The escalating crisis of volatile food prices and food insecurity is the result of an industrial development model based on large-scale, export-orientated agriculture tied to international competition, self interest and stock market speculation. With over a billion people going hungry each day despite a huge surplus of food production, a reorientation towards more localised, smaller scale and sustainable agriculture is urgently required.
For the beleaguered cotton farmers, who consume an overdose of harmful pesticides every year, and are now being lured to adopt genetically modified cotton, there is finally a silver-lining on the dark and polluted horizon. No pesticides, no Bt cotton and there are no pests!
As part of sweeping "economic restructuring" implemented by the Bush Administration in Iraq, Iraqi farmers will no longer be permitted to save their seeds, which include seeds the Iraqis themselves have developed over hundreds of years.
A true reform in agriculture is only possible when the global community
accepts the guiding principle that food for all is an international
obligation. It can only be achieved when the need for national food
self-sufficiency becomes the priority. Developing countries therefore cannot afford to be silent spectators and should protect their agriculture as vigorously as the rich nations do, argues Devinder Sharma.
This was the underlying message of a comprehensive speech delivered at the national seminar on "Alternative Strategies for Development" held in Bhopal, India last month, by one of STWR's contributing writers, Devinder Sharma.
It was too late. By the time, Jai Lal, a landless agricultural worker of Bandali village, in Sheopur district of Madhya Pradesh, in the heartland of India, returned to share the good news with his wife – that he finally managed to get a petty job with a shopkeeper – she had succumbed to hunger. A week later, graves were dug for his two children, both unable to continue with the prolonged fight against hunger.
Green revolution has not only gone sour, it has now turned red. The
unexplained number of huge number of suicides a testimony to the entire
equation going wrong. However, the fundamental issue of destruction of
sustainable livelihoods is not at all being addressed.
