Food Sovereignty

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY, Focus theme of ViBGYOR 2009

Facts and figures of food production and consumption across the globe give us a glimpse of the current food crisis described as the silent tsunami. With food priced out of reach, huge swaths of Africa, Asia and South and Central America are at risk of uncontrollable instability. Worldwide, food prices rose 83 per cent in the last three years, according to World Bank figures, and the steepest increases are in the most vulnerable countries. But even in the United States, food costs 40 per cent more today than it did a year ago. There have been food riots world-wide, in Haiti, Burkina’Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan,Yemen and elsewhere.

The reasons for the present food crisis include weather problems, increased consumption and decreasing agricultural production in many countries, rising fuel costs that affect transportation cost of food, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops. Cars on American roads burn up close to one-third of the enormous corn crop American farmers grow in a year. Since the United States is the world’s biggest producer of corn, an essential staple, this massive diversion from the food bowl to the fuel tank threatens to wreak increasing havoc. Many nations, including India are falling in line and push for biofuels. Transnational agribusiness giants like Cargill, Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland are raking in astronomical profits, not only from the corn they trade and convert but in Monsanto’s case, from the patented seeds and fertilizers they coerce the poor nations to buy, endangering their traditional agricultural sector.

The World Bank and IMF since 1991 have imposed regulations that favor the big agro-business corporates, by forcing the developing countries to cut off support and subsidies to traditional agricultural sector comprising small farmers with small cultivable lands and conventional know how. Continue Reading-> Next Page