The problem
//BOX//
As a child Einstein must have had enough lunches and dinners to nourish his neurons.
Food security, a fundamental human right, is the permanent access of everyone to sufficient nutrition, both in quality and quantity, for a healthy and active life.
In a world of abundance one person out of seven goes to bed without his dinner. Malnutrition worsens the unequal division of resources because it reduces scholastic and working potential.
More than one American child in four is or risks being hungry (Bread for the World).
//BOX//
Will bread revolts accompany us into the Third Millennium?
Famines and the hungry have always been with us throughout history, but today’s scientific and technical conquests should no longer permit them. In 1974, the year of the World Conference on nutrition, the states promised food security in the near future: “in ten years time no child will go to bed hungry”, “it will be possible for everyone to always have what is necessary for a healthy and active life”. Moreover, it is not just a slogan to say that world farm-product production is sufficient to satisfy a much greater population than that of the present time: the average food energetic availability per inhabitant at world level is in fact about 2,720 calories, while it was only 2,300 in the 1960s. And yet there are still 841 million individuals who, according to FAO (United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization), suffer from hunger, that is from an energetic deficiency: accessories being poverty, distribution injustices, wars, drought, bad productive, political, commercial choices. These form 20% of the population of the low income countries, without counting the hungry people in the west and in the former socialist economies. About 190 million children under five years of age are underweight, 230 million are affected by growth delays, 40 million have acute deficiencies of vitamin A; 13 million children die from malnutrition every year and many others see their physical and mental growth ruined. The number who suffer from a deficiency of iron, vitamin A, iodine and other trace elements would actually amount to two billion. Undernourished are above all the peasant families of the countries with a low average satisfaction of fundamental needs (a more realistic way of defining the so-called “developing countries”): billions of women, men and children still live from the “roots of the earth”. But then there are the poor of the big cities, refugees and evacuees: they have to work, sleep and dream in a state of chronic undernourishment.
If in the countries with a low average satisfaction of fundamental needs, food insecurity means above all eating few calories and even less proteins, vitamins and trace elements, in the west there prevails an insecurity connected with the bad quality of the foodstuffs: see the case of the “mad cow disease”; and this is just a needle in a haystack.
(see relative report on breeding).
However the connection between agriculture, food, health, well-being, productivity and working efficiency is obvious everywhere.
There are 88 (of which 42 in Africa) LIFDC countries, that is countries that are not self-sufficient from the food point of view and too poor in foreign currency to import the necessary food. In Africa there is less food per head than there was thirty years ago!.
By 2030 there will be three billion more people to nourish, almost all of them concentrated in the South of the world and two thirds of them residing in capital cities. For decades food production per head was on the increase, but now the tendency is being inverted, the arable land per inhabitant is decreasing, erosion of the soil and water scarcity are not nightmares but reality. If things continue like this it is expected that there will be a further 640 to 730 million undernourished persons in 2010. But things could be even worse: recent years have shown a fall in world cereal reserves below the danger level. And even if there is no doubt that the margins of distributive injustice are enormous and must be corrected, in the next forty years the interaction between environmental limits and population growth will have an even greater importance.
What is very dangerous is the lack of attention that the “developed” countries pay to agriculture, considered “the past”: as if bread, carrots, chickpeas and milk were made in the laboratory. Increasingly enormous and parasitic cities absorb the food from the country without giving anything back. This also gives rise to food insecurity. And the Europeans are mistaken in thinking that it has nothing to do with them. The insecurity is ours too, with apples full of pesticides, meat full of cholesterol and hormones, mad cows, terrain that decays and millions of poor undernourished people in the rich megalopolises. At the moment it seems impossible, but we too could suffer from hunger. After all, who would have thought a few years ago that green England would have found itself in full water scarcity?
Only the most optimistic futurologists think that in the next decades clamorous inventions will make it possible to create nourishing substances in the laboratory thus overcoming the risks of agriculture. And the prospect of the indefinite increase of return per hectare seems ever more unrealistic. And yet, agricultural production, especially in the low income countries, must certainly be improved, and the more vulnerable social sectors must be freed from their state of food insecurity.
Only a profound change in the way of perceiving food, in social rules and in the relationship with the environment, can interrupt the vicious circle of individual and local food scarcity, and avert the threat of a global scarcity.
p.4
Dimensions of the problem
//BOX//
After an abundant dinner, Bill looked up at the shining moon and felt a poetic spirit assail him.
Twelve hours after his lunch, which had been his last meal and had consisted in the left-overs of the lunch of the previous day, Sobou looked up at the moon and felt a cramp assail him.
//BOX//
When, between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, agriculture started looking to the future with mechanization and the introduction of chemistry, intrepid experts imagined how the XX century would have satisfied the most fundamental need of mankind, that of food, that up to then had cost so much effort and dead from hunger. Professor Nicoli of the University of Pisa, in an essay, portrayed a detailed scenario of the so-called “fourth agricultural-food era” (the third was that which was beginning then). Among other things he foresaw that chemistry would have found in the laboratory - protected from climatic risks, infesting agents and lack of water - “the way to synthetically make hydrocarbons, fats, nitrogens capable of satisfying human food requirements. Thus, “agriculture, rather than being called as it is today to offer means of survival, will essentially provide for those of enjoyment. Because chemistry will provide the ugly organic material, but it will not be able to fabricate either a cell, or a fibre or an organ, agriculture will be the basis of flowers, fruit, wood and sheep-breeding. Mankind, no longer restrained by the obligation of available subsistence provided by the crops in the fields, will rapidly double and triple”. How would the world have been? “The walls of the old cities will fall. Every new house will have around it its green island, and a long series of gardens, orchards, pastures, woodlands, will turn the continents and islands into one huge parkland”.
But the professor, although farseeing in many analyses, did not foresee the limits of modern agriculture, the waste of energy, the impoverishment of the land, the decrease of resources, the genetic erosion, the pollution of the air and of the water and the serious imbalances between the countries.
And above all he did not imagine that on the threshold of the XXI century hunger would have survived the enormous increase of returns per hectare and the technological conquests.
Food insecurity has a free hand when the following factors are missing: availability of food in suitable quantity and quality; accessibility to food by individuals and states; seasonal and yearly stability; cultural acceptability of a foodstuff. We can also distinguish between: a) individual food insecurity (a person cannot produce enough food to nourish himself, or he does not have enough money to purchase it); b) local and national food insecurity (when it is an area or a country that does not produce enough and does not manage to purchase it when it is lacking); c) world food insufficiency, when total food availability is inferior to that which is necessary for the mouths to be fed. For now the processes connected with insecurity have hit in the first two forms, while the third is the sword of Damocles that is hanging over the next decades and of which the first signs are already being seen.
//BOX//
System of information consisting of reports prepared by the Committee of Authors, edited by Alberto Castagnola. Graphics and illustrations by Maurizio Rossi.
The “FOOD INSECURITY ” report was prepared by Marinella Correggia.
Prepared with the contribution of the European Union
Service VIII/B/2
** What has underfeeding been and what is it
Undernourished is the person who does not have sufficient resources to produce or purchase food in sufficient quantity and quality for a healthy and active life. Indeed, it is the oldest problem in the world, in spite of all the changes that have taken place over the last decades. At the beginning of the 1960s average energetic food availability per inhabitant (Dea) was equal to 2,300 calories, distributed in a very unequal way among countries and individuals: thus, every individual of the developed countries had 3,030 calories (more than necessary), while the developing countries only had 1,960. Now the Dea-threshold below which we talk of malnutrition oscillates between 1,700 and 1,960 calories depending on the country. However, if a country has an average Dea close to these threshold levels, the ever present distribution imbalances mean that the majority of the inhabitants are in a state of underfeeding. Thus, the “hungry” at the end of the 1960s were 920 million, that is 35% of the world population.
The 1970s were years of growth of world food production and of imports by the underdeveloped countries. Chronic malnutrition decreased therefore to 27% of the total world population. However the regional differences increased and the African situation worsened. During the 1980s chronic undernourishment decreased to 20% of the total, that is to the current 841 million, now that world Dea equals 2,720 calories.
** Eight hundred million very healthy ill
The 841 million people in a state of chronic undernourishment - that is with an annual energy contribution that is inferior to the minimum level of about 2,000 calories daily necessary to maintain body weight and support mild physical activity - are actually ... many more: a large number of them in fact carry out heavy physical work that would therefore require a higher consumption of calories per head with respect to the standard. There are 190 million children underweight: 230 million show obvious signs of retardation in growth and 40 million suffer from a serious lack of vitamin A (whose lack causes about 500,000 cases of blindness every year). 13 million children die from hunger every year. Two billion people - more than half of them women and children - also suffer from anaemia and other micro-deficiencies. 40% of pregnant women are underweight. The percentage of undernourished has decreased in recent decades in Asia (in the south-east areas undernourished are now 18% of the population) and in Latin America (where the percentage is 14%), but not in sub-Saharan Africa (where 41% of the people has hunger as its companion, whereas in North Africa and in the Middle East the number is 10%).
Undernourished are above all the poor of the Third World, even if they spend 80% of their income on food, in comparison to the 20% spent in the “rich” countries. The category most at risk is that of the landless peasants, the poor inhabitants of the city suburbs, the refugees and evacuees, the inhabitants of areas subject to drought, children, women, the elderly and the ill.
For the UN “access to sufficient and healthy nourishment in every moment of one’s life is the precondition for individual well-being and for the economic and social development of the collectivity”. Chronic malnutrition is therefore an individual and national handicap. It begins in the mother’s womb. Pregnant women who are underweight and with protein-vitamin and micro nutrient deficiencies have greater difficulty in bringing their children into the world, when they do not die during delivery. Their children are born undernourished and underweight. And so they remain, very often. The consequences are devastating. Death, above all. Thirteen million small children die every year victims of protein-energetic malnutrition (PEM). Those who survive suffer physical and mental consequences that are more or less serious but often very serious. In the underdeveloped countries a third (one out of three) of children suffer more or less serious retardation in their physical and intellectual growth, a compromise in their physical growth, injuries to their nervous system with reduction in their learning capacity; blindness. These are irreversible effects, even if the child should be better fed in the future. As regards adults, it is easy to imagine the nightmare of devoting oneself to a job that is tiring for the physique and for the mind, moreover in climates that are often wearying.
** Eighty-one LIFDC countries
The statistical rule of the “chicken a head” is valid pretty well everywhere: this summarizes badly the real situation whereby I eat two chickens and you not even one ... So here then just as in the poor countries there are rich fat people, so the great food-producing countries have many skeletons in the cupboard. There are at least 1.4 million stable hungry people “made in USA” and a few tens of millions of transitory undernourished: persons that is that although eating enough calories, are lacking in other nutrients: in 1994 28 million people received the vouchers of meals for the poor. Things are a little better in Europe, but pockets of hunger have always existed. In rich Brazil, to give an example from the South, two thirds of the inhabitants have food deficiencies.
However the over 800 million undernourished are concentrated in the so-called LIFDCs: this is the acronym for Low Income Food Deficient Countries, lacking in food self-sufficiency and at the same time short of those resources that would permit them to import the food that is lacking; 42 LIFDCs are found in Africa, 19 in Asia, 9 in Latin America, 6 in the Middle East and North Africa, 12 in Europe (Eastern Europe). An LIFDC is so for a variety of reasons, depending on the place: shortage of arable land or of water with respect to the population, wars, foreign debt. And colonial residues: in the past many LIFDC countries were self-sufficient in food. In order not to be a slave to food insecurity, with all that derives from it (political insecurity, dependency on the politics of their states, possible internal wars for control over scarce resources), a country must be able not only to produce or import food in sufficient quantity and quality, but also to distribute it fairly within its borders. Africa is certainly the worst hit continent today as regards percentage of starving and tomorrow even in the absolute number. Those who expect that, if current tendencies undergo no change, in 2030 there will be 730 million undernourished, concentrate at least 300 million of them in Africa.... One African in five even today depends on food assistance, while wars and droughts worsen the situation. The cereal output on fragile land (cultivated to face the increase in population) is very low: about 300-500 kilos per hectare as against 5 tons elsewhere.
** Food insecurity in the West
If we look at a continent - Europe - that seems to have achieved food security already this long time, we find three factors of instability: some countries are losing their food self-sufficiency; others to produce food use their natural resources unsustainably; and in both cases, next to citizens too poor to feed themselves well, there are many other hypernourished or undernourished.
The too full stomach, both in high-income countries and in the élite of the poor countries does not protect against food security, either now or in the future. Indeed, food excesses, especially with proteins and animal fats, together with a sedentary life and assumption of tobacco, have become among the main causes of degenerative illnesses in the so-called developed countries: cancer, stroke, cardiovascular diseases. Excessive weight can be as dangerous for health as insufficient weight. The index of body mass (IBM) shows if a person runs risks because of his weight. To calculate it, the weight in kilos is divided by the height expressed in square meters. Normal IBM is between 18.5 and 25.
But the quality of food also causes vitamin and trace element deficiencies and various pathologies. Residues of pesticides, industrial foods with poor nutritional value (junk-food, even if costly ....), refined, chemicalized, hormonized. The meat of the “mad cows” is a sort of paradigm of this highly unsafe food.
Even before chemistry entered our plates in abundance, at the beginning of the century, the nutritionist Carlton warned against the “three food poisons of the modern age” which he listed thus: alcohol, meat, sugar. Daily ingredients of the diet of those who are well-off.
** A population increase that can no longer be pursued
Thanks to the triplication in production that has taken place over the last 40 years, in a greater percentage with respect to the population, the world could still nourish us all today. The 5.8 billion inhabitants have 15% more food available per head than the 4 billion of 20 years ago. Therefore for now there is no problem of absolute scarcity, but there is one of distribution: “It is the poverty of individuals - one billion 200 million live with less than a dollar a day - of countries that transforms global insufficiency into local scarcity” they say in the UN. In theory, the Earth could support an even larger population than the current one. But, in practice, the productive lands, favourable climates, rain and fresh water are not distributed uniformly, nor in proportion to the density of population. Thus some countries can produce excesses, while others must struggle much more to produce less than the necessary. It is also a question of economic resources. FAO has calculated that if all the LIFCD countries had the productive factors (energy, chemistry, technology, money) of the West available to them, only 19 would in any case not be self-sufficient, as they have already occupied the little land available; and among these a good number would be rich enough to import what is needed.
