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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty
  • Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:53:32 -0700


>From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty
The Challenge of Social Movements
http://monthlyreview.org/090831holt-gimenez.php

The current global food crisis — decades in the making — is a crushing
indictment against capitalist agriculture and the corporate monopolies that
dominate the world’s food systems. The role of the industrial agrifood
complex in creating the crisis (through the monopolization of input
industries, industrial farming, processing, and retailing) and the
self-serving neoliberal solutions proposed by the world’s multilateral
institutions and leading industrial countries are being met with skepticism,
disillusion, and indifference by a general public more concerned with the
global economic downturn than with the food crisis. Neoliberal retrenchment
has met growing resistance by those most affected by the crisis — the world’s
smallholder farmers.

Solutions to the food crisis advanced by the World Bank, the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Consultative Group for International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and mega-philanthropy, propose accelerating
the spread of biotechnology, reviving the Green Revolution, re-introducing
the conditional lending of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, and re-centering the now fragmented power of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) by concluding the Doha “Development Round” of trade
negotiations. These institutions have a mandate from capital to mitigate
hunger, diffuse social unrest, and reduce the overall numbers of peasant
producers worldwide — without introducing any substantive changes to the
structure of the world’s food systems. Their neoliberal strategies are in
stark contrast to the proposals for ecological approaches to agriculture
(agroecology) and food sovereignty advanced by farmer federations and civil
society organizations worldwide that instead seek to transform food systems.
Clashes and declarations of protest at recent summits in Rome, Hokkaido, and
Madrid, the growing public resistance to the industrial agrifood complex, and
the rise, spread, and political convergence of movements for agroecology,
land reform, food justice, and food sovereignty, all indicate that the food
crisis has become the focal point in a class struggle over the future of our
food systems.

The Food Crisis

Last year record numbers of the world’s poor experienced hunger, this at a
time of record harvests and record profits for the world’s major agrifood
corporations. The contradiction of increasing hunger in the midst of wealth
and abundance sparked “food riots,” not seen for many decades. Protests in
Mexico, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon,
Yemen, Egypt, Haiti, and twenty other countries were sparked by skyrocketing
food prices (see “Food Wars” by Walden Bello and Mara Baviera in this issue).
In June 2008, the World Bank reported that global food prices had risen 83
percent over the last three years and the FAO cited a 45 percent increase in
their world food price index in just nine months.1 While commodity prices
have since fallen due to the world economic downturn and speculators
lessening their bets on commodities, food prices remain high and are not
expected to return to pre-crisis levels.

The widespread food protests were not simply crazed “riots” by hungry masses.
Rather, they were angry demonstrations against high food prices in countries
that formerly had food surpluses, and where government and industry were
unresponsive to people’s plight. In some cases, starving people were just
trying to access food from trucks or stores. Alarmed by the specter of
growing social unrest, the World Bank announced that without massive,
immediate injections of food aid, 100 million people in the South would join
the swelling ranks of the word’s hungry.2 These shrill warnings immediately
revived Malthusian mantras within the agrifood industry and unleashed a
flurry of heroic industrial promises for new genetically engineered
high-yielding, “climate-ready,” and “bio-fortified” seeds. The World Bank
called for a “New Deal” for Agriculture and trotted out a portfolio of $1.2
billion in emergency loans. The FAO appealed (unsuccessfully) to OECD
governments to finance a $30 billion a year revival of developing country
agriculture. Über-philanthropist Bill Gates invited multinational
corporations to follow him into a new era of “creative capitalism,” promising
that his new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) would provide
four million poor farmers with new seeds and fertilizers.

