Food security
The international food system and the climate crisis
Business as usual as the international food system adds damage to the climate crisis
Authors:
; Grain
Publisher:
GRAIN, 2009
This article is about the inability of the global food system to fulfill its most basic function of feeding people while agribusiness corporations that control the food chain are amassing billions of dollars in profits. The world’s governments and international agencies are pushing for more agribusiness, more industrial agriculture and more globalisation, despite calls for change. The authors assert that with accelerating climate change, driven in large part by this very model of agriculture, the situation is bound to rapidly worsen an already bad situation. .
Industrial agriculture is producing high levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) through the use of chemical fertilisers, the expansion of the industrial meat industry, and the destruction of the world’s savannahs and forests to grow agricultural commodities. Turning food into global industrial commodities results in a tremendous waste of fossil-fuel energy in processing, storing, freezing and transporting these commodities around the world.
The article recommends the following urgent measures for transformation:
- at the most basic level, “business as usual” has to stop. There is a need to build alternative systems of production and consumption organised according to the needs of the people and life on the planet
- the force for change is with communities, organising to take back control of food systems
- seeds must be put back in the hands of farmers and the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides must be stopped
- at the farm level, ways for dealing with climate change and the food crisis must be followed. These include: moving towards sustainable, integrated production methods; rebuilding the soil and retaining the water; and de-industrialising agriculture
- political challenges are difficult, but despite repression, local communities and movements are resisting large-scale projects for dams, mines, plantations and timber and this resistance is an essential component of climate action.
