of soil to sustain our lives by improving soil organic carbon.

Conservation agricultural systems have been successfully developed for many different regions of the world. These systems, however, have not been widely adopted by farmers for political, social and cultural reasons. Through greater adoption of conservation agricultural systems, there is enormous potential to sequester soil organic carbon, which would:

(1) help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming and

(2) increase soil productivity and avoid further environmental damage from the unsustainable use of inversion tillage systems, which threaten water quality, reduce soil biodiversity, and erode soil around the world.

Download the Report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Hungry for Land: Small farmers Feed the World With Less Than a Quarter of All Farmland

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It is commonly heard today that small farmers produce most of the world’s food. But how many of us realise that they are doing this with less than a quarter of the world’s farmland, and that even this meagre share is shrinking fast? If small farmers continue to lose the very basis of their existence, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself.

GRAIN took an in depth look at the data to see what is going on and the message is crystal clear. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems.

Download the PDF version of this report here

Download the printer friendly dataset in PDF format here

Download the fully-referenced dataset as a spreadsheet here

Governments and international agencies frequently boast that small farmers control the largest share of the world’s agricultural land. Inaugurating 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming, José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), sang the praises of family farmers but didn’t once mention the need for land reform. Instead he stated that family farms already manage most of the world’s farmland1 – a whopping 70%, according to his team.2 Another report published by various UN agencies in 2008 concluded that small farms occupy 60% of all arable land worldwide.3 Other studies have come to similar conclusions.4

But if most of the world’s farmland is in small farmers’ hands, then why are so many of their organisations clamouring for land redistribution and agrarian reform? Because rural peoples’ access to land is under attack everywhere. From Honduras to Kenya and from Palestine to the Philippines, people are being dislodged from their farms and villages. Those who resist are being jailed or killed. Widespread agrarian strikes in Colombia, protests by community leaders in Madagascar, nationwide marches by landless folk in India, occupations in Andalusia – the list of actions and struggles goes on and on. The bottom line is that land is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich and powerful, not that small farmers are doing well.

Rural people don’t simply make a living off the land, after all. Their land and territories are the backbone of their identities, their cultural landscape and their source of well-being. Yet land is being taken away from them and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands at an alarming pace.

Keep Reading on GRAIN

Don’t be fooled! Civil society says NO to “Climate Smart Agriculture” and urges decision-makers to support agroecology

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We, the undersigned, belong to civil society organizations including social movements, peasants/farmers organizations and faith-based organizations from around the world. We are working to tackle the impacts of climate change that are already disrupting farming and food systems and threatening the food and nutrition security of millions of individuals. As we move towards COP21 in Paris, we welcome a growing recognition of the urgent need to adapt food systems to a changing climate, and the key role of agroecology within a food and seed sovereignty framework in achieving this, while contributing to mitigation through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

However, despite these promising signals, we share deep concerns about the growing influence and agenda of so-called “Climate-Smart Agriculture” (CSA) and the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA). Climate change is the biggest and the most urgent threat our societies face. We need a radical transformation of our food systems away from an industrial model and its false solutions, and toward food sovereignty, local food systems, and integral agrarian reform in order to achieve the full realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition. We therefore urge decision-makers at country and UN levels to reject the dangerous rhetoric of Climate-Smart Agriculture.

Climate Smart Agriculture must not be confused with agroecology

Climate Smart Agriculture must not be confused with agroecology. Agroecology is a holistic approach to agriculture, based on principles of ecology as well as food and nutrition security, food sovereignty and food justice which seek to enhance agricultural systems by using and recycling natural resources instead of relying on externally-purchased inputs. It encourages local/national food production by small food producers and family farmers, and is based on techniques that are not delivered from the top-down, but developed from farmers’ traditional knowledge and practices as well as from farmer innovations. This approach is based on farmers’ participation and makes nature a powerful ally in ensuring food and nutrition security, building healthy soils and conserving water. It increases farmers’ incomes and resilience in the face of climate change, while improving biodiversity and crop diversity. It is therefore crucial for all efforts to realize the human right to adequate food and nutrition. Governments must recognise that industrial approaches that degrade soil health and water retention, pollute water systems, poison nature and create dependency on external inputs, impoverish biodiversity and ecosystems are not only harmful and unnecessary, but also deeply misguided for a planet facing hunger, ecological crises and climate change.

Keep Reading on Climate Smart Agriculture Concerns

Women and Biodiversity Feed the World, Not Corporations and GMOs

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The two great ecological challenges of our times are biodiversity erosion and climate change. And both are interconnected, in their causes and their solutions.

Industrial agiculture is the biggest contributor to biodiversity erosion as well as to climate change. According to the United Nations, 93% of all plant variety has disappeared over the last 80 years.

Monocultures based on chemical inputs do not merely destroy plant biodiversity, they have destroyed soil biodiversity, which leads to the emergence of pathogens, new diseases, and more chemical use.

Our study of soils in the Bt cotton regions of Vidharba showed a dramatic decline in beneficial soil organisms. In many regions with intensive use of pesticides and GMOs, bees and butterflies are disappearing. There are no pollinators on Bt cotton plants, whereas the population of pollinators in Navdanya’s biodiversity conservation farm in Doon Valley is six times more than in the neighbouring forest. The UNEP has calculated the contribution of pollinators to be $200 billion annually. Industrial agriculture also kills aquatic and marine life by creating dead zones due to fertilizer run off. Pesticides are also killing or damaging aquatic life.

Keep Reading on Common Dreams