But with record grain harvests in 2007, according to the FAO, there was more
than enough food in the world to feed everyone in 2008 — at least 1.5 times
current demand. In fact, over the last twenty years, food production has
risen steadily at over 2.0 percent a year, while the rate of population
growth has dropped to 1.14 percent a year. Globally, population is not
outstripping food supply. Over 90 percent of the world’s hungry are simply
too poor to buy enough food. High food prices are a problem because nearly
three billion people — half of the world’s population — are poor and
near-poor. Around half of the people in the developing world earn less than
two dollars a day. Nearly 20 percent are “extremely poor” earning less than
one dollar a day.3 Many of those officially classified as poor are
subsistence farmers who have limited access to land and water and cannot
compete in global markets.4 In addition, the diversion of large quantities of
grains and oil crops for the growing industrial feedlots in the emerging
economies, as well as the diversion of land and water for “green” agrofuels
has put significant pressure on markets for many basic foods.

Unsurprisingly, the food crisis has provided the world’s major agrifood
monopolies with windfall profits. In the last quarter of 2007 as the world
food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s earnings jumped 42
percent, Monsanto’s by 45 percent, and Cargill’s by 86 percent. Cargill’s
subsidiary, Mosaic Fertilizer, saw profits rise by 1,200 percent.5

The steady concentration of profits and market power in the industrial North
mirrors the loss of food producing capacity and the growth of hunger in the
global South. Despite the oft-cited productivity gains of the Green
Revolution, and despite decades of development campaigns — most recently, the
elusive Millennium Development Goals — per capita hunger is rising and the
number of desperately hungry people on the planet has grown steadily from 700
million in 1986 to 800 million in 1998.6 Today, the number stands at over 1
billion. Fifty years ago, the developing countries had yearly agricultural
trade surpluses of $1 billion. After decades of capitalist development and
the global expansion of the industrial agrifood complex, the southern food
deficit has ballooned to $11 billion a year.7 The cereal import bill for
low-income food-deficit countries is now over $38 billion and the FAO
predicts it will grow to $50 billion by 2030.8 This shift from food
self-sufficiency to food dependency has been accomplished by colonizing
national food systems and destroying peasant agriculture.

The Persistence of the Peasantry

The last half-century of capitalist agricultural expansion has pummeled the
world’s peasantry, dispossessing them of land, water, and genetic resources
through violent processes of enclosures, displacement, and outright piracy.
The Green Revolution, the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs, and
global and regional trade agreements have driven differentiation and
de-peasantization.9 The same period has seen a fourfold increase in grain and
oilseed production, with a steady decline in prices to farmers.10 This has
been accompanied by a relentless industrial trend of vertical and horizontal
concentration within the world’s food systems. Two companies, Archer Daniels
Midland and Cargill, capture three-quarters of the world grain trade.11 The
top three seed companies Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta control 39 percent of
the world’s commercial seed market.12

However, high global rates of urbanization have not overcome the stubborn
“persistence of the peasantry.”13 Whether this is due to the fact that
historically new family-labor farms continually replace those lost through
industrialization,14 or because for much of the world’s rural poor “there is
hardly any alternative but farming,” the fact is that despite massive
out-migration and intense fractioning of peasant landholdings, the absolute
numbers of peasant and smallholder farmers in the South have remained
remarkably stable over the last forty years.15 Smallholders continue to
provide significant amounts of the food in the South, as high as 90 percent
of all food production in African countries.16

This mix of de-peasantization and re-peasantization has led to shifts in
crops, hybridized forms of production, and a heavy reliance on off-farm
income and remittances. These processes are characterized by changes in the
forms of production, livelihood strategies, and political demands.
Reformulating the “peasant question,” Araghi (see endnote 9) identifies not
only historic demands for land, but also demands relating to the
transnational and dispossessed character of today’s smallholders, e.g.,
housing and homelessness, informal work, migration, identity, environment,
and increasingly hunger.

