Article I - Food security for People
Article II - Challenge Corporate Control of Our Food Supply
Source:
The People-Centered Development Forum
http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/
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PCDForum Column #81 Release Date June 1, 1996
FOOD SECURITY FOR PEOPLE
by Tony Quizon
Asia today has many of the world's fastest growing economies, each
competing for markets and investments by offering lower wages and working
standards and providing the most attractive subsidized infrastructure.
One consequence of the rush to integrate into the global economy is a
drastic reorientation of agricultural priorities as basic food crops are
phased out to devote lands to higher-value export products. The
consequences are ominous: endangered food security, a degraded
environment, uprooted rural communities, and greater dependence of the
poor on the market for their survival.
The predictions are grim. In just a few years, Asia will be dependent on
rice imports from other regions. Even today, one bad crop in Southern
China alone could wipe out all surplus stocks on the global rice market.
Our water resources are so badly mismanaged that some believe future wars
will be fought, not over land, but over water. It is hard to believe that
this is Asia, with its long history of food self-sufficiency deeply
imbedded in a culture of community survival.
The change in priorities is reflected in international institutions as
well as in Asia's rural villages. When it was founded 50 years ago, the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) focused on
farmers. Now its focus is on production. Then it was concerned with
household food security. Now the focus is on markets and global surplus
stocks and the lead role in dealing with issues of food and agriculture
has been passed to financial institutions (such as the World Bank and the
Asian Development Bank), the system of international agricultural
research centers, the World Trade Organization, and transnational
corporations, which view food security solely as matters of money and
technology.
When we speak of agriculture, are we thinking of the producers? Or only
the production? When we speak of food security, are we referring to
market-led food security? Or to farmer-led food security?
These were central questions raised at the September 1995 Asian NGO
Workshop held in Quebec in preparation for the November 1996 World Food
Summit in Rome. We concluded that if we truly believe the right to food
is the right to life, then this right should supersede other secondary
rights, including the right of corporations to profit in the presence of
hunger or famine. Similarly, the right of landless farmers to cultivate
idle private land to feed their starving families must supersede the
property rights of the persons or corporations that may own that land.
Imagine the agony of a landless worker peering over her neighbor's fence,
and seeing vast tracts of idle land to which she has no access.
For small farming households in Asia, food security used to be a
relatively simple affair: you reaped what you sowed, ate what you
harvested, and traded your surplus. What the term hand-to-mouth implied
was not a pitiful existence, but a noble life. Yet, in recent years, the
market intruded between farmers and their harvests. Farmers were taught
that to ensure food security for themselves and their families they must
sell what they plant and buy what they eat.
Thus today, in fields that used to grow food, we find cut-flowers being
cultivated for export. Other fields are transformed into food factories,
and chemicals are dumped into their soils. And as farmers become
increasingly alienated from their land and produce, they become careless
about the environment. And why should they care? How can we expect of
people to take care of the land that is not theirs?
Given today's harsh realities, the mere survival of small farmers is a
living testimony to their hard work and ingenuity. Hidden from the
probing eyes of the market, we find that farmers do know the dangers of
chemicals. For while they may sell their pesticide-laden vegetables to
the market, many also maintain a backyard plot of organically grown crops
for their own family consumption.
We need an approach to food security that places farmers at the center of
agricultural research, technology development and extension. There are
efforts all around Asia to establish community seed banks, carry out
agrarian reform, restore the ecological vitality of local land and water
resources, and help communities use alternative indicators of household
food security as a basis for community planning. These efforts remind us
that agriculture is a human enterprise to be carried out by and for
people-not simply one more opportunity to enhance corporate profits. This
is a message that Asian NGOs will be bringing with them to the
forthcoming World Food Summit.
_______________
Tony Quizon is Executive Director of the Asian NGO Coalition, P.O. Box
3107, QCCPO 1103, Quezon City 1103, Philippines, Phone (63-2) 993-315 or
973-019; Fax (63�2) 921�5122; E�Mail [email protected] and a contributing
editor of the PCDForum. This column was prepared and distributed by the
PCDForum based on his presentation to the Global Assembly on Food
Security, October 8th 1995, in Quebec, Canada.
