In what activists have dubbed the “global land grab”, transnational investment in land has grabbed media headlines worldwide. While attention has focused on the role of hedge funds, sovereign wealth and foreign purchases of vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia, recent research is uncovering a broader pattern. As land values increase, land ownership is concentrating everywhere – even where there have been few reports of foreign land grabbing.

Land deals driven by national and international capital expansion are occurring in areas of longstanding inequity, racism and conflict. They involve real estate speculation, mining, agrofuel production, industrial forestry, and “flex crop” production, often led by local elites. The patterns of dispossession are deeper, wider and potentially devastating for marginalised communities everywhere.

The responses to land grabs – thus far scholarly papers, media reports, place-based resistance and global campaigns for transparency and voluntary codes of conduct – have helped to bring the issue to public attention. But as land grabs spread around the world, it is becoming clear that regulating and writing about land grabs is not enough: land grabs must be stopped.

The challenge is for communities to mobilise for the right to land and territory before they are besieged by speculators, hedge funds or extractive industries. This requires a proactive strategy that goes beyond reactive responses to land grabs and actively advances alternative projects and alliances for land use and ownership. It also requires vigilance regarding the political, legal and infrastructural build-up that precedes land grabbing, so communities can prepare to resist.

Reversing the land grab trend demands a powerful, integrated response from under-served communities, civil society and social movements. It means building a pro-active global-local movement based on the right of communities and peoples to sustainable, land-based livelihoods; their right to have a democratic say in how the land they live on is used, and an equitable share in the social, environmental and economic benefits of that land. In short, it requires a broad-based movement for land sovereignty. Much like food sovereignty, land sovereignty brings together the demands of social movements from the South and North and from rural and urban settings.

Land grabs are making projects for food security and sustainable agriculture moot efforts… Farmers’ organisations, social movements and development NGOs need to find “common ground” to protect peasant farmers, forest dwellers, indigenous communities, family farmers and urban agriculture from the devastation of dispossession.

Eric Holt Gimenez

Eric Holt Gimenez is the Executive Director of Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy.
E-mail: eholtgim@foodfirst.org

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A recent study published in Nature found that organic systems yield, on average, 25% less than conventional, chemical systems — although this is highly variable and context-specific (V. Seufert, N. Ramankutty and J.A. Foley, 2012). Embracing conventional wisdom, its authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimising its global environmental impacts”. Unfortunately, neither the study nor conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the world produces more than one and a half times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people making less than US$ 2 a day – most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviable, small plots of land – can’t afford to buy this food. The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritise the growing population of livestock and cars over hungry people.

In fact, when we unpack the data from the Nature study, we find that for many crops and in many instances, the reported yield gap is minimal. New seed breeding advances for organic systems, and the transition of commercial organic to diversified farming systems that yield more than monocultures, will close this gap even further. The Rodale Institute’s 30 year side-by-side study comparing conventional chemical agriculture with organic methods found that organic yields match conventional systems in good years, and outperform them under drought conditions and environmental distress — a critical consideration given that climate change increasingly leads to extreme weather conditions.

Can conventional agriculture grow enough for 10 billion people by 2050? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean it can feed them. To end hunger we must end poverty and inequality. Conventional agriculture’s record on these issues is abysmal. To end hunger we need agro-ecological approaches and structural reforms that ensure that resource-poor farmers have the land and resources they need for sustainable livelihoods.

Eric Holt Gimenez

Eric Holt Gimenez is the Executive Director of Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy.
E-mail: eholtgim@foodfirst.org

The post Opinion: What we need is to end hunger appeared first on Ileia.

A detailed analysis of the corporate food regime dominating our planet’s food systems shows that it is environmentally destructive, financially volatile and socially unjust. Its central role in creating the global food crisis is well documented. What is most striking and disturbing is that the “solutions” call for more of the same destructive technologies, global markets and unregulated corporate power that brought us the food crisis in the first place. We need a vision for real solutions – not from those causing the problems, but from those who are most affected by poverty and hunger.