Too optimistic a view. We must consider the fact that today the undernourished are almost one billion, and that 3 billion mouths will be added within a few decades, and this while the limits of the Earth seem to have been reached. After decades of rapid growth, food production per head is in fact declining, in the sense that it is growing less rapidly than the population: 303 kilos per head of cereals were produced in 1969-71, 342 in 1984-86, but they decreased to 327 in 1989-91 and the same is expected for 2010. Not only this: in 1996, for the first time in decades, world food reserves fell to only 45 days, a much lower number than the 60 days necessary to guarantee world food security. A situation that makes the world vulnerable to local food crises and that in any case, by causing the prices of cereals to rise, determines for the famous LIFDC countries an increase in costs of three billion dollars for cereal imports, which will therefore probably decrease in volume.
Meanwhile cultivable land per head is equal to a world average of only 0.25 hectares. And there has been an increase in the decay of that environment which is still the basis for production. 1.3 billion hectares have lost their fertility, forests are disappearing and the competition between water uses increases.
Turn to the sea? Fish resources are also in sharp decline, as a result of overexploitation.
The growth of the population - three billion in the next 35 years, almost all concentrated in the developing countries - will further decrease the availability of land and will make the need to intensify agricultural production more urgent while increasing the demand for the limited natural resources.
According to FAO, it will be necessary to increase food production by 75% in the next thirty years for the supplies to be sufficient to face the increase in the population.
//BOX//
“So everyone has their own tragedies: for 300,000 Indians that die of hunger, there is one Englishman who dies of indigestion!” (remark by Groucho in the comic-strip “Dylan Dog”, set in Great Britain)
//p. 8//
// BOX//
HUNGER HAS ALWAYS EXISTED
THE FAMINES OF THE PAST
Famines have afflicted mankind since the most distant times; the first known famine dates to 3,500 BC in Egypt. Two famines will hit India in 1700 killing a total of 5 million people. The worst famine documented in history hit China in 1876-79 and cost between 9 and 14 million human lives. Much more recently, the drought of the ‘80s in 21 African nations caused a million deaths and 10 million emigrants. Famines are caused by human factors such as wars, by negative atmospheric conditions and other natural disasters, among which earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions. Very little has been done to eliminate the causes and the most serious damages of famines - the number of natural disasters has quadrupled between the ‘60s and the ‘80s - even if international aid has prevented disasters from turning into catastrophes.
//BOX//
Self-consumption of food products in industrialized countries is equal to just 5% of the total. And only 20-25% of family spending for foodstuffs reaches the pockets of the farmers.
** Parasite cities and other wastes
There is an increase in the decay of the Earth and of the terrain, necessary allies against food insecurity.
Great accomplices of hunger and bad nourishment are the incorrect use and hyper-exploitation of resources. For example: what use are cereals, which are indeed the basis of the human diet, in many countries? Above all for feeding animals raised for human nourishment; this is what happens to 70% of cereals in the USA and 47% in Europe. Up to a short time ago, moreover, it was common in Europe and the United States to produce agricultural surpluses to then destroy them or export them with subsidies.
Now agricultural policies seem to want to pursue greater sustainability, but is this really so? “Developed” agriculture is an environmental homicide and an energetic absurdity; and its attempts to extend it to the rest of the world have brought no well-being.
Finally, if in many areas of the planet the natural productive factors are even over-used, so that they become rapidly impoverished, in many areas the same factors, in the first place the land, are abandoned and uncultivated for political reasons or under-used because the poverty of the producers does not permit them to obtain greater yield while preserving the environment.
Meantime the megalopolises advance and attract increasing numbers of people: hunger seems to paradoxically hit less in the city, a plate of rice can always be found. Energy-consuming and greedy cities, parasites of the countryside, from whom they take land often without producing anything other than paper. Cities whose inhabitants, between elevators, air-conditioned offices, an open tap and a loud-playing stereo, no longer know that tomatoes do not grow skinless and tinned, and bread is not invented by the oven of the baker, nor does milk flow from a computer.
But also alienated cities, whose inhabitants, between a bidonville, a whiff of smog in its pure state, a relentless search for a job and too many children to feed, have sought shelter from that countryside that was once the feeder, but where hunger hit undisturbed.
**TABELLE**
FOOD CONSUMPTION PER HEAD FOR DIRECT HUMAN CONSUMPTION
(calories per day)
Underdeveloped countries
Sub-Saharan Africa
Middle East/Northern Africa
Eastern Asia
Southern Asia
Latin America and the Caribbean
Industrialized countries
CPE areas
Others
World
Source: FAO, “World Agriculture: Towards 2010”, 1996
ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS OF THE EFFECT OF CHRONIC MALNUTRITION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Region Years Total population Undernourished
ann. av. (in millions) % of total population
Sub-Saharan Africa
Middle East and
Northern Africa
Eastern Asia
Southern Asia
Latin America and the Caribbean
Total
Source: FAO, “World Agriculture: Towards 2010”, 1996
// p. 10
//BOX//
WHAT IS EATEN IN THE WORLD?
Out of over 50,000 edible species in the world, only a few hundred are important for human nutrition; and hardly 15 plants provide 90% of the world food energetic contribution. Alone, rice, maize and wheat feed two thirds of the world population. Traditional foods are very numerous but are decreasing in urban areas: citizens increasingly become used to “western” food, often imported and in any case industrially transformed. The food of the poor is still mainly vegetarian; for example in Africa 66% of the products is represented by cereals and roots, and animal products account for only 7%; whereas the food of western people and of the affluent and urban classes of the South of the world contains larger quantities of animal products, over 30%.
//BOX//
Without them, nothing: peasants, labourers, native peoples, farmers, landowners, agromultinationals.....
//BOX//
“They leave behind no sign of identification except for their tombstones and their children: the wonderful surface of the British countryside, the work of their ploughs, spades and shears, the animals that they kept, do not in fact have either a signature or a print like those left by the masons on the cathedrals” (“Captain Swing” by E.G. Hosbawn-G. Rudé, 1968)
//BOX//
“We farmers are the most important people in the world, without us nobody eats” (Latin American producer member of the “Via Campesina” movement).
//BOX//
According to the physiocratic school (Quesnay, XVIII century) every richness came from the earth, the only sector that is truly productive. And in the scientific correspondence of Marx and Engels the idea recurs that “capitalist production exhausts the original sources of wealth: land and the workers”
Full time farmers in the world still number more than a billion, to which we must add another billion underemployed in the rural areas. Almost all are peasants or labourers in the South of the world, with no or very little land, and they are among the main “food insecure”; on the other hand there are only 50 million farmers in the industrialized countries and certainly, except for a few exceptions, they cannot be defined as clodhoppers. In the European Union 7% of the population works in agriculture, in central and eastern Europe the number is 14%, in the United States 3%, while in Burkina Faso the figure is 85%, in Thailand 60% and in Morocco 38%. There is everything in the sector of the farmers. In fact usually a distinction is made among the following actors of food production: peasants (who possess small holdings), rural workers (that is to say, labourers on the land of other people: according to the international farming union Ifat they number at least 150 million), native people, farmers (producers of medium or large dimension), big landowners (landowners of large holdings that are often absent), transformers of the agroindustrial sector, multinationals (who possess plantations and transformation lines).
The African mother who works half an hectare of thirsty land, the Brazilian landowner who makes hosts of landless work on his land where he doesn’t raise herds, the Indio of the Chiapas who has seen his community land taken from him, the Indian landless-outcast, the United States grain baron, the middle size farmer who works his land with sufficient mechanical means, the European “biological” cooperative...
In common they have only land. Very different are even the types of soil, the farming systems and the means of production: the hoe, a bit of animal manure and some natural insecticide in the case of the small peasant farmer; mechanical, chemical and even computer means in the case of the “big”. These last specialize in one or two crops, they sell almost all that they produce and they use a considerable quantity of energy and chemical substances. The “small” work in subsistence farming, worrying about first of all satisfying the family requirements and selling the surplus of some income crop for facing the (very modest) expenses for instruction, health, hygiene and so on.
Among the poor peasants in the Third World, the women contribute up to 70% of farming activity and up to 50% of the production for self-consumption; but they only possess rights of ownership over 1% of the surface.
The numeric decline of the peasant population is estimated as being irreversible. In Europe, between 1960 and 1990 every day one thousand farm jobs were lost. In the poor, and recently industrialized, countries, the difficulties and risks of farming tiny plots together with the lack of social rural infrastructures, continue to drive the peasants and their children towards the megalopolises. If in 1985 the world rural population was still 68.8% of the total, in 2010 it will only be 53.8%.
//Pagina 12//
//BOX//
WAR ON PARASITES, YES BUT HOW?
To feed the world there is no sense in increasing output if first steps are not taken to avoid that a parasite destroys all production. All farmers know how numerous are the starving pests. The problem is how to control them, and in this sense pesticides have often shown that they are insufficient, or worse. Between 1950 and 1986 the use of pesticides increased 32 times over; a quarter of the total is used in the Third World, but above all on income crops. As the distance between the natural ecosystem and the cultivated ecosystem increased, the war of pesticides went completely out of control. But the synthesis phytoprotectors, as well as polluting the environment, health and food, also kill the enemies of the parasites, so paradoxically strengthening these last. Moreover, along the way, hundreds of harmful species have developed that are resistant to pesticides whereas in the 1950s they were very few. The war of the phytopathologies is therefore seeking (or rediscovering) other roads, that are more “sustainable”: biological control by recurring to natural enemies (biological struggle), the use of natural insecticides, the return to multicrop farming that guarantees more resistance, integrated struggles (IPM) that provide for a very selective and reduced use of synthesis pesticides, and for the remainder resort to protecting the plants with the preservation of natural enemies, crop rotation, intercrop farming and the use of resistant varieties.
//cartoon//
Between 1950 and 1986 the use of pesticides increased 32 times over
//BOX//
“Half a calorie of energy produces one calorie of food in the food systems of non-industrial biodiversity, while in the industrial systems 10 calories of energy produce just one calorie of food”
(Vandana Shiva).
* A problem of demand or of offer? Both of them
The 1974 World Conference on Nutrition took place in the year when the prices of cereals on the world market had reached an unprecedented peak. But three years later, the world prices had fallen to levels that were inferior to those of the 1950s. Thus the general fear that the world had entered a new era when the growth of production would not have been able to stay in line with a growing demand for food by a population in rapid increase was withdrawn. In a word, the world food question continued to go on as before: the world had every possibility to increase production - without prices increasing; it was the demand for food by undernourished people that did not increase sufficiently, because of their poverty. The idea began to grow that the problem was not one of the offer, that is to say, production, but the demand and/or distributions of the same.
Actually this reasoning is valid for advanced societies where the majority of the demand for food comes from consumers that do not get their income from agriculture (the farmers are few and therefore proportionately they demand little food), and in which importing food does not cause insurmountable financial problems.
But everything works quite differently in the majority of low income countries, where the largest part of the population depends on agriculture and therefore those who produce and who demand food are the same subjects: the peasant family. There the circle is vicious: if agricultural production is low, the peasant, that is to say, the majority of the population, has little income and therefore food demand remains low. In this case the problem of food insecurity is effectively a problem of production and a policy of food security cannot be separated from that of the strengthening of agricultural production.
In any case, in recent years the prices of cereals have risen again, a phenomenon that is interwoven with the reduction of the planetary corn reserves.
* Social problems, ecological problems
Land and water are limited resources. Current agroindustrial models, that are not fair and lasting, do not seem to take this into account: even today they allow almost a billion people to exist in a state of starvation, and they do not seem to be able to face the challenge of nourishing a population in constant growth without destroying these resources, thus cutting the ground from under the feet of the future generations. Their characteristics are in fact:
- The excessive exploitation of the earth and the exaggerated and often anti-economic use of the external productive factors such as fertilizers, energy and pesticides;
- The rural economic disparity: often rural communities know how to protect the environment but they are forced to exploit it excessively to survive. On the other hand the large landowners end up by ruining the land with single crop farming and intense breeding in their search for higher profits;
- The disparity of resources. The population increase affects and will affect above all the underdeveloped countries and especially the poorest peoples, who have less chance to satisfy their requirements and to invest in their future. The 450 million Sub-Saharan Africans have the same resources available to them in a quantity that equals that of ten million Belgians.
- The non-sustainable technologies, which have increased production but often produced damaging secondary effects, such as the greater resistance of the parasites, wind or water erosion with the destruction of the earth that results from it, the traditional impoverishment of the land, the bad management of irrigation and the loss of biodiversity.
- Exchange relations. With the progressive decrease of the value of the raw materials exported, the underdeveloped countries tried to increase the value of their exports by carelessly increasing agricultural production and selling wood with huge environmental damage.
* The agriculture of the North: a lot but unsustainable
It is 1905 when the first great European industry of nitrogenous fertilizers opens its doors in Pescara. After the Second World War the use of increasingly complex fertilizers spreads to a huge extent, and then herbicides and pesticides, that limit the losses caused by sicknesses. And the agricultural yield in Europe and in other industrialized countries increases extraordinarily.
Is this agriculture perhaps the real proof that agricultural production can thanks to technology arrive in the era of food abundance? Unfortunately no, because we must apply the definition of “so much but unsustainable” to it. High yield and high productivity per worker were obtained at the cost of massive recourse to fertilizers and other chemical inputs and a very reduced use of labour. With very high energy costs. In the United States 900 litres of petroleum are used every year for every hectare cultivated; and half a litre of petrol to produce one litre of milk! So we cannot say that the farmers of the North were better than the peasants of the South of the world: the differences between available capital in the two cases are enormous. In the United States - but in Europe the case is not all that different - a calorie of artificial energy used in agriculture (under the form of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides) produces 0.5 food calories; in India the same artificial calorie produces 16 of them. And if we calculate the environmental costs, including the long-term effects of the chemical substances on illnesses, such a production model would reveal itself as being anti-economic. So much waste for nothing: seeing as how for years the agricultural policies of Europe and the United States have avoided the fall of the prices of so much farm produce .... destroying them with bulldozers.
