Food Sovereignty vs. Food Security: Expert Panel Discussion

[00:00:02]the world beyond the headlines lecture series is a project of the University of Chicago center for international studies okay so let's go ahead and get started um I'm Kathy Morrison director of the center for international studies and I want to welcome you to our third event uh in our series on food security and ins security uh for the Spring quarter of this year I would uh remind you those of you who attended previous events in the series that we have an ongoing Twitter discussion and the hashtag is CIS food security all one word so if you want to uh participate in that way you're certainly welcome to do so our co-sponsor tonight um helping us with the recording of This the tonight's event is the University Communications office today we have a a a special and very important event in our series um in which we're going to discuss some alternative intellectual Frameworks um for thinking about these issues and especially the concept of food sovereignity with a very distinguished panel of Scholars here today so our format is this a little different from our usual routine we'll have uh three speakers as you can tell so each person will speak and then uh I'll play host and we'll have a kind of moderated panel discussion up here so we will not have questions from the audience as we often do but there will of course be time afterwards to chat uh and of course you can always use technology such as Twitter and so on to interject your own perspectives so let me just introduce our three speakers all together at the beginning um we have um from this end of the table toward me U Professor Hannah whitmann who's an assistant professor of sociology and a member of the Latin American studies program at Simon Frasier University uh she conducts collaborative research Local Food Systems food Serenity and agrarian citizenship with the landless rural workers movement and Lavia capina in Brazil and with Community farming networks uh in British Columbia she's the co-editor of um food sovereignity reconnecting food nature and Community Food sovereignity in Canada and environment and citizenship in Latin America um Nature's subjects and struggles the title of her talk tonight is peasants rights or food riots the challenges of institutionalizing food sovereignity Professor Rachel bezner Kerr is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario and the research coordinator of the soils food and healthy communities project in Malawi she conducts community- based research on the linkages between social and environmental inequalities and agriculture uh health and nutrition work that's done in collaboration with small holder farmers and a hospital in Northern Malawi um her specific areas of work have included linkages between HIV AIDS affected families agricultural practices uh food security and health and um something very close to my heart historical and contemporary perspectives on the increased use of drought tolerant crops such as sorghum and Millet her title tonight is agroecology and food sovereignity in Malawi and then uh finally we have Professor Philip McMichael who is an international professor in the department of development sociology at Cornell um trained as an historical sociologist his research examines capitalist modernity through the lens of agrarian questions uh food regimes agrarian food sovereignity movements and most recently the implications for Food Systems of Agro fuels and land grabbing his work involves cons consultation with the FAO the international planning committee of for food sovereignity levia cacina food first information and Action Network and the eego ecoagriculture partners project landscapes for people food and nature initiative and the title of his talk today is food sovereignity versus food security a global conundrum so let's start with Professor Whitman thank you so much Kathy and thank you especially to Jamie vender for organizing this this panel and our trip here it's been really great to to come and learn about your programs here I'm going to talk today about a project that um looks at the J jux to BU Jos of an international human rights discourse around the right to food with on on the ground implementation rights talk has a lot of traction in today's uh environment and we're going to see how this actually is being worked out what are the challenges and what are the intention what are the tensions in different ways of thinking about the right to food so how does the right to food which is a predominantly consumerist concern how do people get food to eat how does that interact with demands to protect the rights of peasants uh food producers who actually need land and need and need markets to be able to provide a living not only for themselves but for their communities so I've worked with rural agricultural communities in Latin America for almost two decades Brazil Paraguay Guatemala and currently working with local food movements in British Columbia to look at what are the challenges to implementing a food sovereignty framework and what are the implications of this framework for Global hunger and environmental sustainability so food security the concept of the idea of food security as a right emerged in the post World War II uh context as a universal ideal to end world hunger it was enshrined in the 1948 Universal DEC Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant of economic social and cultural rights this on the screen you see a quote from the 1974 Universal Declaration on the eradication of hunger and malnutrition this is from the first un sponsored world world food Summit where Henry Kissinger famously declared that by by 1985 no child would go to bed hungry to this end uh National and multilateral food security policies and programs have been oriented around the idea of specialization comparative advantage trade and aid-based food distribution programs to Consumers rather than emphasizing community control over food production distribution and consumption so agricultural trade liberalization concretized through the 1995 WTO agreement on agriculture has decimated agricultural systems particularly in developing countries the fio estimates that nearly 30 million peasants have lost access to land since the mid 1990s and people are still losing land in what is known as the global land grab not only for Mining and oil but increasingly for agriculture uh some estimates uh indicate 227 million hectares have been uh taken away from small scale producers in the last decade today Global grain trade is concentrated in just five companies and National agricultural systems particularly in Latin America are oriented to specialized export oriented crops soybean in sugar cane and Brazil where I work peas and broccoli in Guatemala flowers in Colombia we've also seen a race to the bottom in terms of environmental and social practices accompanying uh trade liberalization with a corresponding rise in deforestation environment environmental degradation and increasing levels of malnutrition so food is thus increasingly mobile M and food prices are increasingly volatile Global food imports were up 25% in 2011 $1.3 trillion uh a second jump after major food prices and and a prol proliferation of food riots uh in 2008 and 2009 so how has all of this mobility in terms of food production and food trade affected the right to food we've seen periods of food price volatility we've seen food riots across the globe tortilla Wars bread rice riots we've seen Urban people whose wages aren't Rising accordingly to be able to accommodate these Rising food prices we've also seen rural peoples who who produce export oriented crops also suffering hunger because those those Rising food food prices aren't trickling down to producers okay so today about 1 billion people still face hunger in the world according to the WTO or according to the FAO the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations so from a human rights framework the right to food from a distribution perspective must be guaranteed by States but the Consolidated International Trade model hasn't worked very well to protect the right to food to enact it so Bruce derine a Canadian food systems activist is critical of much of the food rights discourse he argues that the human right to food has been has been has transformed the sort of discourse around the right to food has transformed a human necessity into a legal claim to be granted by some Authority or another and he says that it actually may put communities in a position of dependency so what about the rights of communities to decide about how they want to get their food and to protect their environments how can they actually reduce their dependency uh to uh face challenges around hunger so there's a tension around the rights of consumers to access cheap food and the rights and responsibilities of producers to produce food that is healthy sustainable and accessible so the Grassroots or critiques uh have emerged around food sovereignty particularly sharpening in the the mid 1990s early 1990s focused on the importance of community farming systems which were threatened by these neoliberal agricultural policies that have reduced support for National agricultural systems and facilitated The Dumping of food commodities so in 1993 a coalition of uh agrarian movement so peasant social movement small farmers Fisher folk uh artisanal um indigenous peoples and pastoralist got together and discovered some common interests in this in trying to challenge the current uh Global Food uh system so today this organization called the the Via comp pasina encompasses 150 National organizations from 70 countries and represents about 200 million uh Farm families peasants and and Fisher folk in 1996 at the at the next World food Summit in Rome the V Capia presented an alternative concept concept which is the concept of food sovereignty or the right of local populations to Define their own Agricultural and food policy to organize their food production and consumption to meet local needs and to secure access to land water and seed and the framework of food sovereignty encompasses a new set of value relations and approaches to rights it's concerned with the survival of small farms and ecological sustainability it's concerned with decision making ways of participating in food policy decisions at various scales from the local to Regional to National