Sunday, January 27, 2013

Empty words don't fill empty stomachs.

"Enough Food for Everyone IF" campaign hopes to mobilise public support leading up to the scheduled meeting of the G8 in Enniskillen in June this year.

While the World Economic Forum launched "New Vision for Agriculture", to coincide with its annual meeting in Davos,Recognising that the planet is home to some 500 million smallholders - who support two billion people, account for 97 percent of global agricultural holdings, and produce food for almost 70 percent of the world's population - the report stresses the importance of "collaborative action" with smallholders to deliver food security, economic opportunity and environmental sustainability. Smallholders are identified as "change agents" and future "catalysts" in the business of agricultural transformation. The report insists that "smallholder-inclusive" projects can be devised in partnership with private sector investors, governments and civil society organisations.

David Nally is senior lecturer in human geography and Bhaskar Vira is senior lecturer in environment and development at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, describe it as "clearly a David-meets-Goliath type alliance. Though local businesses and indigenous farmers frame the picture, it is global agribusiness that dominates the view. Can smallholders really have a voice when faced with the collective bargaining power of Bunge, Cargill, Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, DuPont, General Mills, Monsanto Company, Unilever, and Wal-Mart - just a few of the 28 partner companies that drive the initiative? Genuinely inclusive "bottom-up" decision-making needs to be distinguished from the platitudinous rhetoric of development partnerships and participation, which all too often masks the vast asymmetries of power between participants." Several of the transnational corporations behind the Davos initiative have a sullied record when it comes to engagement with local farming communities. The "New Vision for Agriculture" clearly prioritises market-based approaches to food security and poverty reduction. Significantly the report asks: "With the models employed, are smallholders able fully to participate in the market, or are most still mainly at the subsistence level?" The contrast between subsistence agriculture ("bad") and market participation and commodity production ("good") is not, however, a straightforward one. A World Food Programme, published in 2009, noted that food markets "tend to fail most often and most severely for those who need them the most - the hungry poor". Nally and Vira explain "We should not romanticise subsistence agriculture - unquestionably it is challenging and often a brutal way of life - but it can be a safer bet when food markets are volatile, as they have been since 2007"

Public handwringing and future assurances and the fleeting media attention cycle that surrounds public campaigns on hunger are now part and parcel of the annual cycle of political life, with little tangible proof that this makes any difference on the ground, where it matters most.

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