All Annotations of Pambazuka News[Preview]

saved byArabica Robusta on 2008-06-28

• there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
• The Principle of food sovereignty.
• The Principle of priority of food over export crops produced by small farms sustained by state provision of the necessary infrastructure of financial credit, water, energy, extension service, transport, storage, marketing, and insurance against crop failures due to climate changes or other unforeseen circumstances.
  
• The Principle of self-reliance and national ownership and control over the main resources for food production.
• The Principle of food safety reserves.
• The Principle of a fair and equitable distribution of “reserve foods” among the population during emergencies.
• the above quite commonsensical and, we believe, reasonable principles have not been followed by many governments in the South. They have been grossly violated through five main reasons,
• Distorted state policies on production and trade (e.g. removal of tariffs that made local producers vulnerable to imported food
• and grab by the rich commercial farmers
• Effective loss of control over resources of food production,
• Donor aid dependence
• Disruption of the infrastructure of food production (as described above) that came as a consequence of the above four factors.
• Just 10 corporations, including Aventis, Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta, control one third of the $23 billion commercial seed market and 80% of the $28 billion global pesticide market.
• In an increasingly liberalizing (globalizing) world, Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have increased their control over the supply of water, especially in the South. In many cases, private sector participation in water services has been one of the “aid conditionalities” of the so-called “donor assistance” (ODAs) from donor countries and the IMF and the World Bank. Just three companies, Veolia Environnement (formerly Vivendi Environnement), Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Bechtel (USA), control a majority of private water concessions globally..
  • on 2008-06-28 Pickinjava
    Privatized water.
• The Social Enterprise Development (SEND) Foundation in Ghana have criticised multi-national companies that are trying, using the “opportunity” of “food crisis”, to capture African agriculture through the so-called “Green Revolution” for Africa. FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) said that peasants have been evicted in several African countries so that palm oil can be produced from forests.