and international uh sustainable food production for the local community is seen as an act of citizenship contesting neoliberal conceptions of citizenship as primarily accessed through participation in a global market and in response we've seen new institutional measures emerging constitutional provisions and amendments in several countries laws policies and programs in others this is a slide from the uh uh Community Center in the downtown east side of Vancouver where I live which is the poorest postal code in all of Canada one of the most uh places where that we have the highest levels of poverty and and and a number of social problems and and this this uh slogan painted on the outside of the building represents the alternative demand from the consumer perspective for a human right to food that is now transformed from a demand for simple calories and nutrients to more specific claims around culturally appropriate dignified fresh and local food especially in instances where in instances where the state from a rights framework having the responsibility to provide these choices through food social safety nets so locally produced food in this framework is thought to be more nutritious and better tasting in addition the cir the circulation of locally produced food maintains the food Dollar in a local economy food sovereignty Advocates argue that food Aid when that means dropping in subsidized Commodities from elsewhere can actually undermine the local economy by taking away jobs jobs both farming and urban processing jobs from local communities the food sovereignty framework thus seeks to connect this Urban demand for the right to a particular kind of food with the demands of rural producers to produce food in an ecologically sound manner in a process of creative procurement based on a social economy so in contrast to the right to consume food the focus of un approaches to food security the food sovereignty framework and emphasizes the right to produce as a necessary precursor to the right to eat so to this end to access the material resources needed to engender a food santry model including Land Reform access to technology and access to seeds uh agrarian social movements have begun to link their demands these demands for localized resources to local Global and transnational advocacy networks for social economic and cultural human rights so the Via Comina for example now operates on two distinct fronts distinct but connected to address the transnational character of the need to protect the framework of food sovereignty as a human right the Via compa has embarked on a mobilization for an International Convention on the rights of peasants this document was developed through a set of regional and international workshops and conferences between 2000 and 2008 by peasants themselves so not by lawyers not by un officials and it's now been brought to the UN and is being debated in the general assembly this uh the convention on peasants rights challenges the inability of current International rights conventions to protect peasants rights arguing that the violation of the rights of peasants damages the world's ability to feed itself on a second front member organizations are working to implement changes and National constitutional Frameworks legislations and programs to enact the right of peasants so food sovereignty Advocates argue that governments have a key responsibility in addressing food insecurity food transfers and high food prices haven't combed hunger especially among the rural poor so connecting the right to food with the right to produce can make a difference in four critical aspects of food security uh through availability improving availability of food through strengthening local production chains improving access to food by connecting with local development Alternatives and increasing incomes to purchase food especially for urban people uh the the idea of utilization that acknowledge by acknowledging the negative health effects of the nutrition transition nutrition transition and the the turn to a western diet based on imported food um addressing the lack of access to healthy culturally appropriate foods that has led to a rise in obesity and finally the food sovereignty framework addresses the issue of vulnerability IT addresses the impacts of on local food systems uh of com the combined food financial and energy crises so food sovereignty Advocates suggest that public social safety nets including School feeding programs and public procurement government purchasing for hospitals uh food banks schools Etc can make a difference in stimulating the local supply of culturally appropriate and sustainably produced food thus affecting availability access utilization and vulnerability so how do this come out in practice oh here's three examples of where food the food sovereignty discourse has made its way into National constitutions Ecuador was one of the first countries to explicitly recognize the right to food sovereignty and there's many places where it's mentioned in the Ecuadorian Constitution Ecuador hasn't done much to formally implement this right there's a lot of activity at the Grassroots and in the NGO sector but this is a country where you can see that the establishment of a right hasn't necessarily led to its implementation in Bolivia the 2009 Constitution has a number of articles that mention food sovereignty and of Interest here has been the emphasis on the obligation of State development policy to preserve food sovereignty so there's specific references to uh the the need to consider food sovereignty uh issues in negotiating international trade agreements and the need to transfer uh funds for example from the hydrocarbon tax which under the Morales government have have more of that Revenue has been uh brought to the Bolivian people that those that Revenue specifically is aimed at school feeding programs and other agricultural uh programs Brazil which probably has one of the most advanced food Security Programs in the world has recently put a food sovereignty stamp on some of these programs uh with food sovereignty language appearing in recent laws degrees decrees and programs so to to finish up I'm just going to give a couple of examples of food sovereignty initiatives in Bolivia and Brazil that explicitly challenge the ontological separation of the right to food from the right to produce and then I'm going to give some assessment of the challenges to implementing and domesticating a diversified food sovereignty model based on the principle of international peasants rights so School feeding programs have been in in place for some time globally with extensive participation from food aid providers such as the un uh world food program uh one estimate suggests that in 2008 22 million children uh benefited from school subsidized School feeding programs in 70 countries so we can talk about the benefits of school feeding obviously increasing School attendance increasing uh Child Nutrition uh for development and and actually helping children to uh stay in school for a longer period when based on imported food School feeding does not address doesn't tend to address broader Community Food system breakdowns leading to uh which have resulted in poor nutrition poor poor household nutrition in real communities especially in the early years of life and uh Rachel I'm sure will talk about some some of those important issues uh imported food also doesn't address Community resilience Economic Development or land rights so in response in very recent years there's been a shift to the concept of homegrown School feeding or the idea of supplying local food two schools uh that's culturally appropriate fresher and more nutritious um so the world the world food program has had a major turnaround on this last year more than 60% of its Global budget was allotted to local food purchasing for example in Bolivia world food program funds along with funds transferred to M municipalities through the hydrocarbon tax provide purchased rations but they also provide funds from for municipalities to purchase food from local farmers uh since 20 8 in response to the food price increases Bolivia has taken some further actions to increase uh Food Supplies in local markets as well as stimulate local production one example of this is a 2011 law called the law for the community agricultural production Revolution uh which includes Provisions for strengthening the participation of uh small farmers uh protecting the environment so payment for ecological services and improving the consumption and commercialization of small scale farmer products through uh through marketing Cooper operatives and public procurement programs so is this food sovereignty I've had a couple of students study this uh these programs for their thesis work and and some of the challenges to looking at a school feeding program in Bolivia from a food sovereignty framework one is that uh there's such a history of of providing uh commodity foods for schools that there's a system in place that's really hard to break out of there's also uh sometimes not access there isn't sufficient local production to be purchased that that the agricultural Community has suffered such a breakdown that what used to produ be produced is no longer produced and then finally a third a third challenge was interesting there was a a specifically a food sovereignty named program that tried to introduce reintroduce traditional foods like quinoa amaranth and and other native grains into the school breakfast program in Al Alto and urban area in Brazil and what uh the evaluations found is that students didn't like that food they didn't like the traditional food because they had become accustomed to the Western diet the nutrition transition and what in Bolivia is known as junk food so that's a significant challenge to reestablishing a food softy framework when you have communities that have changed their taste not necessarily for foods that are more nutritious or or uh more appropriate for environment and and social concerns but it's a very real anybody who has children know it's really hard to get your kids to eat something that they don't want to eat so that's a that's a challenge of re-educating the pallette towards a more sustainable food system so in Brazil um well the struggle for food sovereignty is uh arguably much more developed it's a Brazilian social movements have been on the front lines of promoting