Meanwhile unfavourable commercial mechanisms destroyed the basis of peasant farming. The production costs that were increasingly high and not compensated by the selling prices limited to an ever lower number the areas where production was profitable. Yet the EEC declared that it wanted to “promote the development of a living agricultural world, of farmers that live off their work in the respect of the environment”.
For some years now a lot of land has been put at rest: measures have been introduced that encourage sustainable agriculture in marginal areas. But on the most productive lands the agrozootechnical model has not changed with serious damage to the soil at the mercy of erosion.
The phenomenon of the resistance of the infesting agents to pesticides renders dubious the productive effectiveness of “industrial” agriculture. Between 1950 and 1986 the recourse to chemical inputs increased 32 times over, to deal with the resistance developed by insects, larvae and funguses.
In the same period we also saw the scandalous export to the Third World of pesticides forbidden by us because they are too harmful. As well as increasingly higher costs, the exaggerated use of pesticides pollutes the environment, the health of the agricultural producers and the food itself.
(Cf. the relative report on pesticides)
* The green revolution of the South
During the 1960s, when the “export” to the South of the western industrial agricultural world began, it seemed like anything but an illusion! It was thought that soon nobody would suffer from hunger anymore, that famines and too low yields and those at the mercy of the locusts would have given way to a production that would be abundant and without risks of loss during or after the harvest, all told that it would have been possible to feed everyone, even in those countries that up to then had been affected by famines and chronic starvation. With the “green revolution” high yield varieties were introduced, as were pesticides and chemical fertilizers, irrigation and western technology in Asia and a large part of Africa and South America.
Between 1950 and 1980 food production in the developing world increased by 3% per year; the production of wheat in India tripled and that of rice in the Philippines was doubled. Today high yield varieties are cultivated in half of the grain surfaces and in the majority of the rice fields of the world.
And yet to shoot at the “green revolution” is not like shooting at the Red Cross. In a world where the resources are so unevenly distributed, could it ever have worked in favour of peasants and the poor?. No. So much so that, for example in India, the starving resist in great numbers in spite of the achieved food self-sufficiency at national level.
The fact was that, to be really valid, the high yield hybrid varieties depended on the high availability of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the use of machinery. This favoured the wealthier farmers, with more land and with access to water and transport. It is not by chance that the revolution was limited to Asia and to some Latin American regions; Africa was hardly touched. Moreover every new variety gave its maximum usually only for the first three or four years before losing its resistance towards pathogens and sicknesses, so that new varieties had to be produced constantly. After 1966 over one thousand new hybrid varieties of rice were launched. As well as the resistance to parasites it was soon noted that there were other secondary effects: wind and water erosion with the deterioration of the land, nutritional impoverishment of the soil, bad management of irrigation with resulting salinization, the loss of biodiversity (all factors that reduce yield); and the exclusion of women, main workers in subsistence food production.
The methods of cultivation of the green revolution made it possible to economize on land and labour. But unsustainable ecological costs accompanied high financial costs and rural unemployment which causes food insecurity if alternative employment is not offered.
There is talk now of a “new green revolution” which should reconcile the increase in productivity with the protection of resources. Very good: except that on this new path it is expected that there will be a preferential lane for genetic engineering, with all the problems that this can entail.
(Cf. report regarding biotechnology).
//BOX//
The operation was a success but the patient is dead!
//Cartoon//
...In the United States 900 litres of petroleum are used every year for every hectare of land cultivated....
* Genetic industry: tomorrow paradise?
With biotechnologies and genetic engineering, the genes of one species - animal, vegetable, micro-organisms - can be transformed into another, producing the so-called transgenic varieties. For some experts in this way resistant crops can be created, that have high yield and that are compatible with the preservation of the environment because they are less dependant on chemicals. Actually up to now it has been attempted to increase the resistance of the plants not to the parasites but.... to the herbicides that are used abundantly on the crops. On the other hand genetic research is controlled by the same colossals that produce chemical inputs: why should they cut their own throats causing a decrease in the sales of these last? Thus, as the researcher W. Liebhardt of the University of California, summarizes, “The same people that once brought us pesticides now tell us ‘we have better’; and they bring us other problems”.
The industrialized world and the private sector hold the resources for research, while the low-income countries are used as fields of experimentation: living organisms, potential “monsters” are launched in the fields and they cannot certainly be taken back like a tin of tomatoes, out of date.
Moreover the sophisticated technologies are very far from the peasant who produces to survive, perhaps cultivating sorghum and beans, foodstuffs that are of little interest to the great market of the giant producers.
(CF. report regarding biotechnologies)
* Loss of biodiversity
For thousands of years the rural populations of the world protected and handed down a great variety of forms of vegetable and animal life. But today the natural habitats are destroyed or deteriorated and many species are lost. From 1900 to today 75% of the genetic varieties of agricultural crops have been lost; and 400,000 vegetable species risk extinction over the next few years. Poor “centres of Vavilov”, the twelve geographical areas which were the main centres of food plants and in which biodiversity is still concentrated today! By now only a little over 150 edible vegetable species have considerable economic importance. The loss of biodiversity is a factor of food insecurity. In fact, species that are disappearing could be used for developing varieties that are more resistant to parasites and more suitable to hostile environments, therefore in certain situations more profitable, in terms of food yield. Biodiversity furthermore helps the natural equilibrium between populations of preyed upon and predators, and is therefore a natural boundary to the spread of harmful insects. Productive uniformity is a good cultivation ground for great devastating epidemics.
The possibility of patenting living animal and vegetable organisms has meant that a patrimony has been put into the hands of the large multinationals - very clever at discovering and using biodiversity - free of charge: for now no compensation has ever been paid to the traditional guardians of the vital variety, even if FAO and the peasant organizations have for some time been stressing the so-called farmers’ rights.
(CF. report regarding genetic varieties).
* The happy “alternative” of the blue Revolution
“Cultivate” the fish resources, without waiting for the fish to reproduce in the sea and in the rivers, this is the challenge of the “blue revolution”: if agriculture and breeding meet with natural limits, there only remains for us to resort to water culture, an “enormous resource that can give a hand to the peasants by producing so much protein without having to fear drought, erosions, pollution, energy waste, resources consumed by other uses”: this is what the enthusiasts say.
But let’s talk facts. The seas are in reserve, due to the overfishing in the seas with the extension of industrial fishing which to maximise its profits uses techniques that decimate the fish: in fact it destroys their areas of reproduction, as well as producing “wastage” that is equal to 30% of the volume of the catch. The current rhythm of capture of fish - 100 million tons per year - is not sustainable. It has been calculated that, whereas at the present time there are 19 kilos of fish per head available in the seas and in water courses, in the future there will only be 11.
As well as the fish, the victims of this system are the non-professional fishermen that must go increasingly far from land and stay increasingly longer periods in the sea, in any case finding less fish than before. Their unbeatable competitors are huge local entrepreneurs and foreign fishing boats, including European ones. In fact the European Union has signed fishing agreements with various African countries paying them so that they accept the forays of predators bearing the European flag. Some countries, such as Namibia, in the end refused such binding agreements and others are trying to renegotiate them.
So here we have the presentation of the “blue revolution”, aquaculture. Let us cultivate the fish, in special places, and we will have miraculous catches. But judging from the protests of peasants and fishermen especially those of Asia and Africa, the project does not seem more miraculous than hyperfishing.
In particular the widespread cultivation of shrimps in huge ponds near the coasts has had negative effects on agriculture (with the subtraction of precious land), on the watercourses (polluted by the effluents) and on amateur fishing. The movement against breeding shrimps on an industrial scale is by now international.
(Cf. report regarding fishing resources)
//BOX// p. 15
Paintings of the 1600s
Searching for wild vegetable species for collecting their precious germoplasm is by now an imperative. One of the most curious research studies took place in Italy, where paintings of Bartolomeo Bimbi, an artist of the seventeenth century, were used to know and catalogue vegetable species of the past, which he had portrayed with great precision. In fact he painted 112 different species of citrus fruits, 100 of pears, 77 of grapes, 50 of figs and apples; an incredible number if we compare it with the few varieties that have survived until today. In a cartouche he had registered the names of the fruits, the type: Spada Fuora bastarda del fior doppio, lemon of Madonna Laura, cedrangolo, lumia. With the blow-ups of these paintings, some specialists of the University of Bologna managed to find - with great effort - some of the ancient cultivar, whose germoplasm is preserved in the bank of genes of Rome.
Page 16
The causes
//BOX//
“Madam, why have you so many children if you are so poor? Dear Sir, it is because I am poor that I have so many children!”
* Too many mouths to feed for this planet?
The size of the population can be intertwined with food security at three levels: individual, regional, global. Individual level: certainly a numerous poor family can easily fall into starvation. But in a situation of absolute uncertainty for the present and future children are a resource for the future. And in the countryside where finding water and wood requires hours of walking every day, and where there is no type of mechanization, children can lend an essential hand from an early age. Thus the vicious circle continues. Various examples demonstrate then that when income increases and the women are reached with literacy programmes, the number of children per family rapidly decreases.
State level: actually only South East Asia and some small African states are at the limit of the relationship between productive capacity and mouths to feed.
For other LIFDCs (therefore we exclude the countries rich in saleable resources, such as the Emirate deserts seated on oil) the productive capacity has still not been exploited; or rather it is badly exploited.
Global level: the number of persons that can be reasonably fed depends and will depend: a) on the use of technology; b) on the type of food consumption that the average of the inhabitants of the planet adopts or will adopt.
//BOX//
“Only those who walk on cinders feel pain” (Arab proverb)
//BOX//
“The earth is shallow” (proverb of experimental peasant)
* Individual poverty, cause of hunger
You are poor and hungry when either you cannot manage to produce or to purchase enough food. In the first case you are a peasant ensnared in a vicious circle of scarce agricultural resources and therefore scarce productive possibilities, no infrastructures or assistance, deteriorated environment, trade speculations and lack of extra-agricultural income.
In the second case you are a “citizen” or in any case a non-producer ensnared in the lack of purchase power: perhaps you are unemployed, or they pay you too little or occasionally in relation to your expenses. National or global food security is of little interest to these poor people: they are lacking in individual security. We believe that the best way to illustrate the various types of situations and causes of poverty cause of hunger is a collection of stories.
//BOX//
BANGLADESH : MARGINAL PEASANT
I and my husband have a roof of straw, five children (actually I would have desired just two, but my husband says that they will help us in our old age, and then religion...), and a little plot of land of one thousand square metres which gives us fruit and vegetables. To buy rice and lentils we work in the nearby farms. Almost 90% of our spending is for buying food. Two of my children died in infancy. I and my daughters eat last, and a little less than the males, you know that’s how things are done here. One of our big problems are the floods, but when it doesn’t rain too much we have drought. They have told me that the fault is of a huge dam built between India and Bangladesh, that leaves through only as much water as India wishes and when India wishes.
VIETNAM: FAMILY OF THE FOREST
There are six of us in the family, and three of us are in a farming cooperative that has rice-fields and animals. We eat rice, manioca, cabbage and pork fat. We sell the “rest” of the pig, to have a little income. The cooperative manages to produce about 650 kg of rice per hectare, they tell me this is little. With what we cultivate we manage to cover less than half of what we eat. For the rest, we go into the forest: there are at least 60 species of plants, fruit and animals that we use. But certainly the four months before the new harvest are very hard.
ETHIOPIA: PEASANTS UNDER DROUGHT
We have two nightmares: scarcity of rain and the period before the harvest, when the reserves of the previous year are finished. My country is among those most susceptible to years of drought, and it also among those with the lowest per head income, so that emergency assistance is still important. We ourselves, farm producers, will need them for some months of the year. Our daily diet is based on malt and lentils, but we usually eat only once a day. Wood for burning is also a problem: the drought has gradually killed the trees and all the vegetation so my wife has to walk increasingly further to find a few twigs.
Even when it rains it is not easy to produce enough. It is like a snake that eats his tail: apart from the land, I have no money, nor credit for buying fertilizers, or seeds, nor am I part of the irrigation programmes destined to better off farmers who can make their land yield better. So I will always be dying of hunger. In the worst years we have had to drink earthy water from wells dug in the land, until they were used up. Many of our neighbours died then, we saved ourselves by transferring to another highland where relatives took us in. My children will try to go to the city, to do I know not what.
BURUNDI: “MAN OF SERVICE” FORMER PEASANT
In Burundi the population is all scattered on the hills and doesn’t seem much. But our peasants are well aware that our little country is overpopulated with respect to the surface: when the numerous children grow and we have to divide the little plot of land into four pieces, there is nothing left. So like me, they emigrate to Bujumbura, called Buja, the capital. But jobs are also scarce, there are not enough for everyone. I was “lucky”: I have a job as a “boy”, a servant, in this house of Europeans. Certainly they pay me a pittance with respect to what I would have earned if I had stayed in my own country, and I don’t like serving them their cocktails with a deferential air, but do I have alternatives? And then here I eat their left-overs. I understand myself that this is not the way out of poverty; but when I go to my village, I see my two brothers who stayed there who continue to hoe the little ground they have and they do not know what to do. Emigrate to Zaire, which is big? This is the solution that sometimes someone brings out, especially when the ethic struggles increase here, struggles that are also for the land which is insufficient. But who would help us to buy land there, to build a house, to begin planting?
UNITED STATES: A HOMELESS PERSON
And I am a homeless person, without a roof; in good company seeing as how there are 500 million of us in the world. you know how it goes, you begin by losing your job, then your house ... now I make do as I can, at the poor peoples’ soup-kitchen in the evenings, and, at lunch-time a sandwich earned from recycling waste. The Quaker volunteer doctor says that I am anaemic and suffering from a lack of vitamins.