The difficulty of confronting the extensive attacks on smallholders and
politically mobilizing around the complexity of their livelihood demands has
been a challenge for agrarian movements in the South. This has also been a
problem for northern organizations seeking to protect family farms and
counter the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture with more
sustainable forms of production. Only a decade ago, rural sociologists
lamented the lack of an “underlying notion…to serve as a unifying force” for
a sustainable agriculture movement, and pointed to the need for advocates to
form coalitions to advance an agro-foods movement capable of contesting
deregulation, globalization, and agro-ecosystem degradation.17 With the
current food crisis, the peasant-based call for food sovereignty — literally,
people’s self-government of the food system — can potentially fulfill this
political function.

First defined in 1996 by the international peasant federation La Vía
Campesina (The Peasant Way) as “people’s right to healthy and culturally
appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods,
and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems,” food
sovereignty proposes that people, rather than corporate monopolies, make the
decisions regarding our food. Food sovereignty is a much deeper concept than
food security because it proposes not just guaranteed access to food, but
democratic control over the food system — from production and processing, to
distribution, marketing, and consumption. Whether applied to countries in the
global South working to re-establish national food production, to farmers
protecting their seed systems from GMOs, or to rural-urban communities
setting up their own direct marketing systems, food sovereignty aims to
democratize and transform our food systems.

For decades, family farmers, rural women, and communities around the world
have resisted the destruction of their native seeds and worked hard to
diversify their crops, protect their soil, conserve their water and forests,
and establish local gardens, markets, businesses, and community-based food
systems. There are many highly productive, equitable, and sustainable
alternatives to the present industrial practices and corporate monopolies
holding the world’s food hostage, and literally millions of people working to
advance these alternatives.18 Contrary to conventional thinking, these
practices are highly productive and could easily feed the projected
mid-century global population of over nine billion people.19

Smallholders working with movements like Campesino a Campesino (Farmer to
Farmer) of Latin America, and NGO networks for farmer-led sustainable
agriculture like Participatory Land Use Management (PELUM) of Africa, and the
Farmer Field Schools of Asia have restored exhausted soils, raised yields,
and preserved the environment using highly effective agroecological
management practices on hundreds of thousands of acres of land. These
practices have given them important measures of autonomy in relation to the
industrial agrifood system and have increased their environmental and
economic resiliency, buffering them from climate-induced hazards and market
volatility.

At the same time, peasant organizations struggling to advance agrarian reform
have been busy confronting the neoliberal offensive.20 Because the expansion
of industrial agrifood both dispossesses smallholders and recruits them into
a massive reserve army of labor, these peasant organizations have broadened
their work across sectors and borders. The globalization of these movements —
both in content and scale — responds in part to the intensification of
capital’s enclosures, and is partly a strategic decision to engage in global
advocacy. As a result, the new transnational agrarian movements regularly
integrate social, environmental, economic, and cultural concerns with demands
for land reform.

Two distinguishable currents can be identified from these trends. One is made
up of peasant organizations and federations focusing primarily on new
agrarian advocacy — like Vía Campesina. The other trend is made up of
smallholders working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that focus
primarily on developing sustainable agriculture — like Campesino a Campesino.
The political and institutional origins of these currents are different, and
this has at times led to contradictory, competitive and even adversarial
relations, particularly between non-governmental organizations implementing
programs in the interests of farmers, and farmer’s organizations interested
in implementing their own programs. Nonetheless, at both the farm and the
international level, there is clear objective synergy between the agrarian
demands of today’s peasant organizations, and the needs of the growing base
of smallholders practicing sustainable agriculture as a means of survival.
The food crisis may be bringing these movements together.

Advocacy: Walking on the Peasant Road

In 1993 farm leaders from around the world gathered in Mons, Belgium for a
conference on policy research put on by a Dutch NGO allied with the
International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP), an international
farm federation dominated by large-scale, northern farmers. What emerged
instead was an international peasant movement: La Vía Campesina. The
emergence of an international peasant-led farmer federation signified both a
break with conventional federations run by large producers and with the
humanitarian NGOs typically concerned with peasant agricultural production.
The Mons declaration asserted the right of small farmers to make a living in
the countryside, the right of all people to healthy food, and the right of
nations to define their own agricultural polices.21

Since its inception, Vía Campesina’s main objective has been to halt
neoliberalism and construct alternative food systems based on food
sovereignty. It was formed with organizations mostly from the Americas and
Europe, but has since expanded to include more than 150 rural social
movements from over 79 countries, including 12 countries in Africa, and
scores of organizations in South and East Asia. Unlike its large farmer
counterpart IFAP, Vía Campesina is made up almost entirely of marginalized
groups: landless workers, small farmers, sharecroppers, pastoralists,
fisherfolk, and the peri-urban poor.