A dynamic global food movement has risen up to confront the corporate assault on our food. Around the world, food justice activists are taking back pieces of their food systems through local gardening, organic farming, community-supported agriculture, farmers’ markets and locally-owned processing and retail operations.

Food sovereignty advocates are organising for land reform, the end of destructive global-trade agreements and support for family farmers, women and peasants. Protests against – and viable alternatives to – the expansion of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), agrofuels, land grabs and the oligopolistic control of our food are growing everywhere, everyday, providing a vision of hope, equity and sustainability that is “breaking through the asphalt” of a reified corporate food regime.

The global food movement springs from strong commitments to sustainability, food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty on the part of thousands of farmers’ unions, consumer groups, NGOs, faith-based and community organisations that spans the planet’s urban-rural and North-South divides. This remarkable “movement of movements” is widespread, highly diverse, refreshingly creative and politically amorphous.

There are many hopeful initiatives for fair and sustainable food systems. However, there’s been little strategic reflection on how to get from where we are – a broad but fragmented collection of hopeful alternatives – to where we need to be: the new norm. What is to be done? How can we roll back the corporate food regime and roll out healthy, sustainable, and equitable food systems? This transformation of the world’s food systems requires political will – which comes about not just from good intentions and sustainable practices, but through the power of social movements.

The question facing movements for sustainability and food sovereignty is “How can we, in all our diversity, converge to become powerful enough to transform the world’s food systems?” The answer is being forged daily, on the ground, as political alliances grow between producers, workers and consumers, and as social movements begin bridging North-South and urban-rural divides: “convergence in diversity”.

Text: Eric Holt-Giménez

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Farming Matters | 27.4 | December 2011

A day doesn’t go by that the present food crisis – in which nearly a billion people are going hungry – is used as proof of the food scarcity plaguing the planet. There is scarcity – but not of food. The world produces enough food. People are going hungry today because they can’t afford food, especially when prices spike. The recent extreme price volatility and price spikes cannot be explained by simple supply and demand models. In fact, there has hardly been any change in world food demand over the last three years. The falling land productivity of industrial agriculture, the spread of agrofuels diverting arable land to fuel crops, climate change and an inadequate investment in agroecology are all adversely affecting food supply. But despite their devastating impacts, these supply-side factors don’t explain the extreme volatility and price spikes in global food markets seen in recent years.

Food price surges are the result of a new phenomenon: massive hoarding of food commodity derivatives. These are specialised financial products invented by powerful financial institutions. As a result, prices skyrocket because these investors have created a financially-induced demand, thereby imposing immense artificial scarcity on the global food market. In 2008 and again in 2010, prices for staple crops like rice, wheat, and corn doubled and tripled, and extended the grip of poverty and deprivation to hundreds of millions of people. And what’s more, institutional investors knew their speculation was driving food prices higher.

The “financialisation” of our food began with the creation of tradable commodity indexes, which turn some of the basic necessities of life into speculative assets. The trading of agricultural commodities, which in itself serves an important function for corporations with a real stake in agricultural commodities, is taken advantage of by financial speculators. Financial speculators are merely concerned with financial profit – not the destination of the food commodity or the functionality of the global food system. On top of this, new regulations allow institutional investors to trade commodity futures contracts without position limits, disclosure requirements or regulatory oversight. With the crash of the housing bubble, followed by the economic recession, institutional investors flocked to the unregulated commodity index funds. As a result, financial capital flooded the market, taking massive positions in food and concentrating them in just a few, corporate hands – without having to report any of it!

By opening up food commodities to financial speculation, global food commodity markets have seen the most price volatility and biggest price surges ever. The Occupy Wall Street protestors are not off the mark. Wall Street has been occupying our food system for far too long – with disastrous results.

Text: Eric Holt Gimenez

A longer version of this column appeared first in The Huffington Post.

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