the food sovereignty framework principally through agrarian social movements working with land reform participating in the viac compen and scaling up their struggle to uh meet the concerns of urban people in Brazil for uh more healthy food uh they've the Brazilian social have taken food sovereignty discourse into Forest code reform they've taken it into National pesticide campaigns there's a um a poster here that says the the poison is on the table and it's it's actually a film that's shown in a in a public education campaign around the the health impacts of industrial agriculture particularly around pesticide use and of course in Brazil there's active uh mobilization around the global land grab especially around the the environmental and social implications of the rapid increase in soy being production and and Export so agrarian movements in Brazil have always demanded uh a national guarantee of production uh and have asked for the government purchase of of food for social service programs and what we've seen is that um missing my photo there but the the photo that's missing is a photo of the the the president of the um Regional uh food security Coalition in so this is a government uh Council that that is concerned with Foods food actual security uh programs and these are called conas Municipal State and National level councils on food security they've been around since the 1980s in the last five years the conas have had a considerable shift towards a food sovereignty discourse they were they they they were not adopting that that discourse until very recently and they have been principally responsible for bringing they're they're primarily Urban they had been up to this point primarily Urban organizations and they have been very effective in bringing in um and connecting peasant demands for guaranteed markets into school feeding and public procurement programs hospitals food banks and popular restaurants so they collaborated with social movements in the elaboration of a 2006 law that actually requires that 30% of food purchased for schools be purchased from local markets so really trying to get at that issue of cultural appropriateness Regional Foods regional Pils in Brazil there's quite a diversity in what people eat in different regions and they're trying to actually meet that uh in terms of uh nutrition and food security um so for example the picture that's missing is a is a picture of the president of the monago uh Council and she's actually works for a child well welfare NGO but she meets on a regular basis with people like FIA who's a member of the at Landis workers movement who's standing in her field of papaya plants which are uh sold through a Cooperative arrangement to local school districts and then her daughter eats those food Foods when she goes to school so it's a really a way of of closing that separation between the producer and the consumer so uh this is an example of homegrown School feeding most of you have probably heard of Brazil's uh social welfare program called fzo or zero hunger um interestingly fto has a huge budget its budget is actually its yearly budget for last year was double the budget of the entire food and agriculture organization of the United Nations about $3.7 billion us and this includes a lot of programs including conditional cash transfers for School attendance but it's also within the same policy package includes credit for small scale Farmers it in includes public procurement programs that are specifically oriented to agrarian reform settlements and it includes um purchasing for food banks from uh small scale Farmers so this program overall including the conditional cast transfers have been credited with with bringing 20 million families out of poverty in the last s years part of this is pulling rural people out of poverty by supporting their local uh Agricultural and Food Systems so for example uh schools will pay more for food that's organically produced so this facilitates Organic certification by small scale family Farmers that may not be able to pursue that certification without that without without that extra payment so what are the challenges to to this framework in Brazil uh despite this enormous budget of fero the elite agricultural uh and Agri business sector gets more for example between two 2003 and 2007 State support for large scale producers in Brazil was about seven times that that was awarded to family for Farmers this is despite the fact that family Farmers represent almost uh almost 90% of Brazil's Farmers overall and they produce about 75% of the of the food that Brazil actually eats Brazil is a country that actually is pretty much food self-sufficient and most of the food that's eaten in Brazil is produced by by small scale Farmers uh in 2008 for the 2008 2009 Harvest year um Agri the Agra business sector which primarily in Brazil's the sugar cane and soybean sectors received uh six times the budget of the Bola famia uh conditional cash transfer program and at the same time that we're seeing an increased budget for social welfare and and actually strengthening rural agricultural systems we're seeing a decrease in actual land redistribution and land reform so if anybody's interested in Land Reform I tell you stories about that it B was one of Lula's main campaign premises to continue Distributing land to uh landless farmers and it was almost completely halted over the last eight years um so to conclude uh food sovereignty is presented as an alternative framework that can U uh that's a framework that's alternative to the domination of global capital in AGR Food Systems it represents an agriculture that can feed the world and cool the planet it has growing Civil Society support support as a unifying movement that brings together human rights movements environmental labor fair trade women's and other Progressive movements um uh the vi campino which I mentioned has more than 150 me members in 150 organizations in 70 countries 200 million Farm families this does not even count the urban supporters and movements that are pushing for this closer link between urban and rural food initiatives including the examples I gave of school homegrown School feeding programs uh much has been made of the influence of international trade agreements on National agricultural policies and and on increasing world hunger of the almost 1 billion undernourished people in the world 75% are concentrated in rural areas and half of these are farming families the obligations of signatories to the International Convention on economic social and cultural rights are to take positive actions to ensure the right to food according to the proposed International Convention on peasants rights these actions include those that facilitate the right to farm and the right to fair and Equitable and environmentally sustainable food production and trading systems so my research suggests that the implementation of food sovereignty initiatives that protect the right to produce including the right to agrarian reform and local food system development represent a strategic shift in protecting the right to food want to change uh no I think I'm I'll just move this forward a little bit so thanks very much Hannah and I I really uh think that my talk will build on what Hannah was uh discussing first of all I want to thank the organizers of this event for inviting me here it's really exciting to be in Chicago this is my second time to Chicago and I was here 10 years ago so I I'm very grateful for the invitation and it's been a lovely day of meeting with students and getting to know more about what you do here so I have depicted here on this first slide a picture of um a friend and a long-term colleague in Malawi um this uh talk will focus on my work in southern Africa and a country called Malawi and her name is es inua and she is standing in a field of makuna which is a luminous crop that is edible it's also a cover crop so it protects the field from soil erosion and it fixes nitrogen and when you bury the crop residue it improves soil fertility you might be able to see it's probably hard to see but she has a slight smile on her face and I chose this Photograph because I think it shows a certain amount of dignity and pride in what she's accomplished she's a a widow she has five children she also looks after several orphans from her uh siblings who have passed away and um she's in her 50s and she's been able by using different agroecological practices over the last decade to be able to produce enough food for her family and to send her kids to school and to have uh good nutrition in her home and she's also uh openly HIV positive and so she's really proud of her accomplishments and she's talked to me about how how she has felt that taking an agroecological approach to addressing food security is is uh has given her hope and has given her a feeling that she will be able to achieve food security and and improve nutrition in her household so I thought it was a good example of of a very concrete way that families in very difficult circumstances can achieve food sovereignty uh in their communities so I am going to uh briefly talk about the dominant model of Agriculture and the means for achieving food security that you would all be familiar with and then I'm going to spend the majority of my time talking about this alternative approach to addressing food food security and in doing so achieving food sovereignty by using a case study of uh the work that I've been involved with in Malawi which is a participatory research project that is using sustainable agriculture and agroecological methods to improve uh food security and nutrition in uh Northern Malawi and uh so I'm going to talk about some of our findings and some of our uh uh achievements but at the same time Identify some cautions and some uh future research uh activities that we have been uh engaged in in the last few years so the dominant model of Agriculture is the dominant model of Agriculture used here in in the United States so I won't spend too much time on it but it it is using external inputs uh that are dependent on petroleum so fertilizer pesticides uh mechanization largely monoculture and uh to produce food and much of that food is produced for export and this is the model of Agriculture that has been uh dominant in North America and Europe and increasingly in the global South and it is the one that is advocated by many International institutions