Vía Campesina has been remarkably successful in creating the political space
in which to advance its platform of food sovereignty, getting the WTO out of
agriculture, women’s rights, sustainable agriculture, a ban on GMO’s, and
redistributive agrarian reform. The movement was instrumental in organizing
protests at WTO ministerial meetings from Seattle to Hong Kong. Vía Campesina
played the lead role in the FAO International Conference on Agrarian Reform
and Rural Development in 2006, and mounted successful resistance campaigns to
the World Bank’s market-led land reform programs.

Vía Campesina has also been among the most vocal critics of institutional
responses to the global food crisis. At the High Level Task force meeting on
the food crisis in Madrid, Spain, Vía Campesina released a declaration
demanding that solutions to the food crisis be completely independent of the
institutions responsible for creating the crisis in the first place (i.e.,
the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and CGIAR). The declaration reaffirmed the call for
food sovereignty, demanded an end to land grabs for industrial agrofuel and
foreign food production, and called on the international community to reject
the Green Revolution and instead support the findings of the UN’s
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for
Development (IAASTD). This seminal assessment, sponsored by five UN agencies
and the World Bank, and authored by over four hundred scientists and
development experts from more than eighty countries, concluded that there is
an urgent need to increase and strengthen further research and adoption of
locally appropriate and democratically controlled agroecological methods of
production, relying on local expertise, local germplasm, and farmer-managed,
local seed systems.

Practice: Agroecological Transformation — Farmer to Farmer

Farmers helping their brothers, so that they can help themselves…to find
solutions and not be dependent on a technician or on the bank: that is
Campesino a Campesino.

— Argelio González, Santa Lucía, Nicaragua, 1991

This is the farmer’s definition of Latin America’s thirty-year farmer-led
movement for sustainable agriculture. El Movimiento Campesino a Campesino,
the Farmer to Farmer Movement, is made up of hundreds of thousands of
peasant-technicians farming and working in over a dozen countries.

Campesino a Campesino began with a series of rural projects among the
indigenous smallholders of the ecologically fragile hillsides of the
Guatemalan Highlands in the early 1970s. Sponsored by progressive NGOs, Mayan
peasants developed a method for agricultural improvement using relatively
simple methods of small-scale experimentation combined with farmer-led
workshops to share their discoveries. Because they were producing at
relatively low levels, they concentrated on overcoming the most commonly
limiting factors of production in peasant agriculture, i.e., soil and water.
By adding organic matter to soils, and by implementing soil and water
conservation techniques, they frequently obtained yield increases of 100-400
percent. Rapid, recognizable results helped build enthusiasm among farmers
and led to the realization that they could improve their own agriculture —
without running the risks, causing the environmental damage, or developing
the financial dependency associated with the Green Revolution. Initial
methods of composting, soil and water conservation, and seed selection soon
developed into a sophisticated “basket” of sustainable technologies and
agroecological management approaches that included green manures, crop
diversification, integrated pest management, biological weed control,
reforestation, and agrobiodiversity management at farm and watershed scales.

