| Accelerating into Disaster – When Banks Manage the Food Crisis |
|
|
|
In the midst of the present financial crisis when banks continue to go bankrupt, it is absurd to ask banks and financial institutions to solve the food crisis. The real solution is food sovereignty, says a civil society declaration prior to the High Level Meeting on Food Security to be held in Madrid. 26th January 09 - foodsovereignty.org Against the dramatic background of a profound global food and general economic crisis the Spanish government organizes the “High Level Ministerial Meeting on Food Security for All” on the 26-27th of January 2009 in Madrid. The emergency of today is rooted in decades of neo-liberal policies that dismantled the international institutional architecture for food and agriculture and undermined the capacity of national governments to protect their food producers and consumers. The central cause of the current food crisis is the relentless promotion of the interests of large industrial corporations and the international trade that they control, to the detriment of food production at the local and national levels and the needs and interests of local food producers and communities. At the World Food Summit in 1996, when there were an estimated 830 million hungry people, governments pledged to halve the number by 2015. Today, in the midst of a terrible food crisis, the figure of hungry people has risen to well beyond 1 billion. Stop land grabbing for agrofuel and industrial food production In this context the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are pushing for more trade liberalisation, more support for agribusiness and increased sales of fertilizers and genetically modified seeds. As the vicious food price crisis deepens, transnational companies are moving into southern countries on a huge scale and starting to capture millions of hectares of land in order to bring agricultural production further under their control for industrial agrofuel and food production for the international market. Millions of peasants will be pushed out of food production, adding to the hungry in the rural areas and the slums of the big cities. The few that remain will work under full control of the transnational companies as workers or contract farmers. This is the very model that the World Bank and the AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) initiative are trying to impose with the funds they have designated to resolve the food crisis. The solution exists: food sovereignty Contrary to the impression that is given by confused officials, a solution to the crisis exists and is easy to implement if there is sufficient political will. Peasant based agriculture and livestock raising and artisanal fisheries can easily provide enough food once these small-scale food producers can get access to land and aquatic resources and can produce for stable local and domestic markets. This model produces far more food per hectare than the corporate model, enables people to produce their own food and guarantees stable supply. In June 2008 during the High Level Conference on the food and climate crisis, organized by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations), many concrete proposals were made by peoples’ organisations and other non-governmental organisations in a declaration “No More Failures-as-Usual” that was supported by over 800 organisations. The declaration called on governments to:
Governments at the Madrid Meeting have yet to take these demands into account. No effective response so far Since the earlier food crisis in the 1970s, many initiatives have been taken to tackle the food crisis. In the seventies, a so-called World Food Council was set up to tackle the crisis. The Council never functioned and was in the end abolished in the nineties. In 2002 the International Alliance Against Hunger was adopted by the FAO World Food Summit: Five Years Later but it is totally ineffective. At the moment France and other G8 countries and Spain are proposing a “Global Partnership”. This initiative will generate more fragmentation and provide more of the same wrong recipes. For the first time in the UN, this ‘partnership’ would give Transnational Companies (TNCs) and the big foundations such as the Bill Gates Foundations an official seat at the table. Last year, a UN-High Level Task Force was set up to coordinate actions of the UN agencies, the Bretton Woods Institutions and the WTO, and a Common Framework for Action (CFA) was developed. Although increased coordination between UN agencies is desperately needed, the Task Force is mainly driven by the G8 donor countries and Multilateral Institutions like the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF. The CFA was written by the international bureaucracy without any serious consultation of governments and civil society. Although support for small farmers is mentioned in the text, the interests of the multilateral institutions and the G8 countries dominate. The text clearly pushes for more trade liberalisation and the World Bank wants to use this mechanism to channel big funding to agribusinesses for a second green revolution, particularly in Africa. The FAO and other UN agencies, that have a mandate and the expertise to implement effective programs, are isolated and marginalized. Where is the political will to address the crisis in a serious way? The show in Madrid orchestrated by Jeffrey Sachs and the Spanish government that includes some “panels with Civil Society” presents itself as a total sham. By way of preparation for the meeting, the Spanish government presented a proposal for a "Global Partnership", in which "the voices of the poor shall be enhanced, heard and taken into account in the whole process", but the way the Madrid meeting is set up hardly reflects this commitment. One or two peasant representatives may perhaps speak a few minutes from the floor while transnational companies such as Monsanto and the Bill Gates Foundation, the WTO, World Bank and the IMF sit on the podium! In the midst of the present financial crisis when banks go bankrupt one after the other primarily due to excessive gambling, it is absurd to ask banks and financial institutions to solve the food crisis. The principle of “one dollar – one vote” that the World Bank and the donor countries are trying to introduce has to be rejected. No serious effort has been made to bring representatives of peasant farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous people and urban organisations that represent affected people to the table. Once again, the main stakeholders in the debate on the food crisis have been completely sidelined. Only some hand picked NGOs are asked to give their opinion. This event just serves to push through initiatives that lack any legitimacy and will again be totally ineffective or may even make things even worse! Policies based on food sovereignty are desperately needed National governments have to take up their responsibility and urgently implement the following measures:
The UN agencies have to support the initiatives of national governments and forbid the WTO, World Bank and the IMF from interfering in national policies regarding food and agriculture. The WTO, WB and IMF should therefore be excluded from implementation of the proposals of the UN Task Force. No more new structures and initiatives! We protest vigorously against this circus of the ongoing creation of new structures and spaces. They are bound to fail again and again as they undermine existing bodies yet continue to implement the same bad policies. The space where the issue of food is discussed at the international level used to be concentrated in one agency, the FAO. This space has been fragmented, since the last food crisis, into many different institutions that all have their say over food and agriculture: FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Program (WFP), the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), WTO, WB, IMF, etc. On top of this, exactly those who bear the heaviest responsibility for this crisis (WTO, WB and IMF) will dominate the new structures. One single space in the UN system needed Until now UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP) as well as the CGIAR have dramatically failed to address the crisis in an effective way due to lack of funding, inefficient functioning and lack of focus on support for peasant and fisher based domestic food production. This has to change. The global governance of agriculture and food has to be dramatically improved. We need one single space in the UN system that acts in total independence of the WTO, the WB and the IMF, with a clear mandate from governments, a decisive participation of peasant, fisherfolk and other Civil Society Organisations and a transparent and democratic process of decision making. This has to be the unique space where food and agriculture issues are discussed, where policies and rules are set and where all financial resources are controlled. Donor countries should show the same commitment to the financial crisis as to the food crisis and commit the necessary funding to the UN agencies to really tackle the issue. Of the US$24billion promised at the Rome Conference in June 2008, only a small part has been provided. Funding to solve the food crisis is important. But we don't want this money to be spent on providing more high tech seeds, more chemical fertilizer and more of the same old recipes that have already failed in the past, as is happening now. We want support for a true re-orientation of the global food system towards food sovereignty. Note: This statement was facilitated by members of the IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty. The IPC is a facilitating network in which key international social movements and organisations collaborate around the issue of food sovereignty. Grabbing land for food 26th January 09 - GRAIN
As was widely reported around the world in
November, Daewoo Logistics, a subsidiary of the South Korean
conglomerate Daewoo Corporation, is seeking to secure rights to 1.3
million hectares of farm land in Madagascar – half of the country’s
arable land. The land will be used to produce maize for export back to
South Korea. Daewoo says that the deal will help South Korea to obtain
food security, but that is not the way many Koreans see it. In an
interview with GRAIN (available on our website), [1]
Han Young Me, from the Korean Women Peasants Association, said: “The
government should think of how to secure self-sufficiency in Korea
instead of overseas and the government should be working together with
farmers, side by side. But the government is not doing this and in 2008
our level of food self-sufficiency went down. If you go out into the
fields, you will see that farmers have left produce to rot because they
can’t find a market where they can sell it.”
What is happening in Madagascar forms part of a global trend. In a report published in October 2008, [2]
GRAIN describes how a host of nations – China, South Korea, Japan,
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others – have been scouring the globe in
search of arable land to buy or to lease for the production of crops
for food or biofuels. What attracts attention is not just the amount of
land involved – some of the deals involve more than a million acres –
but the logic underlying the transactions. For this is not land that is
being primarily acquired to produce crops to sell on the world market
or to feed the local population.
These crops are to be sent back to the
nation that has acquired the land. Using its economic clout, the
investing nation is taking over land – and, with it, the soil fertility
and the water that are needed to cultivate crops – so that its people
back home can have food to eat and fuel to put into their cars. It’s a
modern-day version of the 19th century Scramble for Africa.
It is not difficult to see what is driving this land grab. To a
large extent, it stems from the global financial crisis (to which the
world food crisis is linked). There are two parallel agendas driving
two kinds of land grabbers. The first track is food security. A number
of countries that rely on food imports and worry about tightening
markets are seeking to outsource their domestic food production by
gaining control of farms in other countries. Saudi Arabia, Japan,
China, India, Korea, Libya and Egypt all fall into this category.
High-level officials from many of these nations have been on the road
since March 2008 in a diplomatic treasure-hunt for fertile farmland in
places such as Uganda, Brazil, Cambodia, Sudan and Pakistan. The second
track is financial returns. Given the current financial meltdown, all
sorts of players in the finance and food industries – the investment
houses that manage workers’ pensions, private equity funds looking for
a fast turnover, hedge funds driven off the now collapsed derivatives
market, grain traders seeking new strategies for growth – are turning
to land, for both food and fuel production, as a new source of profit.
But while their starting points may differ, the tracks eventually
converge. Where they come together is the private sector, which in both
cases will be firmly in control. So whichever of the two tracks you
look at, they point in one direction: foreign private corporations
getting new forms of control over farmland to produce food not for the
local communities but for someone else. Did someone say colonialism was
a thing of the past?
What does it all mean?
One of the clear consequences of the global land grab is that
workers, farmers and local communities will inevitably lose access to
land for their food production. The very basis on which to build food
sovereignty is simply being bartered away. And it is not only the
questionable issue of giving foreigners control of domestic farmland
but also the restructuring of the farming sector that this process
entails. For these lands will be transformed from smallholdings or
forests or whatever they may be into large industrial estates connected
to far-off markets. Farmers will never be real farmers again, job or no
job.
1 - Interview with Han Young Me, Chief
of Policy, Korean Women Peasants Association (KWPA), Dae-gu, South
Korea, 4 December 2008, available in transcript and in audio, http://www.grain.org/videos/?id=194
2 - GRAIN Briefing, Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and
financial security, with accompanying annex listing more than 100 cases
of land-grabbing for offshore food production, October 2008, http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212
|
The Issues
 |
Share The World's Resources |
Phone |
A not for profit organisation with Consultative Status at ECOSOC. |
|
|