as the means to achieve Global Food security the uh logo in the bottom corner here is that of the alliance for uh Green Revolution in Africa which is a major multi-million doll initiative that has been spearheaded uh in the last 6 years or so to promote this approach in Africa as a means for achieving food Security in Africa so an alternative approach for addressing food security and one that I'm going to be talking about in reference to the work in Malawi is an agroecological approach and this approach really Builds on the way uh ecological systems operate so first of all using organic material to improve soil fertility building soil biota and uh using mulch using crop residues using manure as a means to improve organic material within your soil and instead of relying on pesticides uh using uh natural processes so everything from sticky traps to catching the as you can see here catching uh pests with the with a a net or using Predator prey uh interactions so in uh attracting uh Predator insects that will eat the pests that you're having a problem with or intercropping uh so a number of different strategies for addressing Pest and disease problems and then emphasizing resource conservation so Soil Conservation water conservation and increasing biodiversity as as a means for achieving uh food security and and finally your your overall strategy and an agroecological strategy is one that draws on what we know about biological systems more generally so building on synergies within that biological system uh looking at the way uh nutrients are recycled within that system and uh enhancing biodiversity as a means to achieve your your uh food food production and this is an approach which has been promoted by um most recently by the FAO and by the UN um representative for the right to food Olivier dut as the way forward that we should be using as a means to achieve uh food production globally uh a study done by uh uh hundreds of scientists and uh representatives of government in uh 2008 uh called the iasd also recommended this approach as really the viable Way Forward for how we can feed our global population so this isn't uh although it's an alternative model there are many uh scientists and uh representatives of different organizations globally who think that this is this is a viable way that we should move towards in the world so I'm going to focus on Malawi and Mal MAA is interesting for a number of reasons first of all it is a highly rural population so about 85% of people in Malawi rely on their own food production for at least part of their food source it is a very poor country in southern Africa the average uh GDP is about $200 a year it is also a maze-based cropping system which is the dominant cropping system in eastern and southern Africa so it's a place where you can ask the question what is the viable way that this population can feed itself and it's also a place that's quite interesting because in the last 6 years or so the government has really spearheaded the dominant model of Agriculture as the way forward for feeding the malawian population so this is a um um poster that was up all over Malawi uh and the fellow the man in the right hand uh side of the picture is the late uh president uh bingo Metallica he just passed away this last month um and of a of a heart attack uh uh sadly but um while he was President he uh initiated a fertilizer subsidy that was a subsidy for both reduced price of fertilizer and reduced price of hybrid maze seed and he really built his political capital on this subsidy which reduced the price of fertilizer and hybrid ma seed by uh 2/3 and it was made widely available to at initially the majority of small holder Farmers across Malawi and initially the international financial institutions were against this uh policy but they quickly fell in behind it and along with a lot of donor support and in doing so the country became highly indebted and also became in a bit of an economic mess and the last few years initially Malawi was trumpeted as a place where hunger had been solved um and it was called the Malawi miracle and organizations like Agra and the Gates Foundation held up Malawi as the way forward for African Africans to feed themselves through fertilizers and uh hybrid seeds essentially um but in the last few years it's faced an economic crisis there's been a foreign exchange shortage and there's been a a major fuel shortage as well as increasing authoritarianism on the part of the government which has led people to stand back a little and say perhaps this approach is not the way forward for a country that has to import all of its fertilizer and that fertilizer is increasingly expensive so one of the reasons why Malawi is interesting not only for those of us who work there but for people more generally interested in food security is is because you see uh very uh much questions about what is the best way to feed a population that is quite poor and that has tried different models for addressing food security so the work that I've been involved with for the last 12 years is based out of a hospital in Northern Malawi and it really began to Grapple with the question of uh food security from a child malnutrition standpoint so in the late 9s you saw the rising price of fertilizer in part because of economic policies imposed by uh the IMF and the World Bank on Malawi and farmers who had come to rely on fertilizer found that they were unable to produce enough food for their families and they were admitting children with severe malnutrition to the hospital and the hospital was looking for alternatives to fertilizer as a means for supporting food Security in their community and so uh we developed a pilot project initially to test alternative options for addressing food security and these options were sort of a basket of options that had been tested on Research stations and in controlled conditions on Farm but hadn't been really tried out by Farmers under their own farming conditions and the idea was it was going to be a pilot project uh where Farmers would learn these different options and then experiment with them on their own farms and then we would track to see what the outcomes were not only in terms of soil fertility and food security but particularly the hospital was interested in Child Nutrition outcomes and so initially we trained uh 30 members of what we call the farmer research team who learned about these different options and that anyone in their seven Villages could join the project and learn about them and test them on their own field and there were also Village plots where Farmers could see all the options displayed and those plots were managed by the farmer research team we also had field days we had farmer exchanges we had farmer apprenticeship days we had recipe days so many different sort of teaching opportunities that were really based on farmer-to-farmer community-based approaches and we had a a longitudinal design so we are doing both pre- and post as well as control intervention uh design model so we could compare how the situation was changing for Farmers both in comparison to their neighbors but also in comparison to where they were at the beginning of the project and we used all kinds of different measures everything from agricultural uh measures to measuring CH children's weight and height to interviewing Farmers about what changes they were seeing in their community and it was an iterative process so as things came up that we realized we need to be tracking this we also included some additional measures as as required and we did a lot of participatory workshops to check in with Farmers about what they were experiencing so what were these different options that people were trying out on their fields this is a picture of a woman who's growing pigeon peea and uh that's the tall shrubby legum in the background it's a uh a legume that is sort of a Woody shrub and it produces a small pee that is edible you can also use it for fodder for your goats or cattle uh it has deep roots that pull up nutrients from deep below the surface and help other crops growing in the area and it's nitrogen fixing so if you bury the leaves then and and The Roots then you have uh nutrients available to maze the following year to Corn the following year um in uh addition people grow intercropped with that ground nuts or soybean and ground nuts is in this picture that's peanut and uh both of them are harvested they're harvested at different times of the year and that's another advantage of this system you harvest ground nut earlier so you have a nice uh protein Rich oil rich food available ear earlier in the season that also has legume or residue that you can bury in the field to improve the soil fertility and then later on in the season you harvest pige and PE so you have an extension of the season and you rotate this combination with maze so that you have crop rotation which also reduces problems of disease and weeds as well in in essence it's quite a simple uh option and but you're building on Agro agroecological PRC principles and using this in using this option and this was the most popular option there were a number of different options that farmers could choose from but they like this one the best because these two crops are edible so you're not setting aside a field and just growing something that's going to improve soil fertility down the road you're you're growing food at the same time that you're improving soil fertility which is really viable for Farmers where the average land uh availability is about 1.1 hectares per household and what we were able to track is that farmers were really excited by these options I didn't include a graph of the number of people who joined the project but we started with about 185 farmers in the year 2000 and by 2004 we had over 2,000 farmers who had joined the project and we now have thousands of farmers who have received a small amount of seed and a little bit of training and then have taken it from there and what this graph shows is that they were quite willing to expand the area devoted to legumes over time and uh and depending on the type of legum uh depended on how much they expanded it we also found differences by gender in terms of how much they were able to expand it and we are also able to demonstrate improvements in maze yield so you're not just increasing legume availability but you're also increasing your your primary grain crop not