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Globalization & the Reconstruction of the Agri-Food System

In December 2005, anti-liberalization and antiglobalization protest groups around the globe gathered in Hong Kong where the Sixth World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference was being held. Farmers’ groups that were part of the Hong Kong gathering took the position that agricultural trade rules should be impartial to all World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries and not determined by a handful of agriculture-exporting countries. What suddenly prompted these farmers to come together in this way over the issues of food sovereignty and the expansion of farmers’ rights?

"If someone can't afford to buy food, they're still a citizen and we're still responsible to them," city official Adriana Aranha in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, told me in 2000. What a concept--and one that had helped her to lift her Workers' Party to victory in municipal elections seven years earlier.

The world produces more than enough food for all of us. So why will 200 million children go to sleep tonight hungry? Alex Renton investigates the relationship between food and poverty - and what a child calls supper around the world

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.