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Moving from Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty

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Moving from Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty Shattuck and Holt-Giménez: Moving from Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty Comment Moving from Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty Annie Shattuckt & Eric Holt-Gim6neztt I. INTRODUCTION In Haiti U.N. peacekeepers fired on protesters demonstrating against the rising cost of rice.1 Over 70,000 people took to the streets in Mexico City to protest the price of tortillas.2 Even the Italians rioted over the price of pasta.3 The global food crisis of 2007 and 2008 once again thrust hunger into the international spotlight. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) chief Jacques Diouf, food prices spiked 45% in just nine monthS4, setting off a rash of riots around the world.5 When the protests settled, at least one government was left teetering 6 and an additional 200 million people were driven into the ranks of the hungry.7 t Policy Analyst, Food First/Institute for Food & Development. Partially adapted from the authors' FOOD REBELLIONS! CRISIS AND THE HUNGER FOR JUSTICE (2009). tt Policy Analyst and Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food & Development Policy. 1. See Food Riots Turn Deadly in Haiti, BBC NEws, Apr. 5, 2008, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7331921.stm. 2. Jonathan Watts, Riots and Hunger Feared as Demand for Grain Sends Food Costs Soaring, THE GUARDIAN, Dec. 4, 2007, at 15, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/ dec/04/china.business. 3. Id. 4. See Press Release, Food & Agric. Org. of the U.N. (FAO), Urgent Measures Required to Reduce Impact of High Food Prices on the Poor (Apr. 9, 2008), http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2008/1000823/index.html. 5. See STEVE WIGGINS & STEPHANIE LEVY, OVERSEAS DEV. INST., RISING FOOD PRICES: A GLOBAL CRISIS (2008), available at http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/1009.pdf. 6. Kathie Klarreich, Food Riots Lead to Haitian Meltdoon, TIME, Apr. 14, 2008, available at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1730607,00.html. 7. Rod McGuirk, U.N. Food Agency Says 200 Million More People Hungry, ABC NEWS, Oct. 26, 2009, available at http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=8914480 (last visited 421 Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2010 1 Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, Vol. 13 [2010], Iss. 2, Art. 2 422 YALE HUMAN RIGHTS & DEVELOPMENT L.J. [Vol. 13 The food crisis was not caused by population pressures or food scarcity. In fact, in 2007, the year the food crisis began in earnest, the world produced more grain than ever before.8 Over the last twenty years, food production has risen steadily at over 2% a year.9 Meanwhile, over the same period, population growth has slowed to 1.09% per year, with an average growth rate of 1.2%.10 Global population growth is not outstripping food supply; rather, the ability to pay for food is being outpaced by production. While commodity prices have largely come down since the peak of the crisis in 2008, the price of food worldwide has not returned to pre-2007 levels.1 With 1.02 billion hungry people on the planet, compared to just 873 million before the crisis, global hunger rates have not come down either.12 The international community has pledged to attack hunger and poverty for decades, with little actual progress. Since adoption of the high- profile Millennium Development Goals in 2000, which pledged to cut hunger in half by 2015, global hunger has only increased.13 The continuing food crisis constitutes a global humanitarian disaster. But like all disasters, this crisis is caused not by some natural hazard, but instead by the extreme vulnerability of the world's food systems. This systemic vulnerability is a product of overproduction, northern food aid, international finance institutions, and free market "development" policies like structural adjustment, free trade agreements, and green revolution farming models. The movement for "food sovereignty" -people's democratic control of the food system-directly confronts these core vulnerabilities. The concept originated with the peasant organization La Via Campesina. Made up of one hundred farmers' organizations from sixty-eight countries, La Via Campesina has been advocating for food sovereignty since 1996.14 A counterpoint to institutional ideas of food security, food sovereignty asserts a future where governments can and will create policy that favors smallholder agriculture over its industrial cousins. Food sovereignty Apr. 13, 2010). 8. See Sophia Murphy & Armin Paasch, The Global Food Challenge: Introduction, in THE GLOBAL FOOD CHALLENGE: TOWARDS A HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH To TRADE AND INVESTMENT POLICIES 3, 3 (2009), available at http://www.fian.org/resources/documents/others/the- global-food-challenge/pdf. 9. See ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ ET AL., FOOD REBELLIONS! CRISIS AND THE HUNGER FOR JUSTICE 8, fig.2 (2009). 