The effective, low-cost methods for farmer-generated technologies and
farmer-to-farmer knowledge transfer were quickly picked up by NGOs working in
agricultural development. The failures of the Green Revolution to improve
smallholder livelihoods in Central America, and the region’s revolutionary
uprisings and counterrevolutionary conflicts of the 1970s and ’80s combined
to create both the need and the means for the growth of what became the
Campesino a Campesino movement. As credit, seeds, extension services, and
markets continually failed the peasantry, smallholders turned to NGOs rather
than governments to meet their agricultural needs. The structural adjustment
programs of the 1980s and ’90s exacerbated the conditions of the peasantry.
In response, the Campesino a Campesino movement grew, spreading through NGOs
to hundreds of thousands of smallholders across the Americas.22 Though the
movement was routinely dismissed by the international agricultural research
centers for “lacking science” and making unverified claims of sustainability,
in Central America following Hurricane Mitch (1998), some 2,000 promotores
from Campesino a Campesino carried out scientific research to prove that
their farms were significantly more resilient and sustainable than those of
their conventional neighbors.23

One of Campesino a Campesino’s most dramatic success stories has been in
Cuba, where its farmer-driven agroecological practices helped the country
transform much of its agriculture from high-external input, large-scale
systems to smaller, low-input organic systems. This conversion was
instrumental in helping Cuba overcome its food crisis during the Special
Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cuban Campesino a
Campesino Agroecology Movement (MACAC) was implemented through ANAP, the
national association of small farmers. The MACAC grew in a structural
environment in which Cuba’s numerous agricultural research stations and
agricultural universities worked to develop bio-fertilizers, integrated pest
management, and other techniques for low external-input agriculture. Reforms
were enacted to scale down collectives and cooperatives, placing greater
control over farming and marketing directly into the hands of smallholders.
Rural and urban farmers were provided easy access to land, credit, and
markets.24 In eight years, the Campesino a Campesino movement of Cuba grew to
over 100,000 smallholders. It had taken the movement nearly twenty years in
Mexico and Central America to grow to that size.25

The farmer-to-farmer approach has been fairly universalized among NGOs
working in agroecological development, leading to highly successful
farmer-generated agroecological practices worldwide (as well as a fair amount
of methodological co-optation on the part of international agricultural
research centers). The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) developed in
Madagascar has raised yields to as high as eight metric tons per hectare and
spread to a million farmers in over two dozen countries.26 A survey of
forty-five sustainable agriculture projects in seventeen African countries
covering some 730,000 households revealed that agroecological approaches
substantially improved food production and household food security. In 95
percent of these projects, cereal yields improved by 50-100 percent.27 A
study of organic agriculture on the continent showed that small-scale,
modern, organic agriculture was widespread in sub-Saharan Africa,
contributing significantly to improved yields, incomes, and environmental
services.28 Over 170 African organizations from nine countries in East and
Southern Africa belong to the Participatory Land Use Management (PELUM) a
network that has been sharing agroecological knowledge in East and South
Africa for thirteen years. For twenty years, the Center for Low External
Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA) has documented hundreds of
agroecological alternatives that successfully overcome many of the limiting
factors in African agriculture and elsewhere in the global South.

The Divide between Practitioners and Advocates

I think we should not fall in the trap of seeing the development of
agroecology by just looking at the physical aspects of the farm or just at
the economics. We as NGOs have a problem with our social position in which we
are serving as a dike and often an obstacle to processes of agency within the
people and greater local organization… Agroecology is not just a collection
of practices. Agroecology is a way of life… We can’t have an agroecological
change without a campesino movement. We NGOs can accompany them, but we can’t
do it. We promote projects, and projects have a short life. They are
unsustainable.

— Nelda Sánchez, Mesoamerican Information System for Sustainable
Agriculture

Though the farmer-to-farmer-NGO partnership has been highly effective in
supporting local projects and developing sustainable practices on the ground,
unlike Vía Campesina, it has done little to address the need for an enabling
policy context for sustainable agriculture. Given the unfavorable structural
conditions, agroecological practices have not scaled up nationally to become
the rule rather the exception.29 Despite far-flung farmer-to-farmer networks
linked by hundreds of NGOs, farmers in these movements have generally not
lobbied, pressured, taken direct action, or otherwise organized in favor of
sustainable agriculture in a significant way. The farmers of PELUM in West
Africa excel in agroecological farming but until recently were largely
uninvolved in policy work to halt the spread of the new internationally
funded Green Revolution. The renowned Farmer Field Schools of Asia have
revolutionized integrated pest management and pioneered participatory plant
breeding, but have not been a political force in preserving agrobiodiversity
or defending farmer’s rights.

