Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice: Forging Food Sovereignty to Solve the Global Food Crisis - Tapa blanda

Food Rebellions! takes a deep look at the world food crisis and its impact on the Global South and under-served communities in the industrial North. While most governments and multilateral organisations offer short-term solutions based on proximate causes, authors Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel unpack the planet's environmentally and economically vulnerable food systems to reveal the root causes of the crisis. By tracking the political and economic evolution of the industrial agri-foods complex, Food Rebellions! shows us how the steady erosion of local and national control over their food systems has made African nations dependent on a volatile global market and subject to the short-term interests of a handful of transnational agri-food monopolies. Food Rebellions! is a powerful handbook for those seeking to understand the causes and potential solutions to the current food crisis now affecting nearly half of the world's people. Why are food riots are occurring around the world in a time of record harvests? What are the real impacts of agrofuels and genetically engineered crops? Whose interests are being advanced by Africa's 'new' Green Revolution? And why are the thousands of farmer-led 'islands of sustainability' flowering across the landscapes of the global South being ignored by policy-makers? What are hundreds of peasant farm organisations, civil society organisations, and concerned researchers doing about the crisis? Finally, what can you do? Food Rebellions! suggests that to solve the food crisis, we must change the global food system - from the bottom up and from the top down. On one hand, farmers utilising sustainable approaches to production need to be supported, and farmer-to-farmer agroecological knowledge must be spread. At the same time, food and farm advocates need to work in local, national and international policy arenas to open dialogue, demand transparency and change the 'rules' currently holding back agroecological alternatives. The book frames the current food crisis as a unique opportunity to develop productive local food systems as engines for sustainable economic development. Hunger and poverty, the authors insist, can be eliminated by democratising food systems and respecting people's right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources - in short, by advancing food sovereignty.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, the number of malnourished people exceeded one billion for the first time in 2009. What's more, it's clear this isn't just as a result of a growing world population as the figure represents an 11 per cent increase in just a year. It's a direct effect of the food crisis that pushed up food prices so dramatically in early 2008 and so far has kept them relatively high. There has been much debate about the causes of this crisis; the volatile price of oil, the agrofuels boom, impacts of climate change, increased demand for meat and financial speculation on grain all clearly played a part. But what both of these books argue is that these are just proximate causes. Determining the ultimate causes involves tracing the fate of agriculture in the global South during the past 50 years and shining a light on what amounts to a corporate takeover of the world's food systems. The 1960s and 1970s saw the 'green revolution' unleashed on the South, a system of industrialising agriculture particularly through the use of pesticides. Although this increased yields in the short term, particularly in Asia, it left a legacy of debt and environmental pollution that nevertheless benefited seed and pesticide companies enormously and also saw agriculture concentrated into fewer hands. Although encouraged by the World Bank, the green revolution was a state-led process. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s, the state fell out of favour and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund used the power they had as a result of the debt crisis to force developing countries to junk state marketing boards, agricultural subsidies, grain reserves and other 'market distortions'. Agriculture was reorientated towards cash crops for export. More recent free-trade agreements with the North have dealt the final blow, undermining local production through a flood of subsidised food products from the US and Europe. Thus the scene was set for the current crisis. Walden Bello's The Food Wars explains this process very well, taking the Philippines, Africa, Mexico and China for a chapter each, as well as examining the role of agrofuels in the current crisis. A final chapter looks at the alternatives, in particular profiling the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, and its proposal for democratic control of the food system via 'food sovereignty'. Patel and Holt-Gimenez, meanwhile, take a very similar approach (their book even has a foreword by Bello). Yet while The Food Wars concentrates on the economic history of the crisis, and probably beats them on clarity here, where Food Rebellions! really comes into its own is in the substantial space which it devotes to solutions. Their book is full of evidence that smallholder agriculture based on 'agroecology', basically organic or near-organic farming, can actually be more productive than large-scale industrial monocultures. Scientific research into improving such forms of agriculture struggles to receive funding, while patentable technologies like GM get vast sums. Nevertheless, adaptations of traditional peasant knowledge have led to the development of more efficient sustainable farming in recent years - techniques which have then been spread through initiatives such as the 'Campesino a Campesino' movement in Latin America. The call for a local, sustainable approach to farming from the environmental movement has become familiar in the UK, but it isn't just agriculture's contribution to climate change that means this approach matters. The resilience of agriculture in the face of climate change, especially in the South, depends on the diverse cropping of agroecological farms, which can be highly adaptive in the face of climate change impacts. Yet the biotech firms and their allies, who include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are pushing GM crops as a part of a new 'Green Revolution for Africa'. Both these books are useful in making the argument that we don't need GM to 'feed the world' as Hilary Benn has recently suggested. Agricultural globalisation has been a disaster for the climate, for biodiversity, and for the small producers of the global South, many of whom have been forced to abandon farming and try to scrape a living in the mega-slums around major cities. Yet peasants are now organising against this immiseration, and insisting that they and not the North's official development experts have the solutions to the food crisis. As in so many areas of our lives, while these solutions may have technical and cultural sides to them, in the end they come down to winning the battle of democracy against the power of capital. - James O'Nions, Red Pepper The small-scale farming systems spread widely across Africa are a social and ecological asset. As Food Rebellions! demonstrates, planting indigenous trees and using traditional farming methods enhances environmental conservation and preserves local biodiversity. At a time of economic crisis, sustainable agriculture and the economic empowerment it can generate will be key to the survival of the many African families headed by women. - Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Challenge for Africa (Heinemann, 2009). Food Rebellions! situates with accuracy and precision the true meaning, causes and dynamics of what is commonly referred to as the "global food crisis". It shows how skewed and dysfunctional the global food system is, and how the concentration of market power by a handful of transnational corporations translates into power over land, water, food and, indeed, life itself. In Part One, the authors trace with startling clarity the history of hunger and poverty to North-South politics of domination and gender and class inequalities. They compel us to confront the questions: Who is hungry, and why? But all is not gloom and doom. In Part Two, the authors inspire us with examples of creative and constructive resistance by food producers and workers against the capitalist driven food system and propose strategies for transforming the food system - strategies that are practical and well within the reach of anyone concerned with social and political justice. If Food Rebellions! does not make food rights activist of its readers, I don't know what will. This is a truly remarkable book. - Shalmali Guttal, senior associate of Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, Thailand