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Pambazuka News : Issue 459
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Food sovereignty entails transforming the current food system to ensure that those who produce food have equitable access to, and control over land, water, seeds, fisheries and agricultural biodiversity.
Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new ‘resource curse’?
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Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
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In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.
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Pambazuka - Profits before people: The great African liquidation sale
"it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them."
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it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them.
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These monetarist schemes have helped to make Africa poorer and even more dependent on foreign donors and capital, and thus more vulnerable to still more of the big plans, so that now, even as Africans struggle to confront the perfect storm of the global food crisis, financial crisis and climate change – all of which are the offspring of the unfettered free-market financial system – the same big planners are at it again with more sweeping solutions (profitable ones) for the problems they themselves caused.
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Resist/Submit: Biofuels, corporate agriculture and the predicted crisis of land and food
"It is wrong to burn the food of the poor to drive the cars of the rich."
Press Release: The Great Land Grab
The Great Land Grab critically examines the role of the private sector in agricultural development and exposes implications of private sector control over food resources. The report concludes that those who promote the benefits of private sector growth in agriculture fail to recognize that acquisition of crucial food-producing lands by foreign private entities poses a threat to rural economies and livelihoods, land reform agendas, and other efforts aimed at making access to food more equitable.
the Devil and Development
International security (Africom, Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership) blog.
UPDATE 3-Biofuels major driver of food price rise-World Bank | Markets | Reuters
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World Bank economist Don Mitchell concluded that biofuels
and related low grain inventories, speculative activity, and
food export bans pushed prices up by 70 percent to 75 percent. -
"The large increases in biofuels production in the U.S. and
EU were supported by subsidies, mandates and tariffs on
imports," Mitchell said in the research, which looks at rapid
rises in food prices since 2002. "Without these policies,
biofuels production would have been lower and food commodity
price increases would have been smaller." - 1 more annotations...
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq, By Richard Manning (Harper's Magazine)
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“In this situation, we
cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,
we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere
on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The
day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” -
As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture
is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings.
Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question,
especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden
and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points
to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the
presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate
than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of
wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
Five Steps to Sustainable Governance in Africa - Council on Foreign Relations
Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University and the author of The Bottom Billion, discusses policy options for helping the poorest countries in Africa. He says "there are severe limits on what we as outsiders can do," but suggests the United States should work on developing a set of international guidelines for natural resource management. He goes on to outline five steps to put African nations on a path toward better internal management of resource wealth. He is deeply concerned about the current food crisis and advocates that the United States should eliminate biofuels subsidies and that the European Union should get rid of its ban on genetically modified crops.
Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian
Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US production of ethanol from plants.
"It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser, last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."
Pambazuka News
there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
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there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
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The Principle of food sovereignty.
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allAfrica.com: Africa: Food Summit Calls for More Investment in Agriculture
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WTO members reaffirmed their commitment to the rapid and successful conclusion of the Doha development agenda and reiterated their willingness to reach a comprehensive and ambitious result that would be condusive to improving food security in developing countries.
"We encourage the international community to continue its efforts in liberalizing international trade in agriculture by reducing trade barriers and market distorting policies," said the Declaration, adding that addressing these measures "will give farmers, particularly in developing countries, new opportunities to sell their products on world markets and support their efforts to increase productivity and production."
Manufacturing a Food Crisis
an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington.
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an
intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans,
who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US
imports in the first place? -
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into
account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the
homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free
market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt
crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was
forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to
international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a
multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank
executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing
interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations
and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine
identified as barriers to economic efficiency.
Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures
in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from
an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of
government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit,
government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state
marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of
agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to
the destabilization of peasant producers.
This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in
1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect.
Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for
agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly
flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into
chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status
as a net food importer has now been firmly established.
Can the whole world be fed? | SocialistWorker.org
"The food crisis appeared to explode overnight, reinforcing fears that there are just too many people in the world," wrote Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody of Food First. "But according to the FAO, with record grain harvests in 2007, there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone--at least 1.5 times current demand. In fact, over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2.0 percent a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.14 percent a year. Population is not outstripping food supply."
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"The food crisis appeared to explode overnight, reinforcing fears that there are just too many people in the world," wrote Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody of Food First. "But according to the FAO, with record grain harvests in 2007, there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone--at least 1.5 times current demand. In fact, over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2.0 percent a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.14 percent a year. Population is not outstripping food supply."
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Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South asked an important question in a recent article: "How on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on U.S. imports in the first place?"
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