Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

Source: Resurgence

A Rarámuri woman in Cochérare, Chihuahua shells corn from her harvest to make tortillas. (Photograph: David Lauer / Resurgence)

The globalisation of the food market has made food cheap, but who is benefiting?

by Timothy Wise

Cheap food causes hunger.

On its face, the statement makes no sense. If food is cheaper it’s more affordable and more people should be able to get an adequate diet. That is true for people who buy food, such as those living in cities. But it is quite obviously not true if you’re the one growing the food. You’re getting less for your crops, less for your work, less for your family to live on. That is as true for Vermont dairy farmers as it is for rice farmers in the Philippines. Dairy farmers today are getting prices for their milk that are well below their costs of production. They are putting less food on their own tables. And they are going out of business at an alarming rate. When the economic dust settles, this will leave us with fewer family farmers producing the dairy products most of us depend on.

This is the central contradiction of cheap food. Low agricultural prices cause hunger in the short term among farmers. And they cause food insecurity in the long term because they reduce both the number of farmers and the money they have to invest in producing more food. Read the full story

Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

A peasant group meets to discuss post-earthquake strategies for rebuilding agriculture. (Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra)

by Beverly Bell

We plant but we can’t produce or market. We plant but we have no food to eat. We want agriculture to improve so our country can live and so we peasants can live, too.
- Rilo Petit-homme, peasant organizer from St. Marc, Haiti

What would it take to transform Haiti’s economy such that its role in the global economy is no longer that of providing cheap labor for sweatshops? What would it take for hunger to no longer be the norm, for the country no longer to depend on imports and hand-outs, and for Port-au-Prince’s slums no longer to contain 85% of the city’s residents? What would it take for the hundreds of thousands left homeless by the earthquake to have a secure life, with income?

According to Haitian peasant organizations, at the core of the solutions is a commitment on the part of the government to support family agriculture, with policies to make the commitment a reality. Read the full story

Source: Basta!
Translation: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t

by Agnés Rousseaux
January 14, 2010

After GMO, nanotechnologies come uninvited onto our plates: nanofoods, treated with nanopesticides and contained in nanopackaging, are on the rise. At stake: colossal financial profits for manufacturers and environmental and health risks impossible to evaluate today. All in a complete and unbelievable absence of rules and controls.

Smart foods that adapt to the consumer’s tastes, clothing that repels water, materials that repair themselves, “intelligent dust” that discreetly records conversations … Welcome to the nanoworld! A universe where science tinkers with particles invisible to the microscope and piles up atoms on the scale of a nanometer, that is a billionth of a meter [1]. We are promised nanotechnologies will be the foundation of a third industrial revolution during the twenty-first century. Read the full story

Inversionistas corporativos encabezan la carrera por controlar tierras agrícolas en el extranjero

Fuente: GRAIN

Tierra labrada, por Joan Miró (1923-1924)

A mucha gente no le queda claro que los actores principales en el actual proceso de acaparamiento de tierras para producir alimentos de exportación no son los países o los gobiernos, sino las corporaciones. Demasiada atención se le presta a la participación de los Estados, como Arabia Saudita, China o Corea del Sur. La realidad es que aunque los gobiernos facilitan los acuerdos, las empresas privadas obtienen el control de la tierra. Y sus intereses, simplemente, no son los mismos que los de los gobiernos. Read the full story

Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

The article originally appeared in the Globalization and Sustainable Development Program of the Global Development And Environment Institute (at Tufts University) as part of its Feeding the Factory Farm project

Pigs are seen on a farm run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico on the outskirts of Xicaltepec in Mexico's Veracruz state, Monday, April 27, 2009. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)

by Timothy A. Wise and Betsy Rakocy

A common complaint about U.S. trade and agricultural policies is that they have favored the economically powerful while doing little for the average person.  Labor and citizen groups say the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gave unprecedented rights to multinational firms and investors at the expense of workers and communities.  Family farm groups charge that U.S. agricultural subsidies go disproportionately to the biggest farms and that the abandonment of price support policies leaves farmers at the mercy of agribusiness firms while taxpayers foot the bill for rising subsidies.

In this policy brief we summarize the ways multinational livestock firms have benefited from both trade and agricultural policies.  Read the full story

Fuente: Ecoportal

por REDES-Amigos de la Tierra Uruguay
15 de febrero, 2010

Desde 2006 se han comprado en África más de 9 millones de hectáreas. De ellas, al menos 5 millones se dedicarán a producir agrocombustibles mediante el cultivo de jatrofa, palma aceitera y sorgo dulce, entre otros. Pero las cifras son mayores, ya que sólo en Mozambique, funcionarios de gobierno informan que inversionistas han solicitado 4,8 millones de hectáreas (casi un séptimo del área cultivable del país) para dedicarlas a los agrocombustibles.Los gobiernos africanos reconocen la pérdida de tierras, los desplazamientos de comunidades y su preocupación por los impactos que tendrán estos proyectos en la capacidad de sus países para satisfacer las necesidades internas de la producción agrícola de alimentos. Read the full story

Source: GRAIN

by Joan Baxter
January 2010

Over the years many Big Ideas have been imposed on Africa from outside. The latest is that the region should sell or lease millions of hectares of land to foreign investors, who will bring resources and up-to-date technology. None of the blueprints has worked, and African farmers have become increasingly impoverished. It is time for Africans to turn to their own histories, knowledge and resources. Read the full story

Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

Another form of humanitarian aid distribution. (Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra)

by Beverly Bell

One of the first things that Haitians now living in the streets want to talk about is their disgust over the international food aid program. In such places as the camps in the downtown parks on Boulevard Champs de Mars, residents report, food is given sporadically – last week not for four or five days. Moreover, it is uncooked rice, and many of those living in the crowded shelters have no way to cook it.  Some have been able to sell the rice and, with the funds, buy food that they can eat.

In a heavily militarized operation, U.S. Marines distribute rice from CARE and U.S. Agency for International Development. Haitians stand in lines for hours in the hot sun, sometimes receiving nothing, or scramble for food dropped from the air. “We are not dogs,” said one woman in front of a sheet which serves as the front door of her new home in a public park.  “The way they do it just breeds indignity,” said another. Read the full story

Artículo publicado en Amauta con permiso de Argenpress

Fuente: Argenpress

por Pedro Rivera Ramos
11 de febrero, 2010

La producción de medicamentos constituye uno de los componentes más importantes, más sólidos y más poderosos, conque cuentan en la actualidad las gigantescas corporaciones transnacionales, que luego de la reestructuración que hiciesen de su producción de plaguicidas, se autocalificarán como “industrias de las ciencias de la vida”, al pasar a controlar virtualmente todas las actividades esenciales para los seres humanos en todo nuestro planeta. Read the full story

When people live so close to the edge, even small price increases can break them (Chris Coady/ NB Illustration)

Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

Source: The Independent

When people live so close to the edge, even small price increases can break them

by Johann Hari
February 5, 2010

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakeable grief that could last for years. In the middle of the Haitian people’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture. Read the full story