only in comparison to just not using fertilizer but in comparison to plus fertilizer alone so it it is adding food security at the same time that it's improving the quity of the diet and what Farmers started to talk about as well is that this isn't just a means to improve soil fertility and food security but in years when we have drought or poor rain our soils that have been improved by these legumes are responding better to uh the poor rains um and that makes sense from a scientific perspective because the the soils have more organic matter which means they're better able to to retain moisture under times of drought stress and and so what we've been able to document is that these this simple in some ways very simple strategy of incorporating a number of different crops that are leguminous into your cropping system so using biodiversity as one of your strategies to address food security has multiple benefits and so this this graph shows your increasing soil cover so that reduces soil erosion you're increasing protein available within the houseold old VCR is value cost ratio so you're reducing the price of the farming system to the household because you're not purchasing as much fertilizer if you do use fertilizer that fertilizer is utilized more efficiently by the plant because the soil is better able to retain the nutrients and retain water and so it's you use less fertilizer when you do use fertilizer and you still are able to maintain uh grain yield so uh another aspect we looked at is are people maintaining high levels of crop diversity over time and uh this uh table shows that there's a statistically significant difference in terms of the number of farmers who have increased the number of crops they grow compared to control households and these are farmers who may have joined the project on average they joined eight years ago and they're they're still maintaining a higher number of crops in their farming system and farmers are relating this notion of crop diversity also to climate change change because they say when we grow more crops if one fails because of poor rains one year um then then we're better off if the next year there's heavy rains another crop might do better so this is an important strategy for uh conditions of Uncertain rainfall um we also identified uh social issues that you really need to pay attention to in relation to this this strategy um so there were a number of social issues we identified I'm going to talk about uh two one of them was we were saying to Farmers in order for this to improve soil fertility you need to bury the crop residue early after harvest normally it's women Who harvest the legumes uh and normally it's men who prepare the fields for planting just before the planting period so in asking them to bury the crop residue early we are either asking women to take on a new task during the Harvest period or we are asking them to go home to their husbands and say honey do you mind going to the field and burying that crop residue now because it's going to improve the soil fertility and in a in a country where you have very unequal division of labor you have high levels of domestic violence and in Northern Malawi land is passed through men so women aren't considered to be owners of the land so men have a lot of control over the decision- making within households that's a lot to ask women to do and so initially we were not seeing high levels of uh crop residue incorporation what the farmer research team said was well we need to organize some promotion of this so they went they said we're going to have crop residue promotion days and they went to The Villages as a team and said okay folks today's crop residue promotion Day come see what we're going to do hey man take a look at this we're burying the crop residue of this legume because this is your fertilizer hey this is your job this is your fertilizer it's worth a little a lot of money you should bury the crop residue it sounds simple it sounds you know kind of silly but this is what they organized and we were able to track over time a very dramatic shift in agricultural practice this is from 2009 but we've consistently seen this result where farmers were bearing crop residue early in households that were participating in this project and in control households in neighboring Villages they continued to burn the crop residue just before planting so another social issue that was quite important was they were initially we were seeing High you know increases in leum production but women were saying at the workshops well this isn't really helping us out because our husband sorry Ben but it was the husbands were taking the ground nuts and they were selling it and using it for beer or for other uh other things that weren't of benefit to the household and so we uh a lot there were a lot of other sensitive kind of household and Community issues that came up in our in our work and so we decided to organize what we called agriculture nutrition discussion groups which brought together older men older women younger men younger women to talk about some of these issues initially in the small group only with someone of your own age and gender and then through a facilitated uh means discussing it in the larger group to try to raise some of these bigger issues and we found that the this was a kind of revolutionary idea in some ways because Farmers hadn't had that opportunity people hadn't had that opportunity to have this kind of unstructured sharing of ideas in in that way it was it was different for them particularly across gender that wasn't very common having men sit around talking about you know ways to improve Child Nutrition that was quite unique and uh they also found that it was a means to bring up some of these difficult issues in in uh in uh safe in safe ways and so what we have found is that this combination of an agroecological approach combined with paying attention to some of these difficult household and Community issues through different educational strategies has been effective at addressing Child Nutrition and what this graph shows is that uh weight for age and we found the same with weight for height uh for child growth uh is improved both before and after people are involved with the project but also compared to intervention households and this was a very exciting result for us because it's uh there aren't many studies that that have been able to demonstrate that agricultural interventions can lead to improvements in Child Nutrition so another component of this kind of Agri eological uh strategy that really draws on Notions of food sovereignty is that of community organizing so the farmers have organized a community seed legum or a community seed bank for legum seeds which when you join the project you have to pay back the following year uh the seed that you received so after you've had one growing season that seed goes into the SE seed bank and it becomes it gets distributed by the farmer research team to other members of the community they've also organized um a uh um eond farmer Association which is a uh coop operative which helps them to get reasonable prices for their crops and in this picture you see a kiln that they built uh this was just this past year which they used to make fuel efficient uh wood stoves which they distributed to everyone in their Community as one way of addressing uh climate change um so a couple of cautions before you get too excited we've also found in our in our research increasing in entry of uh corporate interest into in farms uh through the seed so uh an increasing number of farmers are reliant on hybrid maze seed and they're buying that hybrid maze seed from the four multinational seed companies that sell seed in Malawi and uh this is in large part because of the fertilizer subsidy in the in the last uh six years um a lot of uh our work in the last few years is focused on climate change and we did some interviews with farmers and Survey work on what are their perceptions of of climate change and farmers are talking about some very dramatic changes in uh rainfall patterns so rains that used to come no longer come they had special names they came in June and they came in September and October they no longer come when the planting rains come they come later and they finish earlier and when they do come sometimes there's a break of two or 3 weeks where they there is no rain and so under these conditions it's it's very difficult to sustain food security and certainly these uh findings which are farmer perceptions of rainfall um would be consistent with what is predicted for subsaharan Africa uh with uh Rising greenhouse gas emissions and namely increased droughts increased severity of droughts and increased unreliability of of rainfall um and I I've mentioned uh gender inequalities as a major concern and something to really pay attention to if you want to address food sovereignty uh we we also have in the case of Malawi in many many parts of southern Africa very high rates of HIV prevalence and a lot of other health issues be it malaria or diarrhea or so on we asked this question two years ago during the last growing season did you or anyone in your household fall sick for one week such that it affected your agricultural activities and about 50% of people said yes so that is something that we really need to pay attention to in thinking about how to achieve uh food security and food sovereignty using the these approaches and uh I've spoken a bit about some of the concerns of women more specifically with regards to how household resources are used and this is a quote from an interview I did in 2009 which really addresses that this woman is saying I'm worried about what will happen when my husband sells the crops because he'll take the money and use it for his own benefit and I'm also worried that he's going to sleep around and he'll bring HIV into the home so these are an ongoing concern that we need to pay attention to um I'm I've been involved for the last four years or last two years in in a long-term project where we're looking at climate change adaptation strategies I won't talk much about that because I want to make sure Phil has time to talk but um uh one of the ongoing research activities is looking at different ideas Farmers have around climate change adaptation and one of them is trees so they've organized Community tree nurseries in the last two years and 20 different Villages and