The international food system and the climate crisis

GRAIN

Today’s global food system, with all its high-tech seeds and fancy packaging, cannot fulfil its most basic function of feeding people. Despite this monumental failure, there is no talk in the corridors of power of changing direction. Large and growing movements of people clamour for change, but the world’s governments and international agencies keep pushing more of the same: more agribusiness, more industrial agriculture, more globalisation. As the planet moves into an accelerating period of climate change, driven, in large part, by this very model of agriculture, such failure to take meaningful action will rapidly worsen an already intolerable situation. But in the worldwide movement for food sovereignty, there is a promising way out.

This year more than one billion people will go hungry, while another half a billion people will suffer from obesity. Three-quarters of those without enough to eat will be farmers and farm workers (those who produce food), while the handful of agribusiness corporations that control the food chain (those who decide where the food goes) will amass billions of dollars in profits. Now the latest scientific studies are predicting that, in a business-as-usual scenario, rising temperatures, extreme climate conditions and the severe water and soil problems related to them will push many more millions into the ranks of the hungry. As population growth raises demand for food, climate change will sap our capacities to produce it. Certain countries already struggling with severe hunger problems could see their food production cut by half before the end of this century. Yet where elites gather to talk about climate change, very little is being said about such consequences for food production and supply, and even less is being done to address them.

There is another dimension to this interaction between climate change and the global food system that reinforces the urgent need for action. Not only is today’s dysfunctional food system utterly ill-equipped for climate change, it is also one of the main engines behind it. The model of industrial agriculture that supplies the global food system essentially functions by converting oil into food, producing tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the process. The use of huge amounts of chemical fertilisers, the expansion of the industrial meat industry, and the ploughing under of the world’s savannahs and forests to grow agricultural commodities are together responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global GHG emissions that cause climate change. [1]

But that is only a part of the current food system’s contribution to the climate crisis. Turning food into global industrial commodities results in a tremendous waste of fossil-fuel energy in transporting it around the world, processing it, storing it and freezing it, and getting it to people’s homes. All these processes are contributing to the climate bill. When added together, it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the current global food system could be responsible for nearly half of the world’s GHG emissions.

The rationale and urgency for an overhaul to the world’s food system has never been more stark. From a practical point of view, there is nothing preventing transition to a saner system, and people everywhere are showing willingness to change – whether they be consumers searching out local foods or peasants barricading highways to defend their lands. What stands in the way is the structure of power – and it is this, more than anything, that requires transformation.

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At a most basic level, the climate crisis means that “business as usual” has to stop, now. The profit motive, as an organising principle for our societies, is bankrupt, and we have to build alternative systems of production and consumption organised according to the needs of the people and life on the planet. When it comes to the food system, such a transformation cannot happen when power is vested in corporations, as it currently is. Nor can we trust our governments – as the mismatch between what the scientists say must be done to stop catastrophic climate change and the actions that politicians take becomes ever more preposterous. The force for change rests with us, in our communities, organising to take back control of our food systems and territories.

In the struggle for another food system our main obstacles are political, not technical. We can put seeds back in the hands of farmers, eliminate chemical fertilisers and pesticides, integrate livestock into mixed farms, and organise our food systems so that everyone has enough safe, nutritious food to eat – without plastics. The potential for such a transformation is being borne out by thousands of projects and experiments in communities around the world. Even the World Bank-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) has admitted as much. At the farm level, ways for dealing with climate change and the food crisis are pretty straightforward.

The political challenges are more difficult. But here, too, much is already happening on the ground. Even in the face of violent repression, local communities are resisting large-scale projects for dams, mines, plantations and timber). Although rarely recognised as such, this resistance is at the core of climate action. So too are the movements, such as the movement for food sovereignty, that are coming together to resist the imposition of neo-liberal policies and to develop collective visions for the future. It is in these spaces and through such organised resistance that the alternatives to today’s destructive food system will emerge, and where we will find the collective strength and strategies to transform power in the food system.