COLOMBIA: FAMILY OF CITY WORKERS
There are six of us, we live in a hut without a toilet in the suburbs of Bogota’. I am an occasional building worker, born and raised here. Recently the price of food has increased more than salaries, while the subsidies for essential food are finished and so things are getting increasingly worse. 20% of my wages goes to the rent of the “house” and 70% for food, mostly rice, wheat and potatoes. A doctor said that my children are underweight and smaller than normal.
CHIAPAS: INDIO MAYA
We have always been poor; ever since the landowners took the communal land and put their animals to pasture there. But the policy of the government now took away even the ejidos, the collective farm areas. Now Mexico buys American cereals, so we will not be able to sell even the little that we sold before to the non-peasants and which we needed to buy the food that we cannot produce.
IRAQ: FAMILY UNDER EMBARGO
From the food point of view we had no problems. I was a mechanic, my wife a housewife, the three children still small. It was like this until 1990. Thanks to its oil Iraq was a rich country, but it imported almost everything: 75% of its food, almost all medicines and machinery. Then, after the Gulf War that even destroyed the civilian infrastructures, the embargo arrived, the prohibition to sell oil and to import anything. There wasn’t even flour to make bread. The little to be found cost a fortune, and my wages are still more or less the same and the same is true for the other workers. Thus, over 600,000 people, above all children, died from misery and curable illnesses. Even now we survive with rations at controlled prices, that however are sufficient for twenty out of thirty days. Not much will change when they permit us to sell a little oil to buy some food. The inhabitants of this country number twenty million, a lot of food is needed! I don’t care about the reasons for which the embargo was placed and for which it is still there: the western interests to have the oil under control are starving the innocent.
BRAZIL: A FORMER HUNGRY PERSON
I am 14 years of age and for six I worked in the sugar cane plantation with my family because we had no land. They paid us very little, moreover we also had to repay a debt. I used to leave home at 4 o’clock in the morning to go to work, always with an empty stomach. Now with others we have occupied uncultivated lands of the big landowners, thanks to the Sem Terra Movement. We cultivate for ourselves, indeed I am going to the rural school, and we eat twice a day and in the morning there is even herva mate, the national tea. But many other labourers had to emigrate to the city, or they continue to die of hunger in a country that is so green, rich and huge, with 100 million hectares not cultivated. Up agricultural reform!
//BOX//
“Breastfeed your son! even with the tears from your eyes” (Mohammed)
* The multinationals do not breastfeed!
Healthy, free, always available: maternal milk is the best nourishment for every baby whose resistance to sickness is thus increased; when the baby comes from a poor family, it is the only possibility for healthy growth. The terrible images of skeleton-like mothers who have however a little milk for their babies says a lot. It is however easier for a mother to find a bowl of cereals for herself than a tin of milk powder for the baby. It is therefore criminal that someone - not to name names, a multinational - gives a present of artificial milk to the new mothers: their milk will go away but, when they return home, they will not have enough money to buy sufficient quantities of tinned milk. Thus, as often happens, they will dilute a few spoons in water of doubtful quality. And so as well as undernourishment, it is calculated that about 1.5 million children die every year because of gastroenteric diseases.
We are amazed by the arrogance with which a certain multinational does not consider all the boycotts and continues to plagiarize poor women.
* Why do poor peasants produce “little”?
Among the 800 million poor and starving many are peasants or rural people without land. Poor, and with respect to the international standards, not very productive.
And moreover, to ask a peasant who works half an hectare of land, perhaps without irrigation, perhaps subject to drought, perhaps without any technical assistance and without money to buy external inputs, why he doesn’t produce ten tons/hectare, is like asking an undernourished Ethiopian boy why he can’t run as fast as Karl Lewis ....
The aforesaid peasant could justify himself with a variety of good reasons. Here are some of them:
To the rich the land of the peasants and of the native peoples
50% of peasants of the Third World work less than an hectare of land. In certain places, like in South East Asia, and in some small African countries, there is an effective overpopulation and the land yet to be exploited is very little. But elsewhere it is the absence of an effective agricultural reform that prevents survival. The majority of land is in the hands of rich landowners, and in the end it has been calculated that the landless country people in the Third World number 500 million, who are labourers or work little plots around their huts. Another 400 million have plots that are not sufficient for living with dignity.
A tragic chapter on its own is that of the native peoples. Their lands, often collectively cultivated and preserved with care, are increasingly reduced or privatized. The situations are numerous and involve the destruction of the forests, such as with the end of the commons in India and the ejidos in Mexico.
And yet there would be land for everyone, if it were distributed fairly. Instead the peasants either don’t have it or if they obtain rented land, they are in situations of absolute precariousness.
Usually the large landowners are more interested in production for export or in any case for sending to city markets: for what reason should they produce cereals, legumes, fruit and vegetables for local self-sufficiency if those starving labourers have not enough purchasing power? Thus the sum of single crop farming and large properties produces paradoxes. Like the island of Negros in the Philippines: green, fertile, able to easily satisfy everyone’s appetite, it has become the Ethiopia of Asia, thanks to sugar cane, cultivated almost exclusively for the industry of transformation and for export.
//BOX// p. 18
The structural condition of the poor peasant is indebtedness
Underdevelopment in the rural world
Without means, without infrastructures and without any system of social protection against, for example, climatic risks, the harvest is limited by definition. It is sufficient that it rains a little less, or too much all at the same time, or that the locusts pass and the harvest collapses. Let us look at the capital that middle and large farmers of the north of the world have available in comparison to that of the small peasants of the Third World. The productivity of every rural worker can be high in the North (up to 1,000 tons per year) and very low in the Third World (ten tons or a lot less in Africa). And without capital, you cannot get farm machinery or fertilizers, or farm chemicals, irrigation, indeed none of those factors that improve yield (certainly at a cost to the environment) and reduce labour.
To live and work in the countryside of many countries is a complete lack of security. Whoever is hungry in the city usually finds the Salvation Army of the situation who will find him a bowl of soup. But in the distant countryside in the periods that precede the new harvest, the only thing to do if you want to eat is to go into debt.
This is not enough: the life in the villages is so hard and without distractions and contacts with the world that the young people go to the city or try to emigrate.
Work in agriculture is very tiring, if only done with a hoe and a plough. The peasants are often alone even in their effort to protect the ground from desertification and deterioration, a task that would require huge investments in sustainable agriculture; while the reduction of attention for the primary sector is clear both of the states interested in the phenomenon and of international aid (the percentage dedicated to agriculture has decreased from 24 to 16% in a few years).
And yet the small holding yields much more than the huge property (in Colombia, it has been calculated as 14 times more) and also with respect to industrial agriculture, if we consider the relationship between means (energy, inputs) used and product.
//Cartoon//
to ask a peasant who works half an hectare of land, perhaps without irrigation, perhaps subject to drought, perhaps without any technical assistance and without money to buy external inputs, why he doesn’t produce ten tons/hectare, is like asking an undernourished Ethiopian boy why he can’t run as fast as Karl Lewis
Hard struggle for peasant organizations
But depending on the places, the farming methods that are not suitable to the soil or one or another disaster (locusts, drought, wars) cause armies of small peasants to fail, to be transformed into salaried workers in the plantations of the agroindustrial firms and of those who control the world cereals market. Often it is the governments that “boycott” the farmers when they appear to be too bellicose. In Brazil, Indonesia, Bolivia, Philippines, India - and not just there - the agricultural trade unions that are not on the side of the government are their opposition.
Women: great feeders who do not count
Agriculture is woman: in the South of the world up to 70% of production for family self-subsistence is obtained by women, with their nails, with their teeth and little else, perhaps with a hoe. Finding water and wood to burn - these too essential factors for individual food security - is another typically female task. In exchange: efforts for reducing female labour are very few; women possess only 1% of agricultural lands; women are not considered “trustworthy” when it is a question of giving them credit offered by the banks (or in the rare programmes where they obtain it, the repayment tax is very high).
Finally, it is not the women but the men who are responsible for the high number of children, a possible hindrance to individual and family food security. Many situations have shown that by giving more power to women - acknowledging their production role, permitting them to go to school - also means controlling births.
Multinationals that cheat
If the peasant does not obtain for his products a price that covers his costs, or if he doesn’t find a market, he will stop making the effort to produce. And paradoxically this is what happens in many countries of the South of the world where food is scarce. The reasons: a) the imports of commodities at unbeatable prices -because they are subsidized by the exporting countries, even sent as food assistance, and in any case produced without considering the environmental costs - have been for some time a formidable enemy for the local peasants on the city markets, so much so that they have even changed the food tastes of the “citizens” leading them to neglect the typical local foodstuffs (in the African cities imported rice is now preferred to local millet); b) the lack of communication infrastructures or the costs of transport from the countryside to the cities render the sales of peasant products difficult, unless they go through a chain of rapacious intermediaries.
One could respond: “if a foodstuff is sold cheaply, it means that it was produced with inferior costs, and isn’t that better for everyone?”. The reasoning would be good except that it is completely wrong. The firms of agribusiness, in fact, being able to sell inputs to the farmers, buy their merchandise from them, and sell it transformed to the consumers, can make profits on the whole chain and therefore be “satisfied” with “low” sales prices. Moreover no one puts into the account the high economic and environmental costs of the “business” production. This is why the competition is unfair and the sales are below cost: the phenomenon is called dumping.
But on average 75% of food security of a country continues to depend on local production; trade only covers 25%.
* LIFDC states: why?
The low income countries that are non self-sufficient from a food point of view (LIFCDs) are not in this painful situation due to impenetrable reasons.
Wars
Without peace food security is an illusion like so many others. Of the 14 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa that suffer from exceptional food crises, half are also scenes of internal wars. War destroys the population’s capacity to produce food or buy it and reroutes towards armaments (often coming from countries of the North) the currency that could be destined to food purchases. Conflicts lead to population migrations (refugees and evacuees), to the abandonment of farmlands, to the ruin of internal territories with the placing of mines. Angola was prostrated by a serious famine in 1991 in spite of abundant rainfall. In the case of war even food aid does not manage to be distributed, as is well seen in the region of the Great Lakes (Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire) and of the Sudan. On the other hand hunger is itself a cause of political instability and of possible further clashes.
Disappeared water
Food production is the only human activity that is subject to climatic risk. One of the oldest and most desperate rites that unite poor rural populations of the whole world regards rainfall: some Italians may recall their grandfathers’ prayers that the hailstones will cease quickly, while in other latitudes, it is Allah who is invoked, or God, or Shivah or whoever so that it may finally rain. But if rain has never been generous with everyone in the same way, in the last twenty years droughts have followed one another more rapidly, just as the rainfalls concentrated into a few hours, useless or devastating for the crops. Sign of the times, indeed of the glasshouse effect?
Generally speaking the amount of water available per person is diminishing. Too much competition for its use: agriculture, industry, cities, waste ... Africa and Asia the continents worst hit by the water crisis. Moreover 80% of food in the future should come from irrigated crops, certainly with a higher yield .... but how to expand them if the water goes elsewhere?
In the near future wars will be declared even because of water: for example that of trans-frontier rivers. In many places it is the availability of water and not of soil that is lacking.
(CF. report regarding water)
Billions of people without wood to burn
The problem is not just what to put in the pot, but also what to burn underneath it. To cook food, more than two billion people still depend on wood to burn and on charcoal, and in the next ten years 3 billion inhabitants of the planet will not have enough of either.
Erosion, desertification: natural but not completely
One billion 200 million hectares of land are subject to deterioration, that is to say, to the impoverishment of their nourishing substances, loss of organic material and reduced microbe activity. Soils like this produce less than they could, and gradually exit from production.
Desertification is the most serious form of deterioration, attributable to climatic factors and to human activity: it affects millions of hectares of arid, semi-arid or even humid lands in 100 countries. The desert is advancing especially in Africa and in part of Asia, but also the countries of southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece, France and Portugal) are affected, just as a fifth of the rural Mediterranean areas and a tenth of the Italian territory. About 250 million people live in areas subject to desertification, while another billion are threatened.
Who causes the deterioration of the soil apart from the action of the climate? First of all distributive injustice, then on the one hand poverty and on the other excessive use. In Latin America and in Asia the main reasons are deforestation and bad cultivation practices: single crops, cultivation on unsuitable land. In Africa - the desertification is very obvious in the section of the Sahel, but in a wide sense 200 million Africans are threatened - the excess of animals at pasture is responsible for 50%, the collection of wood for burning for 7% and bad agricultural practices on unsuitable land for 25%. In Central America it is the intensive use of the soil that is the first crisis factor, followed by over-grazing. In Europe, the finger must be pointed at impoverishing agricultural practices. Even wars cause deterioration, when they prevent the population from cultivating and preserving their land. A strong component is formed by single crop farming for export that stresses the soil, while multicrop farming enriches it.
(CF. report regarding desertification)
//BOX// p. 21
“I don’t know if coffee and sugar are essential for the happiness of Europe; I do know however that these two products have had great importance for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America was depopulated to have lands free to plant them; Africa was depopulated to have the workers necessary for their cultivation”, said Bernardin de Saint Pierre.
//BOX//
“Why
import apples? Let us eat our mangoes!” (Campaign of the
Burkinabe revolution for self-consumption)
Deforestation
Essential for the ecological and climatic equilibrium of the planet, the forests are also a source of food and income for almost a billion persons. Their destruction is being accelerated at the rhythm of 15 million hectares per year, thanks above all to the increase of pastures for meat, responsible for two thirds of the forest destruction from 1945 to the present day: it is not by chance that the price of a hamburger is calculated in 5 square metres of Amazon forest. Another reason is the expansion of the agricultural frontier, due to the increase in population but also in Latin America, to the greed of the big landowners. But the deforested areas have a delicate soil that is soon exhausted and other soil has to be found in a process without end.
