The seed freedom movement
is an inspiring example of how the principle of sharing is central to resolving
the crisis in agriculture, and highlights the urgency of resisting the powerful agribusinesses that seek to eliminate biodiversity and criminalise the saving and sharing of seed.
Civil society organizations from around the world raise concerns with the objectives of the 2nd Global Conference on Agriculture,
Food Security and Climate Change held in Hanoi, Viet Nam, 3-7 September
2012.
In view of the deadlock in the WTO talks, governments
could take actions now to begin negotiating the terms of a limited role
for trade in achieving food security, rather than to continue to advance
complete market access for transnational agribusinesses at any cost, writes Karen Hansen-Kuhn.
Forty years after food activism took off around the globe, corporatism is stronger than ever. But so is the grassroots push for control over our work, land, and seeds, say Frances Moore Lappé, Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, and Michael Pollan in an exchange in The Nation.
The structural barriers to fighting hunger are actually woven into faulty neoliberal economic policies. Until self-sufficiency takes precedence over agricultural exports, vulnerability to food crises in developing countries will continue, says Devinder Sharma in an interview with Eduardo Almeida.
In a food system driven almost exclusively by the market-value of commodities, hunger is largely a result of insufficient income. Agricultural production must be completely rethought to prioritise the nutritional needs of people, particularly those living in poverty, argues Justin Frewen.
In the developed world, where many of the environmental and social costs of food production are absent at the checkout, we are eating beyond our means. To create resilience and sustainability, ‘consumer choice’ can no longer drive the system, argues Jeremy Harding.