People-Centered Development Forum columns and articles may be reproduced
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appears be sent to the author and to the PCDForum, 14 E. 17th St., Suite
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Article II - Challenge Corporate Control of Our Food Supply
Originally posted in IGC member conference: peoplestrib
Date: January 5, 1998
Posted by: [email protected]
/* Written 10:55 AM Jan 5, 1998 by [email protected] in peoplestrib */
/* ---------- "01-98 Challenge corporate control o" ---------- */
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People's Tribune (Online Edition)
Vol. 25 No. 1/ January, 1998
P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654
Email: [email protected]
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6. SURVIVAL TACTICS: WE MUST CHALLENGE CORPORATE CONTROL OF OUR
FOOD SUPPLY
By Tim Metzger
Increasingly, our world is controlled by transnational
corporations. This means that you and I have less of a choice in
matters which affect our health, careers, and livelihood. The
global market is creating a world in which people are restricted
and trade runs rampant. People can no longer cross borders, while
food that is needed to feed them is exported to rich industrial
countries in the North.
Rural peoples are no longer able to feed themselves with their own
crops, but must cater to a global market place where profit reigns
supreme. This is everyone's problem as we will see when the health
effects become obvious.
In today's world, a handful of corporations threaten to own the
entire seed stock of the world. This means that fewer people will
control the world's food decisions. The fact that most of the
corporations in control of food also are in the business of
chemicals and pesticides should frighten everyone. Our food is
being manipulated to require more pesticides, forcing farmers to
buy these products and ensuring that these companies make an even
larger profit. These same corporations are at the top of the list
in generating pollution in poor communities and communities of
color in the United States. At the same time, they devastate other
countries' economies by forcing people to grow crops which are
technology-intensive and not part of the local diet.
Mexico's ability to produce maize and beans (staples of Mexican
rural society) has been cut by one-third, in order to accommodate
the U.S. market's need for fruits and beef. Mexico must import
much of its food today, thanks to "free trade" under the North
American Free Trade Agreement, while people increasingly cannot
make ends meet.
The cattle industry has destroyed two-thirds of the rain forest in
southern Mexico while taking land that could be used by the rural
poor to feed themselves. Mexico has decentralized its economy in
order to compete in the global market, selling state-owned
property to transnational corporations who have no desire to feed
the Mexican people or be accountable to those it displaces.
At the same time that they destroy communities in other countries,
factories in the United States spill toxins into poor communities
and communities of color. Monsanto and Dow are two of the largest
producers of toxic waste in this country, producing chemicals here
and shipping them to Mexico to be used on the genetically
engineered soy beans that Monsanto creates. It should be noted
that many of the chemicals produced in the United States are
banned for use on farms here, but are still sold to Third World
countries as pesticides.
Monsanto's plant in Louisiana has been fined numerous times for
contributing to the pollution of an area known as "Cancer Alley"
due to the amount of toxic waste produced by large corporations
nearby. The surrounding population is around 90 percent African
American and poor and has no say in what these corporations do to
their community.
In order to stop this, people must organize. From rural towns in
Mexico to cities in the United States, people must demand that
corporations become more accountable to the communities that they
are located in. We must also recognize the global connections that
allow rich people in this county to profit, while poor people
across the globe are the victims of this wealth. The solution to
this is to struggle for real social change that recognizes
people's basic needs and allows people to meet them. Food is the
basis of life and should be equally available to all. It is
unacceptable for private companies to own the means by which
people survive. Unless people recognize and challenge the
corporate status quo, things will only get worse for the majority
of people in the world.
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This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition),
Vol. 25 No. 1/ January, 1998; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL
60654; Email: [email protected]; http://www.mcs.com/~league
Feel free to reproduce and use unless marked as copyrighted. The
PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE depends on donations from its readers.
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