(Cf. the report on deforestation)
Foreign debt
Every minute the poor countries give the rich countries 270 thousand dollars as payment of interests, to pay which they need other loans. The International Monetary Fund with the collaboration of the World Bank grant them in exchange for a “packet” of measures, structural adjustment programmes, that foresee among other things, increases in exports, and saving of public money with a cut in expenses among which also agricultural subsidies. Thus, on the one hand food products enter that could be locally produced, on the other good land is assigned to producing coffee, cotton, sugar, bananas, tobacco and other single crops for export; the price of which is moreover subject to strong oscillations. on average in the ‘80s they lost 40% of their value in relation to what is imported, food included.
But that is not all: for agriculture the World Bank asks and obtained from the indebted and “adjusted” countries: that the limits of purchase of land by the great groups be eliminated; that subsidies for irrigation and credit be reduced, that the sale of rights to water (sales to the richest) be facilitated; that trade controls be abolished; that farm cooperatives be treated in the same way as private firms; that the system of food security be demolished.
Again thanks to the debt, the food situation in Africa is worse than it was thirty years ago, so much so that imports of food increased by 185% between 1970 and 1990.
(Cf. the report on “Debt”)
Single crop farming to export to ......import food
Even in the Sahel, where it is sufficient that one shower of rain doesn’t fall for famine to set in, even there single crop farming has arrived and occupies the best land, and it absorbs the scarce resources destined to the agricultural sector. From a technical-agronomic point of view, it is attributed with taking from the soil all vitality and richness within a very short time; while subsistence agriculture, integrated and multicrop, if practised well restores to the soil all that it takes away.
On the threshold of the III millennium even now we must still drag in the colonies: in fact the cash crops that were introduced at that time, for various reasons still occupy excellent areas in the former colony countries, and for some of them, especially in Africa, they are even now the only way for earning foreign currency necessary for importing manufactured goods, food and above all for repaying the foreign debt. The greatest care is reserved for these presumed hens with golden eggs, to which are dedicated agricultural research, services of agricultural divulgation, inputs, credit, guaranteed prices and markets.
Page 22
It is not a question of demonizing cash crops: they can bring foreign currency into the country and, above all, they can provide peasants with that little money which is necessary for a family economy that cannot be autarkic: soap, school copybooks, clothes and a minimum of services are not produced in the field behind the house; in some cases they provide the small peasants with an additional monetary income.
The fact is that up to now those who have gained most are the large farmers and the multinationals that possess plantations, who are little interested in the food self-sufficiency of the host country. Bearing in mind the scarce purchasing power of the poor, they prefer to produce for foreign markets. This is why Brazil, which is a great exporter of coffee, soya and tropical fruits, which has huge uncultivated surfaces, has 60% of its population not sufficiently fed. And in Zimbabwe in 1992, while the production of maize destined for local consumption suffered a tragic decline of yield because concentrated on marginal land, there was a record harvest of tobacco, cultivated with the loving care of the state, irrigation and scientific research included.
To export coffee - moreover at fluctuating prices - to import grain (80% of world trade of this cereal is absorbed by the Third World) may seem crazy for a country that is always on the borderline, but it is also a result of the commercial policies that for a long time and still are applied by the two colossal food exporters: Europe and the United States. By heavily subsidizing the producers and granting rich prizes to exports, these countries manage to make them economically unbeatable on the third party markets. A murderous dumping, the victim was the local production of the South of the world.
//BOX//
There are those who sustain that the United States have a agricultural productive potential such as to guarantee world food security, with the freedom to sell its merchandise abroad. It is a lie. The USA is only defending short-term oligopolistic positions, without a strategic vision” (Mark Rich, expert of an American association).
//BOX//
The scandalous proposal of the USA grain baron
I would tell the small peasants of the Third World to resign themselves. I and those like me, in the USA and in Europe but even in Brazil, Australia and Argentina, can produce for all those who can purchase food. Even now food production is dominated by a few giants. And my country is the second world producer and first exporter of wheat. To be brief, foodstuffs, like advanced technology, you must leave to us, or there will be blows! The new tariff agreement should prevent protectionism by my government, but you know how it is, the agricultural incentives will certainly not be lacking. My grain will continue to cost so much less than yours that it will always beat you. I produce with abundant chemical and energy inputs - which don’t cost much here - so my yield is very high. Your countries are already net importers. Resign yourselves. Go to work in the banana plantations or in the sports shoe factories because you don’t know how to do any better.
//BOX//
And the answer that he deserves
A poor country that renounces producing its own food is destined to lose its independence again, if it ever had it. And to starve millions of peasants. And then it is absurd to expect that the forced agriculture of the North of the world should feed the whole world. Agriculture everywhere must reckon with natural limits, which regard both the South and the North.
Free trade, free insecurity
In 1994 the world exchanges of agricultural products were equal to 485 billion USA dollars; a hyperbolic figure, even if equal to not even a tenth of the total value of the trade exchanges, and to only a five hundredth of the financial operations, the real nightmare of this end of century.
(Cf. report regarding financial transactions)
Agricultural trade between countries has developed much faster than production. Is it more convenient to buy food or make the effort to produce it at home? A good rule for everyone would be not to depend too much on others for what is of vital need (food). This is true also for low income countries with scarce saleable resources, who have too little money necessary for importing food: they could only receive them as aid, but it would be a huge risk ... nobody does something for nothing! Unfortunately in some areas there are limits to food production: according to the calculations of FAO, the net requirement of import of cereals will increase between here and 2010 from 8 to 19 million tons for Sub-Saharan Africa, from 38 to 71 for the Near East and northern Africa, from 27 to 35 million tons for Eastern Asia (excluding China); from 5 to 10 tons for southern Asia. This is chiefly due to a lack of arable land.
Their great trust in trade and in the import of food should not let the “poor” countries forget that what they manage to sell (either gym shoes or coffee) is rather badly paid, while the prices of cereals exported by the North have increased; and that the majority of the returns from exports go to pay the foreign debt!
However everything seems to go in the direction of liberalization of exchanges, all the more so with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO, formerly GATT) which offers this philosophy “freedom of trade to power”. Even in the field of agriculture. It foresees the end of agricultural protectionism and of export subsidies, a plague that for decades had affected farmers of the South, faced with an unbeatable because subsidized external competition.
A pity that the freedom of agricultural trade is actually one-directional: the United States subsidies to exports continue under other forms; and the situation of the oligopoly that characterizes the giants of food export will lead to an increase of prices of the merchandise that will penalize those poor countries not able to produce enough. On the other hand, the countries of the South are asked to open their frontiers to every type of food import, even when it could squash local production: the Agreement on free trade prevents and will prevent the “good” protectionisms: that is to say, the Mexican, Brazilian or Mali peasants will have no law to act as a barrier against competitive imports. Not alone this: the states cannot easily even oppose imports of unhealthy foods! The United States has accused the European Union of illegality because it didn’t want their meat full of hormones....
What will the final result of “freedom of trade to power” be? The optimistic scenarios are two. The first sees the countries of the South involved in increasing significantly their own food production, which has become more competitive. The second is that the growth in international trade will permit the deficit countries of the South to produce and export enough industrial goods (thanks to their “comparative advantages”: read “cheap manpower”) to purchase considerable quantities of foodstuffs, at a lower price with respect to production in loco. It is not however certain that, having thus assured the food security of the LIFCD countries, food will really reach the rural and city “insecure people”, permitting individual food security.
A completely opposite idea on the future of free trade is that presented by some “alternatives”, like the scientist Vandana Shiva and many peasant leaders of the Third World: “Food security is based on a delicate balance: the prices of merchandise must not be so high as to penalize the social sectors of weakest purchasers, but they must not be so low as to render production unreasonable for the country’s farmers. Food is a consumer good like any other. It is only by participating in the production of food that many inhabitants of the poor countries manage to earn the right to food. Structural adjustment and the measures of trade liberalization can create famine and shortage because they allow the free entry into every country of low-cost food and they ruin the peasants. Low prices of foodstuffs can be good for societies that almost have no farmers any more, but in mainly peasant economies they destroy local production”.
We should moreover not underestimate the energy-environmental cost of transport over long distances: merchandise across the oceans, or meat in aeroplanes!
Food aid, false angels
Who has not felt one time or another the “urge” to go to places of famine to help the distribution of food aid? A direct way of feeling useful: preventing death by starvation in the immediate .... It is obvious that in cases of emergency - war, drought, refugees - food assistance is absolutely necessary and prevents disasters.
Hunger in a well-defined situation is a problem that must regard everyone. But the aid must be given in such a way that it does not prejudice, but rather promotes, future possibilities of cultivating in loco.
It hasn’t always been like this. Food assistance, grown seven times over starting from the 1970s, also due to continuous crises, wars and famines, has contributed to destroying local agriculture. The grain and rice, often surpluses of the North, to be got rid of, which arrived as a “gift” were resold on the market at lower prices that those that could guarantee survival to the local peasant sellers.
The most generous year for food assistance was 1988: 4 billion dollars. But during the 1980s and 1990s the food aid programmes were amputated: from the 17 million tons in 1992-93 to only 9 million in 1994-95. And yet the emergency situations were even more numerous. It was not just the politics of the richer countries (who cut all interventions of support of development): it was understood that often the assistance was just an intervention without any meaning.
The objectives for the future are rapid, sufficient aid, directed at the target (children and women in the first place) and able to make of food aid a support vehicle.
Moreover the food aid, brought by the UN, by the European Union and by the NGOs, should favour “triangular” food aid (purchasing food in the bordering countries whose agriculture is thus assisted); provide together with the food the seeds for the following season; involve the “assisted” in the recovery of agriculture. “Today give us seeds together with food; next season we will feed the whole province” so said a Rwandese village head at the World Food Programme.
Agriculture: off target
To invest in agriculture also requires sums of money, public investments. But the agricultural sector has lost ground as a priority for development. In 1988 agricultural support absorbed 19% of total assistance; in 1993 only 10%.
Probably the greatest political error between the 1960s and the 1980s was the inattention for agriculture and the rural world which did not receive sufficient investments, research and development activities, creation of infrastructures, discipline of prices in the various phases of production and marketing. How can we therefore be amazed about the low agricultural yield and the increase in rural poverty!
Even the development cooperation activities did not tip their scales in favour of agriculture: international aid to the sector went from 16 billion dollars in 1988 to less than 10 billion in 1994.
* Causes of global insecurity
Why are the reserves in red?
The dramatically low level of the world cereal reserves (48 days, well below the danger level of 60 days) is such as to render the world vulnerable to a possible serious food crisis in some region and it has considerable repercussions on prices (in 1996 cereals cost 50% more than in 1994). The decline in reserves means that what was taken - consumption - was superior to production. Is this perhaps the first sign that a productive ceiling has been reached and that the era of global insecurity begins precisely in the age when it was thought that even local and individual insecurity would be overcome?
Actually, the World Watch Institute (WWI) stresses, the most immediate cause of the decline of resources was, plainly, the atmospheric conditions of 1995 which drastically reduced the harvests in the USA, in Europe, in the Ukraine and generally in the former Soviet Union, therefore in the great producing countries.
The reconstitution of the reserves will thus be a planetary test-bed of food security. The emergency does exist, so much so that the European Union has decided to put back into production 10% of the land that the reform of agricultural politics had destined for rest. Looking to the future, the WWI is certain that it will not be easy to eliminate the deficit and also cover the growth of the world population bringing the reserves back to 60 days, for a volume of 1,836 billion tons. Impossible it is not, it says, but seeing the agricultural stagnation underway since 1990 public efforts will be required together with favourable conditions.
Also because the number of food importing countries is growing and demand for cereals is “booming” in Asia. China, for example, the great rural country undergoing tumultuous industrialization, in 1994 was an exporter of cereals, in 1995 it became the second world importer after Japan. The cities and industries are taking land and water from agriculture; the new consumer models of the Chinese city-dwellers aim at meat (pork and poultry, as well as eggs) and at beer, and for both one and the other more and more cereals are used, both local and imported.
It is true that Europe and the United States, producers of food surpluses, have voluntarily reduced the surfaces cultivated: by 10% in Europe, and by 14 million hectares in the USA. But it would not be sufficient to put these areas back into production; many of them are moreover damaged by overexploitation of previous years. As regards the other areas of the planet, FAO admits that to extend the agricultural frontier even further has ecological risks and limits: the land that is most suited to agriculture is already cultivated, the availability of water is in rapid decline, the forests are already disappearing at the rate of 15 million hectares per year and yet they are vital for the atmosphere, and for about a billion people who derive their means of subsistence from them.
Therefore, especially in certain areas, according to the experts, the increase in agricultural production and the reconstitution of food reserves could come above all from a better productivity of the lands already being cultivated. But the population growth is added to a deteriorated state of the resources. It will be increasingly more difficult to reconstitute the reserves because the loss of surface layers of the land due to erosion has further reduced productivity of arable land by a third.
//CARTOON//
A HAMBURGER COSTS 5M2 OF AMAZON FOREST
For their part the crops seem to be tired with keeping up with increasingly concentrated chemical fertilizers, and they are less charmed by them than in the past. As regards water, it is increasingly courted by the various economic sectors and by the increase of well-being and waste. Not only this: the farmers see waves of increasingly intense heat arrive because the climate has become more extreme, with rains concentrated into short periods and drought for the rest of the year. And in certain areas, especially in Africa and Asia, a few centimetres of rain mark the borderline between hunger and a sufficient harvest.
Fertilizers: no longer irresistible
From 1984 to 1993 world production of cereals increased only by 9%, equal to 1% per year, that is to say, less than half the average increase registered in the previous 34 years. Even the Institute of Research on Rice (IRRI) noted that after 20 years of growth of productivity, this began slowing down even in the experimental plots in South East Asia; in some cases, decreasing even by 15%. IRRI continues to develop new varieties of rice, but up to now nobody has managed to reverse the tendency, and meanwhile the demand for rice grows. The fact is, the WWI explains, that production of cereals per hectare is a natural process based on photosynthesis for converting solar energy into biochemical energy and, like all natural processes, it can be altered by man, but it is subject to biological limits. They have been successfully overcome in the last decades, but it won’t be possible to go on like this in the long term: the factor that permitted the increase in yield staring from the 1950s was the increasingly widespread use of fertilizers, indeed the synergetic action between the use of fertilizers and varieties of cereals suitable for responding to them. But after 1984 the crops decreased their response, to such an extent that to add other fertilizer became anti-economic. The consumption of fertilizers indeed decreased by 12%, especially in the former Soviet Union, but not only there.
