Agribusiness simply cannot adequately meet the food needs of the world’s population—one-third of people face some form of malnutrition, and one-ninth of people face hunger.
The “supermarketization” of the food system has led to increased reliance on processed foods rather than fresh foods-leading to increased malnutrition and obesity.
Children are still the most vulnerable to malnutrition-according to the World Health Organization, malnutrition is a potential contributor to the deaths of approximately 45% of children under five.
Today’s food system is dominated by trade agreements and economic policies, placing profits above the right to food.
Power is concentrated in the hands of a few corporate participants who benefit from free trade rules and export-oriented agricultural policies.
Such systems allow large agricultural companies to enjoy privileges and harm the interests of others, thereby causing instability in the global food system.
Pollution
However, the food produced in this way accounts for only a small part of the global output-the United Nations estimates that 70-80% of the food consumed in most parts of the south of the world is produced by small farms.
20-30% of the food produced by large agribusinesses has a devastating impact on the entire system.
Large commodity traders such as Bunge Ltd, Cargill, Luis Dreyfus and Archer Daniels Midland are the agricultural equivalents of fossil fuel companies such as Shell and BP.
They get rewards from a broken system and receive subsidies from the state for charity, while leaving the basic needs of millions of people unsatisfied and destroying the natural world.
Trade agreements encourage the cultivation of cash crops and industrial meat industries, thereby stimulating deforestation, diverting water from local communities and polluting ecosystems.
grazing
In fact, destroying forests to grow animal feed is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, which is essential for sustainable agriculture, resilient and sustainable food production, and carbon sequestration.
This process has also led to women being marginalized in agricultural decision-making, and their knowledge and practices for subsistence are ridiculed and made impossible.
Women face a lack of voice in setting work agendas and are increasingly dependent on men for cash and access to the market to buy food they had previously grown.
This has led to an increasing inconsistency between the role of women as agricultural workers and the recognition of them by society, which has a disturbing impact on household food security in particular, because the main responsibility for this is in the hands of women.
It also prioritizes corporate-led awareness and action, rather than more sustainable methods such as traditional rotation systems, permanent pastures, and protective grazing.
livelihood
These forms of sustainable agriculture that restore soil and biodiversity and sequester carbon are being ridiculed, while demand for crops that require large amounts of fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides is forcibly increasing.
In the past few years, the agricultural labor force has become increasingly feminized and temporary, providing flexibility for large growers while increasing the instability of workers.
The ecological cost of agribusiness is also obvious. As a model, agribusinesses are destroying wild habitats while dangerously increasing emissions-and by driving climate collapse, ironically, the agricultural industry is destabilizing access to food.
A recent example is that Hurricane Idai, which hit Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe in March 2019 alone, destroyed nearly 2 million acres of crops, including peanuts such as corn, cassava, beans, rice and peanuts.
Those who depend on the fisheries and agricultural sectors for income and livelihoods particularly feel the displacement caused by the increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather.
system
Industrialized agricultural practices will also reduce our resilience to future intensified ecological impacts (such as desertification), thereby threatening food stability.
A 2015 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that 2.5 to 40 billion tons of topsoil are lost every year due to erosion, mainly due to farming and intensive planting.
The IPCC special report on climate change and land in August 2019 found that in order to adapt to the goals of the climate change era, agriculture must move away from intensification and industrialization methods and switch to a food system based on agroecology and less and better meat.
The countries at the forefront of the most extreme influence have taken almost no measures to trigger the crisis, but are required-through trade and investment agreements-to open their markets to foreign investment through carbon-intensive, alternative and polluting food farming methods. .
Therefore, a vicious and ironic cycle is that global agribusinesses are behind some of the biggest threats to food sustainability and accessibility, and are therefore encoded in the DNA of our global food system.
Agrochemicals
The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights warned that this is leading to a “climate apartheid scenario in which the rich pay the price for avoiding overheating, hunger and conflict, while the rest of the world suffers”.
In response to this crisis, the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina developed the concept of “food sovereignty” in the 1990s.
The food sovereignty proposed at the World Food Summit in 1996 is defined as a clear criticism of the neoliberal global food system, representing a complete break with the dominant agricultural system.
The 2007 Neleni Declaration defines food sovereignty as “the right of people to obtain healthy and culturally suitable food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems.”
Food sovereignty prioritizes factors such as local production, direct commercialization, the use of agro-ecological methods, opposition to genetically modified crops and agrochemicals, and the rights to land, water, seeds, and biodiversity.
Plant base
The Global Just Green New Deal must treat land and food as part of the global commons, so they must be regulated and shared fairly. It must also recognize the close relationship between land sovereignty and food justice.
This means supporting indigenous land rights, stopping land grabbing for mining, agro-industrial plantations and biofuels, and prohibiting land speculation by large financial institutions.
Supporting regional, short-term and renewable agro-ecological models, as well as traditional knowledge that minimizes the use of toxic inputs, reduces food waste, and redistributes industrialized agricultural subsidies to smallholder farmers, will not only cool the earth, but also feed the human world at least three times more .
It is entirely possible to live in a world where everyone can get publicly paid food. At present, the agricultural policies of 53 countries provide (mainly intensive) agricultural enterprises with an average of US$528 billion in direct support each year.
These resources must be reused to adapt to climate change and fair practices. In addition, although it cannot replace the redistribution of land and resources, any technological innovation, such as plant-based meat substitutes, must be provided to all those who need and want it.
only
Incorporating the agricultural industry into public ownership, rethinking what we produce and how much we really need, democratizing access to land and controlling food decisions to prioritize subsistence over market forces is essential, especially for reassessing the female-dominated labor force And achieve food justice.
Acceptance of this “food citizen” may take many forms, including support for more urban and rural participation, collective procurement, and participation in food policy committees. This community-based movement is controlling local and regional food systems with the goal of promoting bottom-up change.
In fact, the food and energy needs of the world’s population do not violate the principle of land sovereignty, that is, “the land belongs to the laborers, the patriots and the people who depend on it for survival.”
On the contrary: a global green new deal that includes land sovereignty is necessary to achieve a just new deal.
These authors
Harpreet Kaur Paul and Dalia Gebrial are curators and editors View Global Green New Deal, Where this article originally appeared.