distributed uh tree seedlings to hundreds of farmers in the area and they see this as one strategy for addressing climate change in their communities and they're also interested in small uh livestock integration as a as a backup plan if the rains are really poor that year so this is a piggy that they built that they're pointing to and it's a communal pigy um where they're keeping pigs and they're and um it's it's kept for the village so I'll end with this slide um and uh it's similar to the first slide um it's a picture of Chrissy Luma and I took this picture just in January and uh she's also HIV positive and she's standing in her field of pigeon pee and soybean and she said she didn't find the work too honorous she found it viable and um at the time at times when she was feeling sick she said the people within the project helped her do the weeding of the field so she found that Cooperative effort really important for maintaining food security and then she received one of the stoves that people made and she said that was really helpful when it was cold it helped keep her warm so I I'm concluding with this slide because I have cautious optimism about emerging alternatives to the dominant model of agriculture in the world and although I'm aware of the multiple forces that can work against those uh Alternatives um and I'm also aware of the importance of taking gender and other inequality seriously at the household and Community level um I I would conclude from our work that using agroecological methods to improve uh food security increases local control sustainability and resilience of the food system and thus is a food sovereignty approach and uh by building farmer knowledge and paying careful attention to Lo local inequalities we can have a uh place that experiences food sovereignty so thanks very much well good afternoon and thank you all for coming I'd like to thank Jamie for taking care of us so well and um Kathy for taking care of us up here with the questions afterwards maybe if I talk long enough we won't have time for those um I wanted to address this Global conundrum I um will start with a couple of I've just realized I've got this this uh device I'm going to start with a couple of um devices a couple of um slides the first one is a slide that gives you some sense of who's feeding the world I think this is a very dramatic um distribution and it's very easy for us in the industrialized regions of the world to forget that 50% of the world's cultivated food is produced by peasants and then of course there's 12.5 coming from forest Etc and 7.5 from Urban food which I'll talk about in a minute I also want to show this picture here that captures the inequality in the world this is from Anki H's work and it gives you some sense of the inequality that the world currently has and I think it's quite extraordinary when you when you when you stop and look at that that um those of us with credit card cards belong in in the middle the bankable crew and we're surrounded by um these two other categories now the reason I'm putting these two slides back to back has to do with this kind of comment and that is that um that that 70% of peasant provisioning exists on the margins of the corporate market system that we've been talking about so far but a growing portion of that 70% May well be the uh the key to surviving the future I just came up from Detroit this morning yesterday I spent the afternoon I'm I'm working with a group of people from different sites around the country on Urban agriculture which is not my special speciality I don't know very much about it but I'm learning um but we view we visited the dtown farm and the Detroit black food security network met with us last night to talk about what was going on in Detroit and what I picked up just from that quick experience was this very really strong sense of bringing the countryside to the post-industrial city in many ways Detroit represents um in some people's minds an image of America's future where uh with jobs going offshore with unemployment Rising with more and more cities with unemployed or underemployed populations and hungry populations people are going to resort to this kind of um local feeding program that uh Detroit so clearly represents and what they talked about last night with us was the whole process of reskilling urban youth to sort of reconnect with with the land we have to remember that anyone who lives in a city um intergenerationally eventually came you know originally came from the land and so what they're trying to do is to sort of recapture uh that connection with the land but in the city um and build neighborhoods and commun ities around that whole process as part of what I would argue is food sovereignty so my argument today is that food sovereignty represents a paradigm change food sovereignty redefines food security from a trade-based to a rights based concept and practice that Nations and communities should have the right to consume rather than trade the food that they produce and that farming an indigenous people should have land rights to secure farming practices local food provisioning for fellow citizens and to encou encourage ecological stewardship of the kind that both Hannah and Rachel have talked about now the conundrum for me is that just as the right to food that's food sovereignty emerges as a powerful Vision it's competing Now with an alternative investor driven right to food which I'm characterizing as the the global land and what I'm arguing here is that there's a global infrastructure of Agro exporting that I I think Hannah mentioned in her talk earlier um which I'm calling the right to trade and that's institutionalized within the wto's agreement on agriculture it's facilitating a land enclosure by Foreign firms and States that's ensuring a new mercantilist vision of food security which is overriding the free trade system via direct investment in offshore food food production so instead of firms and countries relying on the the market they're actually going offshore and directly capturing um access to to land so they can grow food and biofuels and what have you and I'll talk about that so what I'm arguing is that the land grab reformulates food security as a neoliberal activism and by that I mean that um NE neoliberalism is about the market of course and I'm arguing that um these guys are overriding the market um but I'm also Al arguing that neoliberalism has um has opened up countries particularly indebted African countries Latin American and Asian countries to a lesser extent to the attractions of foreign investors coming in and Leasing and and purchasing their land and so there's a very interesting con conundrum that's associated with this whole process so what was food security well well Hannah talked a little bit about this and I'm not going to go over it very much she mentioned the um the vision that emerged after World War II and the FAO certainly had a notion of kind of a a decommodified understanding of um getting food to people who were hungry across the world in the postcolonial period but that Vision shifted to feeding the world with agrotechnologies and dietry and nutritional sciences and the whole emphasis on calories that um that Hannah mentioned also uh the key shift I think was that the US overrode the U unra which is United Nations um relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the world food board in 1946 um that were supposed to be public agencies sort of managing food Aid as well as managing the food world food system um and substituting a bilateral PL Public Law 480 food food Aid regime by which the United States by this time um as a consequence of the um coming out of the 1930s depression and the stabilization of American agriculture after the Dust Bowl in the 30s um the US was producing huge surpluses of food and so one of the the convenient ways of dumping that those surpluses was to sell it to sell those surpluses at concessional prices to strategic states on the Cold War perimeter in the third world States like Korea South Korea India Pakistan Israel Egypt Colombia um and so forth and so became a very effective way of of getting food to those countries to um to to essentially pacify urban populations to um to to build loyalty um and in George mcgavin's words in the late 1960s to um to anticipate future markets once those countries became once those cultures became um addicted to to Western foods and Hannah explained that process also and that's in in fact what happened um so after the food Aid regime was set up um to redistribute us food surpluses the Europeans then copied that model because through the Marshall Plan the US had um had brought the American industrial food system to Europe um and so by the 1970s Europe was beginning to produce surpluses itself and so there became this kind of big trade war between the US and the Europeans which has continued today up till today um and during this period also the Green Revolution were set in place in the in the 60s in particular um growing Staples um for urban populations grains in particular um and Then followed with um genetically modified Technologies um later on with um high value food stuffs that um have produced this kind of global Supermarket that we're now very familiar with and so th those are all part of the the the Agro export infrastructure in 1974 uh there was a a crisis a world food crisis for some of some of us in the audience will remember that food prices shot up at the same time as oil prices were were going up um now food insecurity um had um had emerged from the collapse of this food regime in other words what had happened was the US was selling more and more of its Surplus foods to Russia to the Soviet Union rather um through an agreement by President Nixon and of course that took food away from the third world countries and um prices shot up in in the western world and so there was a a new um world food Summit that that was established in 74 world food program was set up to provide Aid and then on the side parallel um complimenting that was the the elaboration of a um um a trading system where the uh General agreement on trade and tariffs met in the mid 1980s to try and stabilize the uh International Food trade because the US and Europeans were trying to you know dominate different markets and they were competing with one another and and prices were incredibly volatile so that uguay round that began in 1986 um