It is likely that the use of fertilizers for many years hid the negative effects on agricultural production of soil erosion, of air pollution, of water saturation and salinization of the land and other forms of deterioration.
Food models that are not extensible
The Constitution of the Italian Republic often indicates health as a fundamental right of the individual and an interest of the community. A right that is violated many times for reasons of profit, until it produces situations that are incredible because of their cynicism: like the case of the “mad cow disease”, that within a few weeks caused the decline by 30% of consumption of beef in Italy. What better paradigm of the craziness of intensive breeding, far from the minimum well-being for the fenced-in animals and far from an effective social advantage for the consumers?
The intensive breeding farms typical of the industrialized countries involve huge energy and water consumption and considerable environmental pollution (so much so that the energy they require is greater than the food produced) to convert into unhealthy meat an enormous amount of cereals, soya and oily seeds that could often be destined directly to human consumption; as a percentage of the total, 70% in the USA and 57% in Europe (while in the countries of the South of the world the percentage is reversed). It is not impossible to think of competition between “feed” and “food” - feed for animals and food for humans: in some LIFDC countries, where food security is very far away, who owns land and decisional leverage prefers to produce “feed” to export it to the animals of the European and USA stalls rather than destine the land to local consumption: the fact is that the poor have less purchase power than beef... The competition between “feed” and “food” could become even more direct and determine an increase in the prices of cereals.
FAO, that has always aimed at the increase of animal production in underdeveloped countries acknowledges that increasing meat production causes environmental deterioration. Often pastures are opened at the cost of the forests; and in any case they are already super-exploited, for example in the Sahel where they worsen desertification. In India, the country of the sacred cows, where 15% of the world cattle population pastures, too little fodder is produced, and the cattle - moreover thin and unproductive, except for work in the fields - contribute to the deterioration of the land and to deforestation.
If everyone wished to adopt a food regime like that of the United States, three times the cereals currently produced in the world would not be sufficient.
Furthermore, even in the Third World the middle and middle-high classes are approaching the western models of high consumption of meat and animal products. In countries that are weak from the agroindustrial point of view, this involves on the one hand an increase of “feed”-cereals (to feed intensive breeding farms), on the other the destination of further land to breeding. The fact is that, as the international magazine Ecologist explains well, “good quality land, if used for the cultivation of edible roots, legumes, cereals and vegetables, can have a protein yield up to ten times higher than that obtainable if used for cattle breeding.”
(Cf. report on breeding)
Chips against potatoes and hormones against health
Food that doesn’t nourish any more than the plastic that usually contains it; junk food ready and packaged that is all the rage for meals and refreshments (snacks, drinks, sweets). They are produced with “false” and refined substances, or they have lost every nutritional value during their transformation, or they contain additives, as well as costing a lot in terms of energy and in the production of waste. Enormous the business of the false foods, or drinks: for example the Americans spend in Coca Cola in a year the equivalent of the public spending of Bangladesh. Whole multinationals have based their fortunes on junk food, which is increasingly spreading even among the urban sectors of the LIFDC countries.
Little nutritional value also for rice, wheat and maize produced with high yield varieties, spread by the Green Revolution: they usually have a low content of minerals and vitamins; because the cereals have replaced the local fruit, vegetables and legumes that traditionally provided these essential substances, the food of many people in the developing countries is now dangerously poor in iron, zinc, vitamin A and other micronutrients. Together with a growth in the quantity of food consumed, there is an increase in the number of those who are suffering from mineral and vitamin deficiencies which are debilitating for the body and for the mind.
But all this is nothing with respect to the health risks contained in many animal and vegetable foods. The apple with pesticides and the meat of the “mad cow” are in good company. Hormonized, antibioticized, swollen, cholesterol-filled meats; fruit, vegetables and cereals soaked in pesticides that are often forbidden but used above all in the Third World, thanks to a lack of controls.
Italy in particular is victim of huge intertwining between organized crime and clandestine traffic of highly forbidden and highly used chemical and hormonal substances. The hormones Mafia is a reality. But all agroindustrial systems seem to have become vulnerable under the profile of food security.
//BOX// p. 24-25
Trade is not free: embargoes and hunger
The opposite to absolute freedom of trade are the total blocks on every import and export given by a country: the embargoes.
The United States, masters of free trade, are relentless in imposing unilateral blockages with various pretexts: that of Cuba has lasted since 1962, that of Vietnam lasted decades, recent are the embargoes on Iran and the Lebanon, threatened that of Sudan. And dominated by the United States is also the embargo imposed in far-off 1990 on Iraq that every day causes the deaths of thousands of children and adults from hunger and illness. No violation of human rights by a dictator - after all in good company at world level - can justify the assassination through hunger of a civilian population.
The absurd is that, while we pretend to weep over the 800 million of starving, we prevent others from feeding themselves, even if by exporting oil.
//BOX//
If all the inhabitants of the planet took it into their heads to eat even only half of the meat eaten in Europe and the United States, five planets would not be sufficient to feed the human beings.
Page 26
The situation for the future
A few sums
The sums must be done with the 841 million starving stomachs of today and with the three billion new stomachs that will arrive between now and 2030, when the planet will have reached 8.7 billion. To feed everyone, it would be necessary between now and then, to increase food production by over 75%. All this with an agricultural surface per inhabitant that has been reduced by now to 0.25 hectares.
That is what would be needed; but what is the outlook? According to the study “Agriculture towards 2010” of FAO, if measures are not adopted to reverse the current tendency, in 2010 the people affected by chronic undernourishment could still be 680 million (12% of the world population), of which 300 million in Sub-Saharan Africa. The production of cereals will continue to grow, but not that per head, estimable in 326 kg in 2010. The developed countries especially will slow down their rhythm: they already amply satisfy their own food needs (even if their use of cereals per head is of 635 kg, and their inhabitants which are 20% of the world population, total 46% of world consumption).
The “developing” countries, traditional exporters of merchandise and animals, according to the forecasts will become net importers of foodstuffs. In fact more than their production per head, they will increase their still limited consumption: both because of the population increase and the greater use of cereals as nourishment for animals, which will increase in the percentage of from 17% (about 160 million tons) to 22% of the total. In the underdeveloped countries the consumption of meat will in fact increase - especially pork and poultry: from 10.5 kg per head of 1969-71 to 16.4 of 1988-90 to 25 of 2010. An average that is however far from the 80-100 kg that characterizes the western world, where in fact animal production will stagnate. At a lower rate than the population increase, there will be a rise in the production of tuber and root vegetables, so important in the rural diet especially in Africa. The production and consumption per head of legumes, essential source of vegetable proteins, will remain stable.
Many countries of the South will seek the foreign currency necessary for importing cereals in the export of manufactured goods, or of the traditional “colonial” varieties: cotton, coffee, tobacco, bananas, etc. The trend of these cannot however be judged optimistically, either in quantity or in value.
FAO has calculated that 19 countries could not manage to produce enough food even by applying western agricultural standards that increase yields. Some of them are able to import the food necessary, others are the poorest countries on the earth (for example, Bangladesh or Rwanda). Some countries still have great reserves of arable land that could be used in the future (this is the case of Angola or of Brazil), while others have practically no reserves, like Tunisia and Burundi.
Negative are the prospects for Sub-Saharan Africa, the only area to have suffered from a food decline in the last 30 years, where food availability will grow little or not at all, unless measures are taken to protect and relaunch the agricultural sector.
On the other hand the 450 million inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa are forced to share a quantity of resources equal to those consumed by 10 million Belgians .... The result is that in Africa the gap between production and demand of cereals could triplicate by 2010, the International Food Policy Research Institute adds; and it is unlikely that the region will have the capacity to pay increased food imports or that food aid can cover the lack, unless things change.
Some hope
The increase, in absolute and no longer per head value of world production will depend according to FAO on higher yields, on more intensive production (while however caring for the environment) and on the expansion of the areas cultivated: without however further deforestation or use of marginal lands. In the less developed countries, these will pass from the 760 million hectares of 1995 to the 850 forecast for 2010, which will also be exploited more intensively. The quantity of fertilizers used will be doubled: from 37 million of the early ‘90s to 80 of 2010. The urgency to increase food production will translate into a greater need of water to be destined to agriculture, with problematic consequences where it is already scarce (Africa and part of Asia).
A positive factor is the slowing up of the population growth which, it is expected, should become stable around 2050.
To make the accounts balance means to feed everyone without cutting the ground and the Earth out from under ones feet with unsustainable agricultural production. There are those who entrust great hope to the choice of high yield and more resistant food plants, to the possibility of increasing yield, to “fantafeeding” with substances synthesized in the laboratory.
But the world must be fed in the next decades: and for then, technology will not yet have invented how to create a steak from oil, or how to cultivate the seas, in an energetically and economically sustainable way and one that is accessible to everyone.
Some doubts
The productive scenario as foreseen and proposed is however partial: it is based on the current characteristics of the food production and consumption model. To fight food insecurity we must defeat the economic, social, agroecological and political causes that are common to all sectors of production and consumption; a profound distributive injustice, lack of sense of limit.
Then the threat of overheating of the world hangs over the head and stomach of everyone: the possible 0.3 degrees increase every year in the next century would render even more difficult the task of increasing food production. Agriculture would be amongst the sectors most affected, the rain system would be disturbed, a phenomenon that is moreover already under way.
The fact is, the World Watch Institute sustains, that the “channel of new farm technology is not dried up, but the flow is reduced to a trickle of water. (...) On various sides it is observed that there is great confidence in biotechnology, as a means for improving in an extraordinary manner the food prospects, but this is a panacea. The conclusions of a conference in which important agronomists took part were thus summarized: “Over the next 25 years, the main way to improve food prospects and breeding will be represented by the improvement of conventional technologies”. No revolution is in site therefore.
As regards fish, the decline in availability per head (which is now at 19 kg but will only be 11 in 2030), can be compensated only by aquaculture; but in that case the fish in the nurseries must be fed, with other fish or with cereals. The same for meat: the pressure on pastures is at its maximum, and only the number of animals reared in stalls can increase. But again they must be fed cereals. To stay in line with the increase in population as regards meat and fish a annual quantity of cereals equal to their annual increase needs to be invested. But then we would have less cereals than necessary for direct human consumption.
To extend the areas cultivated in an economic and sustainable way seems to be very difficult, as is demonstrated by the United States and Soviet experiences of the last decades on unsuitable and fragile soil that rapidly declined.
Here the carrying capacity comes into play, that is the capacity of load of a territory with respect to the persons who inhabit it.
//BOX// p. 27
“The result is that throughout the world we can no longer count on agriculture to feed all those who will be born. It will be impossible to reach an equilibrium between food availability and population, without resorting to family planning and changes in the choices of food consumption” (World Watch Institute)
//TABLE//
UNDERNOURISHED POPULATION
|
|
1969-1971 |
1990-1992 |
2010 |
|
Inhabitants |
920 |
840 |
680 |
|
Percentage of total |
35 |
20 |
12 |
Page 28
What to do
//BOX//
Food, agriculture and rural development to assure food security at individual, local, national and international level
Food insecurity derives from the unjust and not democratic conditions that control the distribution of productive resources: earth, credit, information, measures of encouragement of production. Consequently, production is polarized in a limited number of nations and it is concentrated in the hands of an increasingly restricted number of intensive producers, to the detriment of other regions, of the small producers and of food security at local level.
Food security is an essential right of the human being. Each and everyone must see their access to healthy and nourishing food as guaranteed. To guarantee the right to independence, food security must be, as far as possible, based on local self-production.
(From the Treaty of the Non-governmental Organizations participating in the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro 1992)
The premise: Sustainable agriculture and rural development (SARD)
To increase production while at the same time protecting the resources on which it depends: this is the objective of the so-called “sustainable agriculture”, determined by the Earth Summit of Rio de Janeiro in 1992 in programme 21. The importance is stressed of preserving and improving the productivity of the best lands to be able to sustain a population on the increase, but also of preserving and reclaiming the less good quality lands and of avoiding the further invasion of marginal lands.
There are then proposals of measures of intervention in 12 sectors, among which agrarian reform, access to funding, trading at fair prices.
The populations must be educated in the protection of the land, resorting to the most efficacious traditional and modern techniques. Genetic resources must be preserved with greater care and their fruits must be divided between providers and users. Finally the biological struggle and integrated systems for the nourishment of plants must be defended.
Using this as a basis FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) has established some requisites for sustainable agriculture and rural development (SARD), some alternative strategies and some commitments. The requisites: a) political-economic-commercial interventions at government level (first and foremost agrarian reform and agricultural development programmes), at rural community level, at the level of regions, of productive units, to arrive at the consumer of foodstuffs; b) agronomic activities and those for preserving land, water, biological, trees and forests, fish resources; c) activities of support with sustainable external factors in the field of the protection of harvests and of technological transfer. The strategies foresee, depending on the cases: a) intensification of production with more efficient use of external productive factors, but in the sustainable form of integrated biological struggle; b) the improvement of productivity with recourse to mixed crops that reduce the need for chemical inputs; c) the combination between agricultural activities and other sources of rural income; d) extensive systems in the marginal areas, where low habitation density and great “delicacy” with respect to natural resources are required .
FAO considers that the increase of yield per hectare and the reduction of losses in the field and after the harvest are achievable objectives. They should be the object of a new “green revolution”, that better than the first would use available technology making it compatible with the environment and making it available also to “insecure” peasants.
However, many movements that work in the sector of food security are sceptical in this regard: if the paradigm of development is not turned upside down, if the rules of the commercial game are not changed, food will remain a reality.
And on this basis they considered insufficient and often contradictory the commitments assumed by the governments of the world at the end of the World Food Summit (November 1996) on the following points:
1. Guarantee a political, social and economic environment that permits the reduction of poverty and lasting peace, based on the full participation of men and women, conditions necessary for achieving food security for a growing population.