Ironically, the strength of these farmer-to-farmer networks — i.e., their
capacity to generate farmer’s agroecological knowledge in a horizontal,
widespread, and decentralized fashion — is also a political weakness. On one
hand, there are no coordinating bodies within these networks capable of
mobilizing farmers for social pressure, advocacy, or political action. On the
other, their effectiveness at developing sustainable agriculture at the local
level has kept its promoters focused on improving agroecological practices
rather than addressing the political and economic conditions for sustainable
agriculture.

While the potential synergies between a global peasant federation advocating
food sovereignty and far-flung smallholder movements practicing agroecology
may seem obvious, efforts to bring agrarian advocacy to farmer-to-farmer
networks have run up against the historical distrust between development NGOs
implementing sustainable agriculture projects and the peasant organizations
that make up the new agrarian movements. Aside from having assumed many of
the tasks previously expected of the state, NGOs have become an institutional
means to advance social and political agendas within the disputed political
terrain of civil society. Within the institutional landscape of agricultural
development some NGOs are enrolled either directly or indirectly in the
neoliberal project. Others are simply doing what they do best and tend to
look out for their own programs. But others are deeply concerned that
advancing the practices of sustainable agriculture without addressing the
conditions for sustainability will ultimately end in failure. These NGOs are
potential links to vast informal networks of smallholders who are committed
to transforming agriculture.

Over the last thirty years the farmers in these networks have demonstrated
their capacity to share information and knowledge. Their commitment to
agroecological practices has resulted in a body of agrarian demands specific
to sustainable peasant agriculture. It is now common among these farmers to
hear the term food sovereignty. However, because most of these farmers do not
belong to the farmer organizations that make up Vía Campesina, there are few,
if any, avenues for them to exercise this commitment politically.

Integrating Advocacy and Practice: Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement

One example of the potential transformational power of integrating peasant
advocacy with agroecological practice comes from a peasant movement that is
actively integrating these two aspects into its own organization. Brazil’s
Landless Worker’s Movement (MST), one of Vía Campesina’s founding members, is
the largest rural social movement in the Americas. The MST has had a
significant influence within Vía Campesina and a profound effect on agrarian
politics worldwide. The MST has settled more than a million landless peasants
and forced the redistribution of thirty-five million acres of land (an area
the size of Uruguay).

The MST has its roots in peasant land occupations dating back to the late
1970s. In December 1979 a group of landless rural workers set up a camp at a
crossroads now known as Encruzihalda Natalino. Following a clause in the
Brazilian constitution mandating that land serve a social function, the
peasants demanded that the government redistribute idle land in the area.
Three and a half years and many mass mobilizations later, the group was
granted around 4,600 acres. Building on the success of Encruzihalda Natalino
and several others like it, land occupations have been the primary tactic of
the MST.30

Delegates from land occupations throughout Brazil met in 1984 in the state of
Paraná and laid out four basic goals for the future of the movement: “a) to
maintain a broadly inclusive movement of the rural poor in order; b) to
achieve agrarian reform; c) to promote the principle that land belongs to the
people who work on it and live from it; and d) make it possible to have a
just, fraternal society and put an end to capitalism.”31 Since then the
movement has established some 400 production associations, 1,800 elementary
schools, adult literacy programs, credit co-ops, health clinics, and its own
organic seed supplier for MST farmers.32