culminated in 1994 and then in 1995 the WTO with the agreement on agriculture was set up to sort of institutionalize and stabilize this whole process of Agro exporting from the global north um and I'm not going to get into the details of that right now but the dominant ideology underlying this was essentially articulated at the beginning of the Uruguay round in 1986 and and this I I would argue represents the the notion of food security as a privatized system whereby food is moved from granaries or bread baskets in the north uh through the device of transnational food corporations to um hungry people and countries in the global South that's essentially how the system was set up um another way of looking at it is um the issue of dumping which I'll come back to so what's interesting is during this period that um public expenditure on agriculture in the global South fell 50% and those figures are quite extraordinary if you look at the direct payments to oecd Farmers that's the the northern farmers in 2006 125 billion um just in one year whereas only 3.9 billion are going to the um public expenditure going to the global South um the world Bank in its report in 2007 actually admitted deep in the deep in the in the report that um structural adjustment programs established in the 1980s um and through the and through to the present day essentially dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies supporting uh small farmers in the global South now what's interesting about this whole process is that agriculture uh was off the radar now from the from 1980 right through until 2007 when the world Banks World development report which comes out annually refocus on agriculture after 25 years of ignoring agriculture all of a sudden it came back into the center of um world Bank reporting and of course this was a period of uh food price crisis and and um food riots Etc it was a happy coincidence but I I think it um tells us something about how Agriculture and food are really um returning to to the center um and where to recognize that in fact agriculture is the foundation of civilization in in um in several different ways so um this cheap food regime I'd mentioned about The Dumping and what's interesting about that and I think this was mentioned earlier that what I call the corporate food regime was a system whereby subsidies in the north paid for by taxpayers enabled food food to surplus food to be dumped at artificially lowered prices in the global South driving farmers off the land um and this low price was institutionalized by the WTO and it has led to the displacement of small holders going to slam or aggro exporter States 1990s the FAO figures um were conservative Hannah mentioned 30 million I'm I'm being um uh bit more conservative here here saying 20 to 30 million Mexico um the figures are about 2 million campus enen was dispossessed since NAFTA was brought in the north North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 um it's quite extraordinary you know the debate about so-called illegal immigration from Mexico into this country always ignores the um um the enabling factors which have to do with the um the reduction of support for Mexican Farmers um as a consequence of signing onto NAFTA by the Mexican Government the privatization of communal lands which were established after the Mexican Revolution earlier in the 20th century um the incredibly heavily subsidized corn coming from Iowa um that is dumped in the Mexican markets making it very difficult for small farmers to compete um in the market so so these are all fascinating um structural um forces that um have have wrought um considerable havoc on the um small farmers across the world um so we have this crisis conjuncture uded to earlier small holders on their heels raising hunger Hunger levels Rising food energy prices food riots global warming financiers looking for non-industrial profit Frontiers development institutions looking for re Rel legitimation the markers of this period I think it's fascinating that all of these reports and this is not all of them but these are the key ones the Millennium ecosystem assessment came out in 2005 the stern review in 2006 and and um um the stern review made the point that climate change was the greatest market failure of all time um and the world development report I just mentioned which refocus on agriculture the international assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for development report came out in 2008 and Hannah mentioned that and then the world food Summit in Rome in 2008 uh which I went to but I was part of the alternative Forum the Tera pra Forum which um was was sort of meeting alongside the um the big shots um I mean we did have an audience um in in the fa FAO but this was a meeting of um csos social movements um agrarian land rights movements Etc and what we were trying to do was to put pressure on the FAO and the World Bank and the the corporate leaders to take very seriously this crisis in food prices and um was pretty much met with with de ears just as the IAD report was also because as um both Hannah and Rachel have mentioned I think agroecology was a central part of the IAD report basically arguing that um um business as usual is no is no longer an option that's a direct quote from the report uh and it's in this context that land grabbing exploded um and um by this year over 200 million Acres I think Hannah mentioned 227 Acres approximately the area of Western Europe this gives you an idea of the spiking of land grabbing I mean land grabbing is not new we know that it was was um essential to colonialism and of course we're sitting on grabbed land right here in in Chicago um and I'm I'm from Australia and of course I'm very conscious of um the fact that um the white settlers grabbed the land in 1788 um but nevertheless I think there's something very unique and different about this particular land grab that's going on today um well in the middle of the food crisis the New York Times had this editorial which I always find fascinating because they made the point that um cooking oil um became too expensive for very poor families um who grow much of their own food but have to buy oil in which to cook it now you're probably wondering why I'm bringing this up well if you look at um uh crude oil and palm oil here palm oil is um cooking o right you look at the um from 2007 essentially um they are totally connected um in in in the um uh those this this sort of syn synchrony of of prices which tells you something about how um food and energy um has become incredibly integrated now and what's interesting about that is that um Hannah pointed out that um um industrial agriculture is so dependent on fossil fuels I mean it's extraordinary when when Al Gore came out with his Inconvenient Truth I don't know if you remember but there was no mention of agriculture in there and agriculture has been measured as being responsible for at least 30% of greenhouse gas emissions um so what that tells us is not that our Gore is ignorant but the public discourse about the role of Agriculture um has been um remarkably ignorant and then Jeffrey sax came out with a new book called Commonwealth and I didn't buy it but I went to a bookstore and looked it up um and found that when he was when he was measuring sources of greenhouse gas emission no mention of Agriculture and this is a couple of years later it's extraordinary um so it just tells us about Urban civilization that we totally ignore the land where our food comes from because it become it comes from the fridge right or from Walmart or wherever you know what I'm getting at so um this is this is quite an interesting graph put together by a grad student of mine now oil palm you can see um is a sort of classic Industrial crop and what's interesting is that oil palm is used for cooking oil it's also used for biodiesel so palm oil the principal cooking oil produced in Southeast Asia now doubles as biodiesel to supply the rising European demand for green energy and the Europeans have mandated that um 10% of their energy um has to come from from biodiesel by 2020 first Paradox food Necessities for the poorest in the global South become fuel for energy intensive Northern consumers Paradox two the policies addressing energy and climate crisis encouraging biode diesels diesel exacerbate food and environmental crisis has been shown that biofuels other than um sugar um essentially don't produce um sufficient alternative energy to offset the the emissions that those industrial crops produce um and that's you know that's quite extraordinary to think about that that we we're talking about using these alternative green fuels when in fact we're not really solving the um the emissions problem but we're also upsetting the environment even more with the industrial crops and we're taking food away from Hungry people so the US also has its mandates for um biofuels and this gives you some sense of the the externalities that are associated with bofs um this is just telling you giving you some sense of the figures associated with corn production the extraordinary um influence that us traded corn has on world corn prices and when um the US government under George Bush U mandated um Rising ethanol use in this country um corn prices I mean corn distilleries um went nuts um corn prices well they didn't go nuts they went corn but um they um cor corn prices shot up and um farmers who are growing wheat and soy shift to Corn also because they're getting subsidies for this they're getting high prices for it so it has this kind of cascading effect and this is one of the reasons why the um price spike in 2007 2008 was so dramatic and those are the estimates there the World Bank estimated uh the US responsible for 65% of EG flation I can't remember which it was who it was Hannah or or Rachel mentioned um farmer Hannah I said Hannah Hannah said that far the trickle down effect of high high prices for food didn't reach the small farmers um those that did um did have the trickle down effect found that um they were being swamped by Rising seed fertilizer and agrochemical crisis I mean the profits that were made by the Agri bus company during that crisis were extraordinary and I I don't have the figures right here but if someone wants them I can get them um this I think sort of captures the uh the issue of biofuels that um I like to call them Agro fuels to remind us that um they're about um