Food sovereignty to peasants, small farming families, fisher folks and other marginalized local communities—this was the call made by the Land Research Action Network and Focus on the Global South, as close to a billion people found themselves without enough food on their tables during World Food day, October 16. Ironically, for these people across the globe who suffer from hunger and malnutrition, there was no reason to celebrate the event, much less with a global food crisis that is expected to deepen even before it can be abated.
The Land Research Action Network (LRAN) and Focus on Global South released a study, on the occasion of World Food day, highlighting the causes of food crisis in recent years. Titled “Defending the Commons, Territories and the Right to Food and Water,” the study (LRAN Briefing Paper Series 2 and a Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform publication) underscores soaring food prices, land grabbing and climate change as key factors contributing to the worsening food crisis.
“We have apparently moved into an era of more volatile, wildly fluctuating commodity prices,” said Peter Rosset in “Land and World Food Crisis.” Rosset cited the rapid increase of prices of agricultural commodities “between the end of 2007 and summer of 2008, while “world market rice prices tripled in 2008, wheat prices more than doubled, and corn prices almost doubled…and following the dramatic hikes, the prices for rice and wheat fell by 55 (percent) in late 2008 and corn fell 64 (percent). In January 2009 rice prices began increasing again.” Rosset is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico (CECCAM), and is part of the technical support team of La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement.
The culprit behind this volatility is skewed and deregulated commodity markets, which have allowed food and other agricultural crops to be traded like any other commodity through derivatives and other complex financial instruments. The food crisis has contributed to the revaluation of land and the rush to control it, especially in the global South, for the purpose of securing a country’s future food and energy demands. This phenomenon has now been called global land grabbing by civil society organizations. These lands, of which peasants have been dispossessed, are now controlled by agribusiness. Meanwhile, budget cuts, privatization and removal of tariff barriers have diminished the peasant class’ capacity for agricultural production, in turn rendering countries dependent on imported foods and therefore more vulnerable to price changes, Rosset said.
But land grab is just a symptom of an underlying, more serious infirmity—a paradigm that promotes privatization and commoditization of resources, thereby discriminating against the poor and socially-politically marginalized, said Shalmali Guttal and Mary Ann Manahan in their paper “In Defense of the Commons.” Privatization and commoditization have weakened “common property management systems” that used to be the traditional practice of local communities and peoples. Guttal and Manahan work at Focus on the Global South.
Explain Guttal and Manahan: “Commons are forms of wealth that belong to all of us and that must be actively protected and managed for the good of all… Land, territory and natural resources are not simply economic assets; they are the foundations of culture, identity, society, food sovereignty, self determination and well being. They must be protected as commons to achieve social and economic justice, and the well-being of communities, society and ecosystems in the present and for the future.”
As it is often the case, the poor and marginalized, since they have been deprived of economic opportunities and political agency to demand their rights and access to resources, bear the brunt of changes—economic, political, and now even in climate and the natural environment.
The paper “Weathering the Storms: land use and climate change” exposes the link among climate change, depletion of natural resources, increasing control by business/corporate interests of these diminished resources and further dispossession of the poor.
This paper asserts: “Today, about 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas in developing countries and practice small hold family agriculture, artisanal fisheries and/or pastoralism. Their daily food, fuel and other household needs are met primarily through localized production and foraging activities-- often by women—in family owned plots, common grazing lands, woods, forests, streams, rivers and lakes. These production/foraging practices and the eco-systems that sustain them are increasingly under threat from changing weather and precipitation patterns because of climate change, as well from intensifying demand for farmlands, forests and water sources among state and private investors, corporations, traders, brokers and speculators.”
Land grab has not only destroyed communities and depleted resources; it has also intensified food insecurity, said LRAN and Focus on the Global South. The recommended path to security in food production and access to food consists of the following:
- “Peasant agriculture, family farming, artisanal fishing and indigenous food procurement systems that are based on ecological methods and short marketing circuits;
- “Production, distribution and consumption systems that fit the carrying capacity of the earth;
- “New agricultural policies that respond to the needs, proposals and direct control of small-scale food producers instead of current top-down, corporate-led, neoliberal regimes, and;
- “Genuine agrarian and aquatic reform programs that will return land and ecosystems to local communities.”
The briefing paper series is a timely publication replete not only with facts but a profound appreciation of the current—worsening—global food crisis as it relates to other critical issues on land, water, climate change, and national and global policies.
The other articles in the collection focus on national experiences in unjust agrarian structures and relations, the right to land and grassroots campaigns directed at recovering access to land and other resources. This collection of papers aims to be a resource for social movements and grassroots activists as they “defend the rights of local people to land and natural resources” and seek “to re-orient policies towards food sovereignty.” C.V.MILITANTE