2. Implement policies for the reduction of poverty and for improving access of everyone to healthy and sufficient food.
3. In crisis situations, guarantee necessary provisions while however promoting the reconstruction of the local capacity to satisfy future needs.
4. Pursue sustainable nourishment, agriculture and rural development that encourage the supply of sufficient food for individuals, nations, regions and at global level.
5. Assure that the trade of foodstuffs, and trade policies increase food security.
6. Invest in human resources, in rural development, in food systems.
//BOX// page 29
It’s a lot easier to say than to do
//BOX//
Everything is grand. Relieve poverty, permit the peasants to produce more and live better in their rural environment, avoid wars and disasters. But can we believe it ? Were these not the same commitments made by all the states in vain in 1974?
And so?
Among the social movements that deal with food security, pursuing food justice, there is a certain agreement on three main points:
a) produce food of good quality in sufficient quantities for everyone;
b) guarantee a level of life and work suitable to rural populations;
c) respect and maintain the environmental equilibrium now and for future generations.
This far nothing very different from the commitments announced by the governments. But when one arrives at the principles and instruments that should guarantee these objectives, the differences are seen.
These are in fact the principles for food security understood as “qualitative and quantitative security” of “certain access to the food necessary for an active and dignified life”.
a) Recognize the many factors of poverty (even injustice in the distribution of income and of productive factors and the exploitation of work) that are at the basis of individual food insecurity. Then criticize the unjust choices of governments, traditional resistance with respect to agrarian reform and protection of (even industrial) work, as also the overwhelming desire for profit of businesses, the research of paradises in which to invest while exploiting work and environment.
This also means criticising the privatization of former collective lands and the other corollaries of the neoliberal and capitalistic system: such as the reduction of biodiversity and the theft of peasant knowledge by the multinationals without any remuneration.
b) Aim at lasting rural development (services, infrastructures, energy, activities of self-managed and extra-agricultural transformation) rather than just productive development. Too often, the idea of lasting rural development is only used for the so-called marginal areas, while those that are highly productive can continue to pursue the sole aim of production even if this means marginalizing sectors of the population and forcing them to emigrate to the cities.
c) Fully acknowledge the different functions carried out by agriculture (not only in the marginal areas) with its “existential” role of preserving life, rural settlements, environmental and even climatic equilibrium. Especially in the South of the world, no one is paid for these services, indeed agrarian systems are reduced to simple systems of food production.
d) Focus on the real actors of food production, starting from the most marginalized: women, peasants, native people and labourers, while the main attention is usually dedicated to the large farmers and multinationals, relegating the others to a mostly assistant role. Except for then repressing them when their collective, peasant, native peoples and labourer organizations revolt.
e) Favour - protect if necessary - local production with respect to international trade. Powerful interests, and commercial agreements in course, drive in the opposite direction. It is believed that “commerce generates economic efficiency deriving from the comparative advantages and stimulates economic growth, fundamental for improving food security”. The countries of the North define food security as a “combination between internal production and international trade”, without underlining the primary role of the former and of food sovereignty (except for then attempting protectionisms in practice). How could the protection of peasant economies from the invasion of low-price (but not lower production cost) products be assured? On the opposite side, we continue to tolerate that the block of international trade reduces entire populations to starvation, without any worry about food security.
f) Put agriculture, so long a Cinderella, back to the centre of priorities and review the city-countryside relationship. At the moment, even the most miserable life in the city offers some chances more than those of the remote rural areas, that are abandoned, without infrastructures and divested of their products without any notable compensation. Not alone this: the city, the cement and industry have increasingly covered arable land: the phenomenon must be reversed.
g) Make precise choices not only on “how to produce” but also on “what to produce”. Not all production is ecologically sustainable, starting from that of animals. It appears however that the choice to produce more meat and more fish is not yet being questioned, even while its low energy yield is acknowledged.
//BOX// page 30
If the choice were between using a technology that destroys the very bases of production, or returning to the tiring hoe and the very low yield per hectare, we would be in a bad way. In fact we cannot expect heroism from the peasants.
Recipe for food security
1. Low-income agricultural countries.
Peasant and rural populations
The following is what the movements for food security ask governments and technical bodies, with the consideration that all programmes and projects against hunger focus on farmers.
1) Guarantee peasants and native peoples, and in particular women who are the main actresses of food security, access to the factors of production:
a) land. Agrarian reform with subtraction of the land from local and multinational landowners, overcoming of local traditions such as caste and “slavery”, cooperative organization, preservation of communal lands.
b) water. Greater saving and better distribution.
c) biodiversity and local varieties. To protect, recover and relaunch as a sustainable example of productivity.
d) credit. In order not to fall into perennial debt that condemns peasant families to absolute insecurity.
e) technology. Mechanization and other productive inputs for a remunerative and sufficient production that preserves basic resources such as the soil, water, environment and increases the well-being of the peasants with the increase of productivity per head and the reduction of the labour in work, without creating more unemployed in the countryside. “Appropriate technology” can mean: reduced scale of production, necessity of limited sums of money for every job created, relatively simple and cheap equipment, relatively high work intensity.
2) Acknowledge “farmers’ and indigenous peoples’ rights” to the control of their traditional knowledge and their genetic patrimony granting them the right to remuneration in the case of industrial exploitation of local knowledge.
3) Sustain the struggle against desertification and deforestation conducted by farmers, movements and organizations.
4) Promote and increase production of basic foods: cereals including traditional ones, legumes, vegetables, fruit; promote the production of alternative sources of protein (e.g. seaweed).
5) Develop, even in the so-called “marginal” areas, agricultural systems that are diversified, holistic, at low input level (from Integrated Pest Management and such to biological agriculture) which are able to: a) preserve natural resources, forests and biodiversity, b) guarantee a high level of food self-sufficiency to rural families, c) guarantee them sufficient buying power to cover their basic needs for a dignified life. Hence the importance of agricultural research and of the spreading of knowledge, integrating it with the recovery of traditional and sustainable techniques.
6) Acknowledge that in most contexts peasant families cannot live only from what the field yields: it is necessary to promote a summation of the sources of income, contributing to the creation of extra-agricultural activities in the food, secondary and service sectors.
7) Recognize remunerative prices for agricultural products and favour the rural systems of transformation in the countryside of agricultural products into food products, so that the value added remains in the countryside; penalize the profits of intermediaries favouring more direct relations between consumers and producers.
8) Destine resources to lasting rural development creating infrastructures (water, energy, social, transport), services (education, communications, sports, culture) and extra-agricultural employment that: a) reduce the hardship of material life in the countryside, especially that of women; b) limit the destruction caused also by the absence of energy alternatives to wood for burning, substituting it by recurring to alternative energy; c) render rural areas “attractive”, against the sensation of isolation which is one of the reasons, together with material poverty, for driving young people to urban migration; d) give job and life opportunities to currently underemployed populations; e) locally produce sustainable agricultural inputs.
9) Obtain respect of the international agreements and the laws on work with regard to the 150 million rural labourers so that their buying power may be sufficient.
//BOX// page 31
“Land, a roof, work in dignified conditions, bread health, education, equilibrium with the environment, independence, freedom, justice, peace were the flags of our revolution, on 1 January 1994”; they are the reasons for the Zapatist revolt in Mexico; and they are also a good summary of the objectives of lasting rural development.
//BOX //page 32
BIOLOGICAL AGRICULTURE DOES NOT STARVE!
Agriculture without pesticides is not a whim of the rich. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (FIDOAM) - 530 organizations members in 100 countries - has members above all in poor and peasant areas of the South of the world: “Natural agriculture can produce food in sufficient quantities and of good quality, assuring the protection of the environment and of biodiversity. It can permit effective, lasting food security for everyone”
ISFOAM Conference, August 1996
//BOX//
“he peasants are a part of the solution of the hunger problem; we want therefore our voices to be heard” (Organization of the Campesinos Unorca, Mexico)
//BOX//
There is too little land for the peasants? Take it from the big landowners and the cities, not from the forest.
//CARTOON//
NO TIME TO LOSE!!
Non-peasant populations
1) Reduction of poverty through the increase of the power of the labourers, of the industrial and service workers is the condicio sine qua non of the food security of those who do not work their own land. This implies the struggle against the exploitation of the work force and the reform of the structural adjustment programmes that take services and work from the poor.
2) Control of the quality, especially of locally produced industrial foods, of imported foodstuffs and of chemical agricultural inputs.
3) Control of the final prices of food products that must be accessible to everyone.
4) Block on the spreading of consumer models based on (harmful or useless) junk-food or those of low energy content (animal proteins).
5) Encouragement of city orchards already developed in many cities.
6) Discourage artificial milk feeding.
7) Promote family planning - less children equals less tired women and more food for all - without this becoming an excuse not to face the problem of social justice.
Recipe for food security
2. Industrialized countries and high purchasing power
Produce the right food
1) Revolutionize agriculture with high intensity of capital, water, energy and consumption of the territory and of the natural productive factors is an imperative of intergenerational and international sustainability and justice. According to the study “sustainable Germany”, within 15 years German agriculture - and by extension that of the other western countries - should eliminate synthetic fertilizers and pesticides! Not to return to the low yields and great labour of many years ago, but rather by replacing the unsustainable inputs with: natural fertilizers (manure and green compost, that can be found in quantity with special systems of recycling the organic part of waste) “green” pesticides and biological struggle; crops systems with rotation and productive associations that consent greater control over the illnesses of plants.
2) Systems of breeding without land must be recognized as unsustainable, and converted.
3) The territory and agricultural soil must be protected with careful territorial planning.
4) The production of quality and transformation by part of the small farmers or cooperatives must be encouraged and better connected with the city market outlets thus obtaining a double effect: creation of jobs in rural areas, correct remuneration of the product, eliminating too many intermediaries, availability of healthy and accessibly priced food.
5) Check the healthiness of foods is a security imperative.
6) Run campaigns of education in “sure” and sustainable food consumption.
//BOX// page 34-5
LADAKH: WHERE ECOLOGY DOES NOT MEAN HUNGER
The region of Ladakh (40,000 square kilometres) is situated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It has just over 100,000 inhabitants who live at an average height of 3,500 metres. It is a desert at a high level, because the rainfall is only 10cm per year. And yet the families of Ladakh are self-sufficient, except for tea, salt and “luxury” goods. Moreover they produce surplus goods for marketing. All told their level of life is quite high. How do they do it? The land plots are usually 1 or two hectares, subdivided into small terraced fields, placed wherever there is enough water to irrigate. The water in the canals is subdivided between the inhabitants of the villages according to carefully controlled regulations. Actually the division of the water - the most precious resource - was possible only due to a very high level of social cohesion. The main crop is malt, but there is also wheat, peas, tubers, potatoes, fruit; willows and poplars provide material for building and for fodder. Traction is by animal, and the methods of cultivation and harvesting maintain the natural richness of the soil. The great secret is the constant recycling of nourishing substances. In the water that comes from the melting glaciers there are mineral salts and substances. The land is moreover fertilized with the waste water from the human settlements. Normally animal manure is not spread directly on the land, but preserved as fuel for the stoves. But the ashes from these are mixed with the waste water and thus provide potassium and phosphate. Animal urine that passes to the soil during grazing or after the cleaning of the stalls provides the necessary nitrogen, as the pulse vegetables also do. Over the centuries different types of farming have been chosen on the basis of characteristics that best suit the environment: rapid growth, early ripening with high yield. Thanks to the high altitude, moreover, the harvest is exceptionally immune from harmful insects and illnesses.
The production on average reaches three tons per hectare but some fields reach ten, exceeding even yields obtained with extensive use of chemical inputs.
Only local animals are bred: these give little milk but are well suited to the climate.
Apart from the integrated system where nothing is wasted, the secret of the people of Ladakh is the control of the population that derives from their awareness of the natural limits of their resources.
Social cooperation has also always been an essential factor. The instruments, labour and draught animals are usually shared between groups of houses, as is the task of bringing the animals to higher pastures.
In spite of the brevity of the period when it is possible to farm, Ladakh remains distant from the levels of agricultural desperation common to many less favoured regions of the world.
Recipe of global food security
1) Subordinate to food security and to even material well-being of local populations the freedom of trade and the activities of the large national and transnational firms. Food trade must be at the service of the small producers and of consumers and not the opposite. It is therefore essential that there should be a “clause for food security” which if necessary puts a stop to commercial free trade.
2) Cancel the foreign debt of the countries that are most at risk of food insecurity.
3) Reinvent the structural adjustment programmes of the international financial institutions that: a) impoverish the sectors that already have low food purchasing power; b) demand that the peasants must compete with a foreign competition that is too “assisted” to be beatable.
4) Stop the diffusion of unsustainable food production: intensive breeding separated from agriculture, extension of the agricultural frontier to the detriment of forests for single crop production, vast breeding farms or settlements of landless (farmland must be taken from the large landowners, not from the forests!); aquaculture and trade agreements that permit destructive fishing.
5) Internalize the ecological costs of production, a measure that would revolutionize the relationship of price between the foodstuffs of the peasants of the South and those of the great agroindustrial companies.
6) Direct food aid to the recovery of local production in the case of disasters or wars.
7) Increase budgets in favour of agricultural programmes.
8) Not starve the people with embargoes imposed by single countries or by the United Nations.
9) Put a stop to Cinderella-agriculture: increase investments in the agricultural sector including with regard to international cooperation.
We and our food incivility
Let us dispassionately analyze our food day and reflect on some alterations. Among others:
1) Consumption of sustainable farm products and direct purchase.
The food from glasshouses or out of season and meat are almost completely unsustainable for the environment and for our health. Do biological foods cost less? We can compensate by renouncing useless foods because they are in excess and not nourishing. And by trying to get supplies directly from the producers, perhaps even cooperatives.
