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Mint Press
News March 11, 2014
http://www.mintpressnews.com/un-report-calls-radical-democratic-food-system/186303/
UN Report
Calls For Radical, Democratic
Food System
Complete
reversal, not reform, of global
food system needed in favor of
sustainable food
sovereignty.
By Martin
Chamberlain
The current
global food system needs to be
“radically” and
“democratically”
changed in order to alleviate
global hunger and serve human
rights over the profits of major
agribusiness corporations,
according to a report released
Monday by the United Nations
Special Rapporteur on the right
to food.
“At
the local, national and
international levels, the policy
environment must urgently
accommodate alternative,
democratically-mandated
visions” which go beyond the
goal of profit maximization and
instead rebuild local and
sustainable food models, said
Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter,
while presenting his final report
(pdf) to the UN Human Rights
Council, finalizing his six-year
term.
“Food
democracy must start from the
bottom-up, at the level of
villages, regions, cities, and
municipalities,” the rights
expert said.
“Food
security must be built around
securing the ability of
smallholder farmers to
thrive,” he emphasized.
“Respect for their access to
productive resources is key in
this regard.”
The current
system, says De Schutter, has
instead created a world
monopolized by the big-agro
“green revolution” of
mono-cropping, industrialization
and pesticide-heavy techniques,
which has boosted agricultural
production over the past 50 years
but has “hardly reduced the
number of hungry people,”
the report states.
This system
of large-scale export-based
agriculture is most often
“based on the exploitation
of a largely dis-empowered
workforce,” the report
states, “operated at the
expense of family farms producing
food crops for local
consumption” that cannot
keep up with corporate
competitors.
This has
resulted in a “paradoxical
situation in which many
low-income countries, though they
are typically agriculture-based,
raw commodity-exporting
economies, are highly dependent
on food imports,” the report
states, “sometimes
supplemented by food aid, because
they have neglected to invest in
local production and food
processing to feed their own
communities.”
This
industrialized system has also
led to a major loss in
biodiversity, soil erosion, mass
pollution, and a rise in man-made
greenhouse gas
emissions—”the most
potentially devastating impacts
of industrial modes of
agricultural production,”
the report states.
Under these
conditions, and particularly with
the onset of climate change,
agricultural productivity will
only decrease sharply over time,
De Schutter warns.
According
to De Schutter, an
“eradication of hunger and
malnutrition” is an
achievable goal only if we
completely reverse the current
logic of our food system to a
system which depends on
democratic decision-making led by
the people—or as food
justice campaigners put it: Food
Sovereignty.
“National
right to food strategies should
be co-designed by relevant
stakeholders, in particular the
groups most affected by hunger
and malnutrition, and they should
be supported by independent
monitoring,” stated De
Schutter.
De Schutter
continued:
Objectives
such as supplying diverse,
culturally-acceptable foods to
communities, supporting
smallholders, sustaining soil and
water resources, and raising food
security within particularly
vulnerable areas, must not be
crowded out by the
one-dimensional quest to produce
more food.
[...]
The
greatest deficit in the food
economy is the democratic one. By
harnessing people’s
knowledge and building their
needs and preferences into the
design of ambitious food policies
at every level, we would arrive
at food systems that are built to
endure.
The report
offers as an alternative a system
which enables local, autonomous
food production alongside
international trade that would
incorporate
“agroecological” modes
of production. Agroecology
includes techniques such as
“intercropping, the
recycling of manure and food
scraps into fertilizers, and
agroforestry…that reduce the
use of external inputs and
maximize resource
efficiency.”
The report
explains:
Because
agroecology reduces the cost of
farming by minimizing the use of
expensive inputs, it improves the
livelihoods of farming
households, particularly the
poorest households. And it
supports rural development:
because it is knowledge-intensive
and generally more
labor-intensive, it creates
employment opportunities in rural
areas.
Though
easier to implement on
smaller-sized farms,
agroecological techniques can be
disseminated on a large scale and
should also inspire reforms in
how large production units
operate.
Other
objectives include reducing meat
production in favor of crops
grown for human consumption and a
reduction in biofuel
use—both of which have
“represented a major source
of price volatility on
agricultural markets” over
the years.
In response
to the report, Martin Drago,
Friends of the Earth Food
Sovereignty Program
Co-coordinator, stated,
“This report is the only
recipe for the eradication of
hunger. Its recommendations are
bold and simple: our current food
systems must be reversed, not
just reformed.”
“The
report’s recommendations
clearly state that Food
Sovereignty is needed to
eradicate hunger as well as to
democratize our food
systems,” said Drago.
“The report also recognizes
Food Sovereignty as an essential
condition to be fulfilled in
order to fully realize the right
to food.”
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