I NEED OTHER HUMAN BEINGS IN ORDER TO BE HUMAN-WE ARE MADE FOR INTERDEPENDENCE. DESMOND TUTU
The success of this campaign depends on your interaction.
The purpose of this Forum is to share ideas, opinions, actions and connections. The internet has presented an opportunity for global communication between everyone in a way never before available. Use it. Create World Campaign for yourself, by interacting with others.
Food Rebellions - Crisis and Hunger for Justice Amid Plenty
Author: AllAfrica.com., Philip Ngunjiri, The East African, Nairobi
Date: Wed Mar 3rd 04:41:02 2010
1 March 2010
Nairobi--Recent reports that despite a bumper harvest in the last season East Africans face hunger in the next few months is baffling to many.
But not when you read Eric Holt-Gimenez and Raj Patel book Food Rebellions! Crisis and Hunger for Justice.
The authors might as well be writing about Kenya's maize scandal in which some politically-connected politicians and technocrats made millions by selling duty-free maize imported by the government to cushion the country's poor from escalating food prices brought on by the world-wide recession.
The book shows how the steady erosion of national control over food systems has made African nations dependent on a volatile global market and subject to the short-term interests of a handful of transnational agri-food monopolies.
Why are food riots are occurring around the world in a time of record harvests?
What are the real impacts of agrofuels and genetically engineered crops?
They answer these questions with accuracy.
They go a step further to explain the true meaning, causes and dynamics of what is commonly referred to as the "global food crisis."
They show how skewed and dysfunctional the global food system is, and how the concentration of market power by a handful of transnational corporations translates to power over land, water, food and indeed, over life itself.
For instance in 2007, they point out, despite growing hunger, food aid fell globally by 15 per cent to 5.9 million tonnes for the year - the lowest since 1961.
This reflected the tendency of food aid to respond to international grain prices and not the food needs of the poor.
When the price of cereals is low, they note, Western countries and transnational grain companies sell their commodities through food aid programmes.
When the grain prices are high, they sell their grains on the global market.
So when people are less able to buy food, less food aid arrives
The book brings together masses of case studies, research, facts and statistics to look at what lies behind the recent food crisis that sent prices soaring in that year (2007).
It also asks how we can end the food insecurity and hunger that continue to plague millions around the world.
Hunger results from the way that food is produced under capitalism.
2008 saw both record hunger and record global harvests, the book points out. "Hunger doesn't reflect food shortages," they write.
The book argues that rocketing prices has many immediate triggers, including the increasing use of biofuels, and speculation.
But it points out that the root cause of the crisis is "a skewed global food system that has made poor people everywhere highly vulnerable to economic and environmental shock."
The case studies combine to give a vivid picture of how the food industry impacts differently in different places - in Ghana, Mexico, India, China, Haiti, the Philippines and the US. You get a real sense of what this means for ordinary people.
Food Rebellions insist that there is no alternative but to radically rethink the basis on which food production is organised.
Fine-tuning is not an option because they believe that the existing system is a prime cause of the problem, not the basis for a solution.
The main criticism of the book however, is levelled at the dominance of world agriculture by a handful of major transnational companies which, the authors say, manipulate prices of inputs and outputs, making vast profits for their shareholders but leaving destitute many from whom they buy and sell.
And, they believe, the international institutions that have the greatest potential to assist farmers with advice and finance - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the US and the EU aid agencies - are at best complicit in the continuing status quo, largely because of self-interest.
The authors propose a reversion to small family farms, with farmers empowered to develop "food sovereignty" - people's self-government of the food production and marketing systems.
To justify their argument, the authors of Food Rebellions quote the World Bank Report which revealed that small farmers in five Latin American countries had produced three to 14 times the yield per acre than their larger neighbours.
The case studies combine to give a vivid picture of how the food industry impacts differently in different places - in Ghana, Mexico, India, China, Haiti, the Philippines and the US. You get a real sense of what this means for ordinary people.
Food Rebellions insist that there is no alternative but to radically rethink the basis on which food production is organised.
Fine-tuning is not an option because they believe that the existing system is a prime cause of the problem, not the basis for a solution.
The main criticism of the book however, is levelled at the dominance of world agriculture by a handful of major transnational companies which, the authors say, manipulate prices of inputs and outputs, making vast profits for their shareholders but leaving destitute many from whom they buy and sell.
And, they believe, the international institutions that have the greatest potential to assist farmers with advice and finance - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the US and the EU aid agencies - are at best complicit in the continuing status quo, largely because of self-interest.
But such production needs protection from subsidised, cheap exports from industrialised countries.
For example in Ghana, 95 per cent of poultry consumed in 1992 was from domestic production.
By 2000, following imports of subsidised chicken from the US and the EU, share of local poultry had dropped to 11 per cent.
Respond to this message.