2) Food security does not rhyme with meat. Let us suppose that in 2030 the harvest of cereals at world level will be equal to 2.2 billion tons, corresponding to annual growth of 12 million. Such a quantity of cereals according to the WWI could be sufficient for populations of various sizes, depending on their consumption levels. If these were equal to that of the United States - 800 kilograms per head per year, naturally mostly consumed by animals in stable breeding - such a harvest would provide sustenance for 2.75 billion people, that is to say half of the current world population. At the level of Italian consumption - 400 kilograms per head per year - it would be sufficient for 5.5 billion inhabitants. But at the Indian consumption level - 200 kilograms - it would suffice for 11 billion people.
3) Damaging and energy-consuming industrial foods. They do not nourish (at the most they fill), they produce a lot of waste (their packaging), they increase the profits of the food multinationals and often the agroindustrials that produce them. Is it really impossible to reduce the consumption of industrial snacks and potato crisps?
4) Coffee and tropical foods. The solution here is easy: the channels of fair and solid trade, also called alternative trade, guarantee that you are not contributing to the hunger of the peasant of the Third World who produces them. Avoid tropical foodstuffs from multinationals, coming from plantations, with their low social-ecological level.
5) Energy saving. Excessive energy consumption (transport. electricity) affect the food security of the planet and, strange as it may seem, even that of the distant peasant who tries to draw food and subsistence from his field. Energy consumption is in fact connected to the production of glass-house gas that contributes to the overall heating of the atmosphere, and to the change of climate, with what results from it for world agricultural production and therefore world food security.
If we then try to imagine that there is a limit that must not be exceeded in the production of glass-house gas linked to almost all energy consumption (except for non fossil energy), we can deduce that we must reduce our share of consumption to permit the poor peasant to increase his: by labouring less (thanks to a farm machine) and producing more.
6) And who will farm? The times of farm cooperatives of young people who abandoned the cities seem to have ended. The rural exodus also seems to have slowed down, but those who work in the countryside as well as living there are increasingly less. But if sustainable agriculture requires more work to replace a part of the chemical inputs, who will provide it?
It would be easy to reply, as for all the other jobs that Europeans no longer want to do: the immigrants of the Third World. But it only seems fair and healthy, seeing the serious emerging problems of the North (unemployment, fall in income, etc.) that European consumers should return to sharing in the production of the food that they consume. Perhaps by finding biological farms that periodically need labour in exchange for some farm products.
//BOX// p. 35
As long as there are those who work hard to produce for others who only labour over paper, Gandhi and his exhortation to “produce at least part of what one consumes” will not be out of date.
A STORY
THE PRESIDENT WHO ATE MILLET AND THE COUNTRY OF THE HONEST
“Two meals a day and ten litres of drinking water for all the Burkinabé”: food security was the main objective of the revolution that between 1983 and 1987 crossed and woke up the Upper Volta. That country of the Sahel which had always been at the bottom of the world classifications of poverty became Burkina Faso, that is “country of the honest”, under the leadership of the young president Thomas Sankara. He was one of the very few figures in history who united a perfectly upright and completely strict personal behaviour - his income was modest and he owned no property - with a thinking and political practice that were holistic, inspired by social justice but also by the concept of natural limit, based on self-sufficiency and capable of speaking loudly against international predominance. It was not by chance that “Sankara the rebel” was killed in a coup d’état in 1987. Thus Burkina Faso returned to being a normal African country, better administrated by others because a clean revolution does not pass in vain.
Sankara anticipated strategies and practices that are now recognized as essential in the struggle for food security and the country continued partially to follow them, once the revolution was suppressed. First of all the idea of food self-sufficiency linked to the sovereignty and independence of the country. Up to then the food balance of the country, which depended on international charity, had been in deficit, also due to the import of cereals and fruit to nourish the limited well-off class and to produce beer. Sankara launched - not just in agriculture - the motto “Let us produce what we consume and consume what we produce”. Thus imports of exotic fruits (such as apples) were forbidden to promote local mangoes: the manufacture of beer from foreign cereals was forbidden (“all the Burkinabé must be fed, but there is no need for them to drink beer”). One of the great obstacles to the food security of the poor - competition between basic autoctonous food and imported cereals that created new consumer models in the city dwellers - was faced by proposing the recovery of local food traditions. Thus the president was the first to eat millet, typical cereal of the Sahel, rich in nutritional value but despised by the city-dwellers.
Naturally the commercial provisions were not sufficient. There was a need to improve the destinies of agriculture and of the rural areas. The revolution focused on the eternal forgotten ones, the peasants, that 85% of the Burkinabé population that worked and populated rural areas which for some time were subject to famines and drought. The peasants had to recover from a double exploitation: the international one that despised the raw materials, and the traditional one based on the customary heads of the villages, the chiefs: “The feudal organization of my country did not consent the development of the countryside nor a minimum of justice and material and moral well-being of the peasants. A few men, by birth, could control and distribute as they wished hundreds of square kilometres of land. The others just had to cultivate and pay. Their kingdom is about to end, with our revolution. From now on the paysan will have the security of his land. He will given it in trust by the state and he will be encouraged to enrich it, so that it remains with him. Before you enriched the land with effort, you planted trees, you spread manure and them after one or two years, when it was about to become productive, the chief arrived and said to you ‘now, go away’. The development of agriculture requires the security of possession over time” stated Sankara in 1985.
The priority of food security required investments in the rural areas to stop the desert, create social infrastructures (literacy and the health centres were at the centre of real “Command campaigns”, but even sports fields in the villages were considered an important objective). Desertification, that subtracted lands, was fought by involving the inhabitants of the countryside in three struggles: against the practice of extensive grazing (the goats ate down to the last twig), against fires and cutting trees for firewood. The peasants were instructed in lasting agricultural practices: natural fertilizing, crop rotation. Hundreds of small dikes were built and the food situation in Burkina began to improve. The role of women, great producers of food especially in Africa, was stressed and appreciated. “They are always the driving wheels, they are spare wheels in emergencies, and yet they are always counted for nothing”, thus spoke Sankara on 8 March 1985.
For such a poor country, to invest in the rural areas that produced food meant reorganizing the parasitic expenses of the cities and of the bureaucratic administration. “Up to now thousands of city managers have had more than millions of peasants “Sankara had said. The cuts in bureaucratic spending were drastic: the limousines of the high officials of the state were all sold (they all went around in Renault 5s), controls were made on the expenses for paper and electricity in the offices (including that of the president, where the air conditioning was forbidden), ministerial corruption was suppressed.
While the neighbouring countries began to accept the policies of austerity of the International Monetary Fund, Burkina found its own way: “we will impose our own austerity, that way it’s democratic”. Actually without structural adjustment the country managed to achieve the miracle of almost completely eliminating the public deficit and investing in the countryside. For rural Africa, still threatened by hunger, Thomas Sankara remains a symbol of self-development and honesty.
//BOX// page 36
DIRECT TRADING THAT WORKS
Brazil. At one end of the chain were the peasants of the Sem Terra (without land) Movement: although after much struggle they had managed to obtain a few hectares to farm, they continued to be exploited by the traders who purchased foodstuffs for very little money and with many transfers sold them expensively in the city. At the other end were the poor inhabitants of the city: their purchasing power was not sufficient to buy good quality products: the price was in fact swollen by the many transfers.
So, the cooperatives of the Sem Terra Movements began experiments of direct marketing in some regions of Brazil: a lorry of the cooperative of the former “landless” leaves twice a week and goes to the city squares.
If all the Brazilian peasants could adopt this system, the situation would be very different, and the city dwellers would eat much better! Hence the absolute necessity for the peasants to organize themselves into cooperatives to be able to have the means of transport and other structures necessary for the direct relationship with the final consumers.
//BOX//
HUNGER
SHARPENS URBAN INGENUITY
Or how to bring the countryside into the city with urban orchards. A report of the United Nations studies the “city dwellers” who have started farming tiny surfaces left free by the cement.
They go from the owner of the villa in the suburbs who grows carrots and not just flowers in his garden; to the inhabitant of the South American, African and Asian bidonville who raises small animals and cultivates vegetables in the little lanes of the “neighbourhood”.
The city is polluted and the food must grow contaminated? It may be so; but the families who survive thanks to 20 square metres of vegetable plot are increasingly numerous.
//BOX//
LA PAZ INVADED BY ANTS
Luca Colombo, il manifesto, 29.10.96
Remembering the siege of 1782, a month ago thousands of peasants, settlers and indigenous, among whom many women and children, entered the Bolivian capital of La Paz: it was 20 September last and the entrance lasted a number of days. They came by three different access roads to the capital and they came from various localities of the country. It was the goal of a march that started out at the end of August.
Having reached La Paz, in the Aymara, Quechua, Guaranì and Spanish languages, the leaders of the demonstrating groups addressed “los marchistas”: they said that the group would not disperse until the right of the peasants and of the indigenous peoples to administrate their own lands was acknowledged through the approval of the INRA law (Instituto Nacional para la Reforma Agraria). The leaders of the march are carrying out a difficult negotiation with the government. Arriving in La Paz they obtained the solidarity of the trade union organizations of the other categories of workers and of many citizens who contributed to the sustenance of the demonstrators (the health and food cover involve a great effort). The “march for the land, the territory and for dignity” is driving the Bolivian government to accelerate the time to arrive at producing the text of law destined to replace the Agrarian Reform of 1953.
Then the reform had formally even if not substantially put an end to large landowners. But since then a distribution of farmlands has crystallised whereby about 550 thousand peasants are owners of 4 million hectares as compared with 32 million hectares in the hands of 50 thousand “agricultural businessmen”, representing a consolidated economic and political power that is the dominant block even in Bolivia today.
The normalization that the government hopes to obtain through the INRA law aims at guaranteeing a compromise between the requests of indigenous peoples, small farmers and settlers on the one side, and agrozootechnical businessmen on the other. The former, through their respective confederations, jointly claim different and at times even conflictual (see indigenous and settlers) rights, but substantially homogeneous rights: the indigenous people want the acknowledgement, delimitation and entitlement of their traditional territories (in the meaning, confirmed by them, of land and biodiversity, with obvious implications regarding rights to genetic resources). The small farmers ask for exemption from paying taxes and the conclusion of the process of agrarian reform that brings to an end the entitling of the peasant ownership; the settlers of old and new date (responsible for the farming of virgin lands and relative creation of new settlements) are interested in the legalization of their property and they are above all worried by the clause of dispossession in the cases, provided for by the law, of “ecological damage” or of abandonment to deterioration of non cultivated plots.
Their social counterpart, the agricultural businessmen, sustain that the full ownership of the land in their possession today must be guaranteed even in order to assure any operation of buying and selling of it, mortgage or change in its destination of use; without blisters on their feet they have already managed to obtain from the government a softening with regard to tax imposition. Within this picture, other questions linked to environmental problems and to development also find space: the strong appeal for the conversion of the cultivation of coca, currently without great prospects for the farmers - the cocaleros are participating in the march - and the deforestation by the companies interested in the wood and by the large breeders, who often carry out their activity within the indigenous territories plundering them and destroying them. The thrust of the demonstrators is in fact also directed at contextualizing the INRA law within the dimension of a more extensive concept of rural development that includes within the question of the land, the achievement of local and national food security and the “sustainable” exploitation of the resources.
//PAGE 38//
In reading the first report published on the great theme of water, you will perhaps have noticed between one chapter and another, the figure of a woman, wrapped in the traditional Islamic dress. This was not just an “occasional” presence connected with the technical requirements of making up the pages, but an editorial solution that will accompany us in all the reports. In fact there will be many other personages whom we will present and who will be entrusted with the task of “guiding us” through the texts as they are gradually proposed. Ours will therefore be a discussion with a number of voices, and Shalima, the Iranian peasant woman, will be joined from time to time by: Jabrallah from Sudan, Felipe from Peru’, Mohandas from India and many others.
THE RECIPES OF CIVIL SOCIETY AGAINST HUNGER
The following is a summary of the proposals presented to the governments by 200 peasant organizations, cooperation groups, environmentalists, promoters of agroecology, in September 1996.
· Food security is a human right which must have precedence over macroeconomic and commercial questions.
· The current growth model generates exclusion and poverty in rural and urban areas; it is necessary to sustain a fair, lasting development based on participation.
· The organizations of farmers, labourers, peasants, cooperatives, rural women, must be encouraged and involved in the decisional processes regarding the food systems.
· Indigenous and traditional knowledge in the productive processes must be promoted and improved to assure a fair distribution of healthy food.
· Effective agrarian reforms must be sustained and applied.
· The structural adjustment programmes and foreign debt put food security in danger and must be renegotiated.
· Governments have the responsibility to face city malnutrition by promoting urban farming, the control of prices, assistance to vulnerable groups.
· Mother’s milk is a natural and vital resource for food security.
· Poverty, source of food insecurity, is a result of unequal distribution of wealth, of injustice in North-South relations, of the application of macro-economic policies unsuitable in the developing countries.
·Food security of the developing countries who import foods is threatened by fluctuations in the international market. It is necessary to aim at national food self-sufficiency as regards the basic foods, thus sustaining the producers.
· Access of the rural and urban populations to productive resources, including land, credit, technology and infrastructures, is fundamental for defeating hunger.
· Donors should respect the commitment to destine 0.7% of their Gross National Product to projects of cooperation in development.
· Free access to national and international food reserves is essential for food sovereignty.
· Agriculture and sustainable rural development (SARD) involve a change in the scientific paradigm. The development and diffusion of technologies must be redirected in that sense.
· The preservation and access to water resources is crucial also as regards their distribution between neighbouring countries.
· Genetic resources in agriculture are the result of thousands of years of peasant efforts and they cannot be privatized and covered by patents. Indigenous communities and peasants must have free access to them.
· Food cannot be used as a weapon. It is necessary to eliminate both unilateral and international embargoes which affect the food security of a country or of a community.
· The world liberalization of trade is not the solution to the food security problem and in many cases it threatens it. We ask governments to freeze further liberalization in the trade of foodstuffs. The Uruguay Round Agreement on agriculture must be renegotiated inserting a clause for food security that excludes all basic foodstuffs.
· To render operational such a clause, we propose the negotiation and adoption of a global Convention on food security, under the auspices of the United Nations.