Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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How Agri-Food Corporations Make the World Hungry
Written by Al Huebner   Tuesday, 09 February 2010
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1851/1/

ImageThe Winter 2009 issue of Food First News reports that last November the 
World Summit on Food Security in Rome issued a declaration that the world is 
now hungrier than ever before. Significantly, this is not the result of food 
shortage, with world production at 11/2 times that needed to feed every man, 
woman, and child on the planet.

The root cause of this insecurity is the food system itself, which is 
controlled by a handful of global monopolies. In fact, the crisis comes at a 
time of record global profits for the world's agri-food corporations. Archer 
Daniel Midland, Cargill, Monsanto, General Foods, and Wal-Mart all posted 
profit increases in 2008 of 20% to 86%. For Mosaic, a fertilizer subsidy of 
Cargill, profits increased by a stunning 1200%.

The World Food Summit did nothing to confront the hunger crisis. The lack of 
any political will in Rome was so low that not one head of state from a G-8 
country showed up (except for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who 
of course lives there). With a shocking lack of commitment the G-8 
representatives decided to drop the goal of ending world hunger. Now the rich 
countries need only work to halve hunger by 2015.

In a situation with many parallels, in November the US Department of 
Agriculture reported an alarming increase in food insecurity in the US; one 
in seven Americans don't get enough food throughout the year. The USDA report 
refers to household food shortages, yet in the US, as in the world, there is 
no food shortage. An obvious question comes up: why, in the most productive 
farming country in the world, do we have so many hungry people? The answer is 
that families simply don't have enough money to buy the food they need.

The reasons for this aren't hard to find. The nation's food workers make up 
18% of all workers in the US. But those who pick, process, pack, and serve 
our food are the lowest paid of any industry. This is analogous to the global 
situation, where most of the world's hungry are poor farmers. In both cases 
women and children suffer the most.

While more than 1 billion people in poor countries aren't sure where their 
next meal is coming from, many chronically food-insecure countries are 
selling their land, as Raphael Grojnowski reports in the same issue of Food 
First News. Sudan, Ethiopia, and Cambodia, for example, have already sold 
nearly 40 million hectares of their best agricultural land to foreign 
investors, mainly from the Middle East, China, and South Korea. This is a 
classic imperialist land grab that, like those familiar from the past, leads 
to a steady deterioration of the condition of human beings, not to mention 
degradation of the environment.

Spurred by the global food-price crisis and supply shortages in the volatile 
world food market, wealthy but food-deficient countries are buying up vast 
tracts of land, especially in Africa. There they expect to grow food and fuel 
long distance. Promising new technologies and employment to some of the 
world's most neglected areas has many poor governments rushing to attract 
these new investments.

These land deals are negotiated in total secrecy and are having devastating 
effects on local farmers and their families. To make room for the new foreign 
mega-farms, small farmers are being dispossessed of their land. In their 
place, huge monoculture plantations to feed foreign consumers are being 
established, using industrial farming techniques that have extremely damaging 
environmental effects, such as chemical contamination of rural water supplies.

While many peasant organizations are relentlessly drawing attention to this 
devastating land-grabbing, the UN and other agencies have been 
characteristically slow to act. At last year's World Food Summit three UN 
agencies and the World Bank finally announced plans to draft a code of 
conduct for such "foreign land acquisitions." But the proposed guidelines are 
only a non-binding and voluntary code. Worse yet, its implementation is 
scheduled for late 2010, leaving investors another year to make secret deals 
for prime agricultural real estate overseas.