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.
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.
In response to a new wave of overseas farmland acquisitions, the World Bank is promoting a set of principles to guide responsible agro-enterprise investment. Civil society groups and analysts argue that voluntary measures should not be used to legitimise these so-called ‘land grabs’.
Producing an ever-larger volume of agricultural commodities will not
address the systemic fragility in our food system. To address the structural causes
of hunger, governments must place human rights at the centre of any response to
the global food crisis, says Olivier De Schutter.
Agricultural policies prescribed by industrialised countries
have led to a food system dominated by private interests. But in
the context of achieving global food security, maximization of international
trade and corporate profits should not be the dominating forces, writes Daryll E. Ray.