10. See U.S. Census Bureau, International Database Total Midyear Population for the World: 1950-2050, http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.php (last visited Apr. 9,2010). 11. See David Dawe & Christian Morales-Opazo, How Much Did Developing Country Domestic Staple Food Prices Jncrease During the World Food Crisis? How Much -HaveThey Declined? 6 (FAO, Agric. Dev. Econ. Division Working Paper No. 09-09, 2009), available at ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/012/ak42le/ak421e00.pdf. 12. See FAO, Hunger, http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/ (last visited April 12, 2010). 13. Id. 14. See Annette-Aur6lie Desmarais, The Via Canpesina: Consolidating an International Peasant and Farni Movement, 29 J. PEASANT STUD. 91, 100-101 (2002); What is La Via Campesina?, http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php (follow "Organisation" hyperlink) (last visited April 12, 2010). https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yhrdlj/vol13/iss2/2 2 Shattuck and Holt-Giménez: Moving from Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty 2010]1 Moving from Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty 423 demands that everyone has the right to enough resources to feed oneself. Many of La Via Campesina's members have also been practicing agroecology, the science and practice of sustainable agriculture, for over thirty years, with solid results in the fight against hunger and poverty.1 Agroecology and food sovereignty, a set of practices and political demands coming from small farmers' movements, directly address the root causes of hunger: poverty and inequality. Together they imply not only restructuring control over land and food-producing resources, but also restructuring market power; democratically determining national food and agriculture policies; increasing biodiversity; transitioning away from fossil fuel-based inputs; and balancing gender power relations. 16 Agroecology and food sovereignty have the potential to radically change our food systems in favor of the poor and underserved. We will examine both the proximate and root causes of the global food crisis, as well as the potential for solutions based on agroecology and food sovereignty to address global hunger. II. CRISIS AND THE HUNGER FOR JUSTICE The overnight reversal of a thirty-year global trend in cheap food unleashed what quickly became referred to as the "global food crisis." The media generally told five stories about the causes of the food crisis: they blamed high oil prices, rising consumption in India and China, the global biofuels boom, drought, and to some degree, speculation. These proximate causes merit discussion because many of the assumptions behind them are plainly false. Some are symptoms of a deeper, structural vulnerability. The volatile price of oil, for example, did exert pressure on food prices, but industrial agriculture's dependence on fossil fuel-based inputs is at the root of this effect. These five proximate causes are important to understand in order to go past the myths about world hunger to address root causes. 1. The Volatile Price of Oil As it fluctuated wildly between $60 and $140 a barrel, the price of oil exercised a ratchet effect of intermittent upward pressure on food prices. High oil prices increase food production and distribution costs, which in turn drive up food prices. Food produced under modern industrial methods requires more fossil fuel calories than it produces in food calories. This energy is required not only to transport food considerable distances, 15. Latin America's Canpesino a Canipesino Movement has been a leader in the practice of agroecology among La Via Campesina members. See, e.g, Eric Holt-Gimenez, Measuring Farmers' Agroecological Resistance After Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua: A Case Study in Participatory,Sustainable Land Management Impact Monitoring, 93 AGRIC., ECOSYSTEMS & ENV'T 87, 100 (2002). 16. See generally Raj Patel, What Does Food Sovereignty Look Like?, 36 J. PEASANT STUD. 663 (2009). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2010 3 Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, Vol. 13 [2010], Iss. 2, Art. 2 424 YALE HUMAN RIGHTS & DEVELOPMENT L.J. [Vol. 13 but also to operate machinery and to manufacture inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. 2. Rising Meat Consumption The Northern media has been quick to blame China and India for driving up cereal prices because of increasing consumption of grain-fed meat among their growing middle classes. In this view, economic progress in developing economies puts a strain on the world's food supply. But the fact is that both China and India are practically self-sufficient in grain and meat. Some analysts insist that China at least will not become a major meat or grain importer.17 3. Unfavorable Climate Poor harvests have been caused by climatic events, like the 2008 tragedies in Burma, Cuba, and Haiti. Extreme weather has been responsible for poor harvests, in particular in Southeast Asia and Australia. An average of 500 weather-related disasters now take place each year, compared with 125 in the 1980s; the number of floods has increased six- fold over the same period.
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