http://www.grain.org/nfg/?id=577

GETTING OUT OF THE FOOD CRISIS

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This is a pre-release of the editorial on the food crisis of the July 2008 issue of GRAIN's Seedling magazine. We decided to distribute this now in support of the mobilisations of social movements around the High-Level FAO Conference on World Food Security, held from 3 - 5 June in Rome.
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While there has been widespread reporting of the riots that have broken out around the world as a result of the global food crisis, little attention has been paid to the way forward. The solution is a radical shift in power away from the international financial institutions and global development agencies, so that small-scale farmers, still responsible for most food consumed throughout the world, set agricultural policy. Three interrelated issues need to be tackled: land, markets and farming itself.

In March 2008, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other international agencies began talking openly about a global food crisis. As with many such crises, they were a little late. Food prices -- especially for cereals, but also for dairy and meat -- had been rising throughout 2007, markedly out of step with people's incomes. People had coped by changing their eating habits, which included cutting back on meals, and had taken to the streets to demand government action. By early 2008 grain prices were surging and riots had broken out in nearly 40 countries, instilling fear among the world's political elites.

A few months have now passed since the global food crisis was put on the world agenda. The causes of the problem have been identified and more or less understood.[1] Yet the food crisis is still unfolding. Prices are continuing to climb, a whole class of "new poor" has emerged, governments are scrambling to find or manage grain supplies, and the eruption of another major setback could provoke a really dramatic world crisis.

Everyone agrees that something needs to be done but there is vast disagreement as to what this implies. The policy priests at the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, the corporate boards of directors and, indeed, most governments and their teams of advisers want us to continue on the course of industrialising agriculture and liberalising trade and investment, even though this recipe just promises more of the same in the future. Social movements and others who have been fighting the injustices of today's capitalist model see things differently. For them, it is now time to break with the past, to mobilise around a new, creative vision that will bring not only short-term remedies, but also the kind of profound change that will actually get us out of this food crisis -- and, indeed, the unending series of crises (climate change, environmental destruction, poverty, conflicts over land and water, migration, and so on) that neoliberal globalisation generates.