Food Crisis Update

This global food crisis has been a long time in the making. For more than 30 years hunger has been endemic among the poor, especially those living in rural areas. Farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk have been increasingly dispossessed of their livelihoods as well as their land, grazing, fishing grounds and markets; grain stocks have been run down as the globalisation agenda has been mposed by the wealthy.

Governments, including those in the global South, and intergovernmental organisations must now recognize their part in implementing policies that have undermined agricultural productivity and destroyed national food security. The emergency today has its roots in the food crisis of the 1970s when some opportunistic OECD governments, pursuing neoliberal policies, dismantled the international institutional architecture for food and agriculture.

These governments and their institutions adopted short-term political strategies that neglected food and agriculture and set the stage for the current food emergency.

For the view of farmers, see the Press Release by Via Campesina, the International Peasant Movement “Food crisis: we cannot gamble with food!”
www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=529&Itemid=1

While there are food riots and extreme hardship among the poor, corporate players are profiting.

·Cargill, the major global grain trader announced increased profits for the first quarter of this year of 86%.

·Speculators are betting on food price rises (See yesterday’s FT article Speculators accumulate as risks rise for world’s poor, by Tony Jackson www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e299bd06-1fbc-11dd-9216-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

·International institutions are using this opportunity to press globalisation on the poor – the very same pressures are behind the crisis (See, for example, interview with Peter Mandelson 8 May www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/08/hardtalk/mandelson_08may.ram ); and

·Offers of more of the same (proprietary) technical fixes are pouring out thick and fast from the UN, world Bank, biotech industry and the new philanthro-capitalists despite the warnings from the UN/World Bank IAASTD report that a different approach is necessary (See Change in farming can feed world www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/16/food.biofuels )

There is an intense Civil Society process in Bonn for the next three weeks (in parallel with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meetings on Biosafety (MOP4) and Biodiversity (COP9)) that will express its concerns and offer solutions at the FAO High Level Food Crisis Conference in Rome (3-5 June). These will be followed up during the subsequent High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra (4 – 6 September), the MDG High Level Event on 25 September in New York and at the FAO committee on world food security in Rome in October.

Through the IPC for Food Sovereignty, the CBD Alliance, and the campaign for More and Better aid to agriculture, the UK Food Group is indirectly or directly involved in all these processes. Updates will be available online through the websites linked above and on www.ukabc.org.