Friday, May 25, 2012

Freeing the farmers


 Never before has so much money gone into the industrial food system. The last decade has witnessed a spectacular increase in speculation on food commodity markets, increasing food prices everywhere. With today’s global financial and economic crises, speculative capital is searching for safe places to multiply. Food and farmland are such places. “Everyone has to eat” is the new mantra preached in boardrooms. People who just want to grow food and make a living from the land are being expelled, criminalised, and sometimes killed, to make way for land grabbers. It is nothing less than an assault on peasants.

 The global food system is in profound crisis. More than a billion people suffer from hunger, and their numbers are rising faster than the global population. Yet more than enough food is produced to feed everybody in the world. At the same time we are heading deeper into a global climate crisis, for which the industrial food system is to a large extent to blame. Meanwhile corporations are grabbing huge areas of land and water systems in poor countries, and displacing rural communities.

Ethiopia often in the midst of a severe food crisis and is heavily dependent on food aid to feed its people. Yet, the government has already signed away about 10% of the country’s entire agricultural area to foreign investors to produce commodities for the international market.

Over the past few years, nearly half a million hectares in Senegal have been signed away to foreign agribusiness companies frequently to grow sweet potatoes and sunflowers to produce biofuels for European cars.


We could go on and on with statistics of the appropriation of land throughout the orld

Today, over a billion people on the planet do not have enough to eat. Around 80% of these people are food producers living in the countryside. We are all acutely aware of the climate crisis. But how many people realise that the current industrial food system contributes around half of all global green- house gas emissions? You get this figure if you add up the emissions from agriculture itself, plus the change in land use when forests are turned into plantations, plus the enormous distances that food and feed are transported around the globe, plus the energy that goes into processing, cooling and freezing, plus the waste of energy and food in the increasingly centralised supermarket chains. GRAIN has calculated that just by focusing on soil fertility restoration in agricultural lands, we could off- set between one-quarter and one-third of all current global annual greenhouse gas emissions!

Small farmers can indeed cool the world. They can also feed the world. Earlier this year, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food presented a report showing that agro-ecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty. Others have shown that policies oriented towards promoting local markets, short food- transport circuits and peasant farming, all help to do the same. The issue is as simple as keeping food in the hands of people, rather than corporations. Still, peasants, fishers and other food producers have never been more in danger of extinction.

The race is on to take control of the world’s food-producing resources – seeds, water and land – and the global distribution of food. The corporate food system destroys food systems based on , local cultures, biodiversity and, most of all, people. It puts the profits of the few before the needs of people and leads to massive food safety incidents, environmental destruction, labour exploitation and the decimation of rural communities. Banks, investment houses and pension funds are actively buying up farmland all over the world. The data and the contracts are very hard to acquire, but current estimates are that 60-80 million hectares of land have fallen under the control of foreign investors for the production of food in the last few years only. This is equal to half the farmland of the EU! Most of this is happening in Africa, where people’s customary rights to land are being grossly ignored.

This latest trend in global land grabbing – that for outsourced food production – is only one part of a larger attack on land, territories and resources. Land grabs for mining, tourism, biofuels, dam construction, infrastructure projects, timber and now carbon trading are all part of the same process, turning farm- ers into refugees on their own land.

Taken from here 

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