Though the MST initially promoted industrial agriculture among its members,
this strategy proved unsustainable and economically disastrous on many of its
settlements. In 1990 the movement reached out to other peasant movements
practicing agroecology, and at its fourth national congress in 2000, the MST
adopted agroecology as national policy to orient production on its
settlements. Today, the seven organizations that participate in La Vía
Campesina-Brasil have all adopted agroecology as an official policy, as have
many organizations in Vía Campesina-International. The MST and La Vía
Campesina-Brasil have established eleven secondary schools and introduced
university courses in agroecology to train the movements’ youth to provide
technical assistance to campesino families in rural areas. The integration of
agroecology into the new agrarian movements is a welcome development because
it helps advance forms of production that are consistent with the political
and social goals of food sovereignty, and the MST schools in and of
themselves are a testament to the movements’ capacity to advance
agroecological policies at state and federal levels.33

Cultivating Convergence

The global food crisis had reinforced neoliberal retrenchment in agricultural
development and breathed new life into the sagging Green Revolution, now
resurgent in Africa and parts of Asia. Like its predecessor, the new Green
Revolution is essentially a campaign designed to mobilize resources for the
expansion of capitalist agriculture. Similar to the role once played by the
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (albeit on a much smaller scale), the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation is the new philanthropic flagship for the Green
Revolution tasked with resurrecting the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research and obtaining broad social and government agreement for
the expansion of agro-industrial capital into peasant communities. The
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa serves up shallow definitions of
terms like agroecology, sustainability, and even food sovereignty in an
effort to strip them of their deeper, agrarian content and enroll NGOs and
their stakeholders into the Green Revolution.

The food crisis is bad, but another Green Revolution will make things much
worse. The alternative, smallholder-driven agroecological agriculture, was
recognized by the IAASTD as the best strategy for rebuilding agriculture,
ending rural poverty and hunger, and establishing food security in the South.
To be given a chance, however, this strategy requires a combination of strong
political will and extensive on-the-ground agroecological practice to
overcome opposition from the well-financed Green Revolution.

In the face of a renewed, neoliberal assault in the form of a Green
Revolution, peasant movements and farmer-to-farmer networks do appear to be
moving closer together. When PELUM brought over three hundred farmer leaders
together in Johannesburg to speak on their own behalf at the World Summit on
Sustainable Development, the Eastern and Southern Africa Farmers Forum was
founded. African farm organizations and their allies have met in Mali, Bonn,
and Senegal to advance African Agroecolgical Alternatives to the Green
Revolution (2007, 2008). Following the Rome food crisis meeting, Vía
Campesina met in Mozambique where they signed a declaration for a smallholder
solution to the food crisis (2008). These developments and others suggest
that the international call for food sovereignty is beginning to take root in
specific smallholder initiatives to confront the food and farm crisis. New
mixes of advocacy and practice across borders and sectors and between
institutions are being forged on a daily basis.

These hopeful developments have the potential for bringing together the
extensive local networks for agroecological practice with the transnational
advocacy organizations. If the two currents merge into a broad-based movement
capable of generating massive social pressure, they could tip the scales of
political will in favor of food sovereignty.

Ultimately, to end world hunger, the monopolistic industrial agrifood complex
will have to be replaced with agroecological and redistributive food systems.
It is too early to tell whether or not the fledgling trend of convergence
signals a new stage of integration between the main currents of peasant
advocacy and smallholder agroecological practice. Nonetheless, the seeds of
convergence have been sown. Successfully cultivating this trend may well
determine the outcome of both the global food crisis and the international
showdown over the world’s food systems.

Notes

1. S. Wiggins, and S. Levy, Rising Food Prices: A Global Crisis (London:
Overseas Development Institute, 2008). Go back
2. World Bank, “Rising Food Prices.” Go back
3. Global Monitoring Report 2008 (World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2008). Go
back
4. E. Holt-Giménez, R. Patel, and A. Shattuck, Food Rebellions (Oakland:
Food First/Fahamu, 2009). Go back
5. G. Lean, “Rising Prices Threaten Millions with Starvation, Despite
Bumper Crops,” The Independent (2008). Go back
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