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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sun Feb 28 2010 - 23:52:14 EST
http://www.merinews.com/article/how-agro-food-corporations-keep-the-world-hungry/15799622.shtml
How agro food corporations keep the world hungry
grrow
Sun, Feb 28, 2010 14:01:35 IST
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 per
cent to 86 per cent. For Mosaic, a fertiliser subsidy of Cargill, profits
increased by a stunning 1200 per cent.
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 United States
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 per cent 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 one 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 organisations 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.
Sacrificing the environment for food security
In the aftermath of Copenhagen, many observers are lamenting the apparent
unwillingness of governments to confront climate change. However, this
unwillingness simply reflects an essential truth about public policy: The
immediate always trumps the distant. For most policymakers, the threat of
climate change remains a distant one. Governments prioritise immediate
threats, even if doing so hastens the melting of glaciers and the rising of
sea levels that may eventually destroy habitats and nations.
Another vivid illustration of this mindset is the acquisition by foreign
governments of vast tracts of farmland across the developing world. These
land deals leave immense carbon footprints and threaten widespread
environmental destruction, but are justified by both land-acquiring and
land-ceding nations as a necessary response to pressing concerns about food
security. This is no isolated trend.
According to the United Nations, 74 million acres of farmland in the
developing world were acquired in such deals over the first half of 2009
— an amount equal to half of Europe’s farmland.