displacing food crops but the underlined sections I think are are important because they they show I think the way in which um an open market system in the in the world food regime and the these mandates for biofuels um naturally lead investors to invest in biofuels at the expense of uh local populations um having access to to their own to to food that they could grow so here's your average chicagoan right we don't have these kind of people in Etha um so in the context of this the land grab becomes uh increasingly important and and um people are developing coalitions to to address and fight the the land grab um I'm I'm involved in trying to set up a um a land an anti-land grab Consortium in the Americas um later on this summer um because I think that we feel that it's a it's a really um threatening Vector that uh is is uh threatens to undermine the um progress that's been made by food sovereignty movements around the world this gives you some sense of the um states that are buying and leasing land and here we're looking particularly at the East Asian countries and the Middle Eastern countries that are concerned to obtain sufficient food to pacify their urban populations in particular and if you think about the Arab Spring a good deal of the Arab Spring was um caused by Rising food prices and one only needs to go back and look at the history the recent history of Egyptian Agriculture and see the way in which the Egyptian government has substituted uh feed grain production and livestock production within Egypt um and has imported more and more of its basic grains from offshore so that what's being produced in Egypt is feeding relatively wealthy consumers and the poorer consumers are dependent on food importing which of course becomes problematic when prices go up and the big food exporting countries like Argentina and Vietnam and Russia um in particular um put export banss on in order to retain the food for their own population so the the whole process has again this cascading effect which is quite fascinating so the new land grab the patterns are over the last decade 60% has gone into biofuels 20% to food 20% to other areas um 70% of land grabbing is taking place in Africa um 2007 biofuels were the fastest growing segment of world agricultural Market um and it's quite extraordinary that um um my teachers Insurance pension fund um is investing in the land grab and um so um I'm a land Grabber also so the world food crisis led to these export bands intensified land grabbing um and the land grab is capitalizing these new aggro export zones of bioresource grabs speculative profit and carbon offsets that I'll mentioned so here's another one um last year in the New York Times oxan produced this report showing that this particular company that puts up eucalyptus plantations to sell carbon credits to polluters back in Europe was enabled by the Ugandan state to EV 20,000 people from their land and this is not an isolated pattern isolated episode this is becoming a pattern there's a new plan um in um in in the works to to to um to change African soil for carbon credits in other words for investors to invest in improving small farmer productivity around conservation farming um in return for carbon credits which will will be sold on the carbon Market to polluters back in back in Europe um it's an extraordinary um connection um that that uh actually puts agriculture at the service of this fictitious carbon Market which is really not um helping to reduce carbon emissions but it's financially very profitable so you have states in the world Bank helping to reclassify Peasant land you have offshore investment by Fin financiers and you have these um interesting conglomerates um this recombinant Capital um across Auto energy chemical Agri business companies and they're investing in these different Commodities and it doesn't really matter what commodity you're investing in you invest in the commodity that commands the highest price and what I call this sort of indiscriminate um cropping because what it's basically saying is that um what's being produced on the land it doesn't really matter so long as it's profitable and this has a huge impact obviously on on Hunger at these some of the bio economy products that are part of this um bioeconomy that's emerging it's becoming very profitable there's a shift that's going on away from the fossil fuel economy the attempt to use plant-based um products to um as substitutes now the bior resource grab that I've been talking about represents the transition from and this incredibly elegant quote from via Campina the massive Movement of food around the world is causing the increased movement of people back in 2000 they said that and I'm arguing that we should be rephrasing that now to the massive movement of capital or carbon credits around the world is forcing increased movement of people I mean the two things are working together obviously but it's interesting to think about what's happening um in that regard it's it's not so much about food anymore it's it's it's more about what you can um earn what what kind of value you can get from the land there's in institutionalization of these various codes of conduct which I don't have time to talk about the ra is the responsible agricultural investment principles that the World Bank has hammered out the voluntary guidelines are being put forward by the FAO in a much more Progressive Way they're looking after gender Equity issues um they're trying to privilege small farmers um to protect land tenure um on the part of um farming communities and and common lands and things like that but these are only voluntary guidelines they don't have the force of law um the UN rights rur uh has has referred to this code of conduct production as responsibly destroying the the world's peasantry which I think captures the point very well um this is just a quote from the voluntary guidelines to regulate land grabbing that just came in this year in March and you'll notice that um everything is voluntary um OB it's it's it's in the language of obligations and um down the bottom the voluntary guidelines are designed to strengthen the recognition of customary profit property tenure and address gender in inequity now I'm showing you this slide because I think that the the guidelines represent um certainly an advancement on the World bank's RI principles um but they also signal um a huge struggle that's going on in the FAO um that has to do with protecting the rights of small holders across the world and this is my last major slide here the FAO is undergoing these deliberations and I see and I've been involved in these in part um not not on a big scale but um I I've it's it's been very interesting to watch this unfold in the last 2 or 3 years there's a promising Trend to protect small farmers um the committee on food security was rebuilt about 2 or 3 years ago and um it's part of the FAO and the what's interesting about that is that they instead of just having member states have votes they now allow Civil Society organization to have a voice in that committee uh which I think is an extraordinary de development which U was pioneered or pushed driven by the international planning committee for food sovereignty securing this right to food principle and then we have the human rights repur on the WTO reform arguing that provisions of the a the agreement on agriculture treat food security as a deviation from the objective of agricultural trade liberalization so his whole shtick right now is to argue that the AOA um is is now redundant and that it needs to sort of catch up to the post food crisis world that we're experiencing right now and he's pushing the minimum human rights principle the question question for whose benefit is at least as important as the question how to produce more and I'm finishing off by making the point that ironically the land grab threat is concentrating the Paradox of industrial agriculture by empowering a global forum in Rome as well as food sovereignty movements as a paradigmatic alternative and somebody asked me to make some mention of uh the food sovereignty movement in in the United States so I took this from their recent platform um and um it's pretty much pretty pretty similar I think to some of the ideas of food sovereignty that both Hannah and Rachel have talked about but um very much emphasizing the importance of um anti-racist movements in the urban centers in this country and uh that is Malik yalini in the top right corner there um he's the uh sort of director of the um the Detroit the dtown urban farm that I visited yesterday thank [Applause] you thank you very much that was that was really great and I know you all three know each other but um you should feel free to speak Talk Amongst yourselves as well um so I have lots of questions and we don't have much time so I'll just ask a couple of them but I I want to start with um a more sort of broad conceptual question about the um idea of food sovereignity as as a framework and one thing you know that's really striking about the um the the the discourse around it is a kind of close attention to specificity that is a close attention to place to um Community environment to history right so to argue that not all you know food for example is schol right that um food has locality it has history it has um community and so what this introduces obviously is the sense that there's an alternative value system right there are other kinds of values um that come into play in addition to values which can be reduced to quantities right so whether that quantity is money or whether that quantity is calories right that there is a kind of ir reducible historical cultural or local kind of element right and that strikes me as a kind of interesting parallel to discussions in environmental uh environmentalist circles right where there have been attempts in in order to sort of sell the value of natural environment to put a value a dollar value on you know ecosystem Services right so to actually reduce these you know quite incommensurate value systems to a kind of number in an economic discourse and um and which completely loses the specificity of a particular location for example to say that the ecosystem servfaces of this Wetland are such and such it it says nothing about what it means to communities or what it looks like or you know the you know how how you met your first boyfriend there or whatever you know the story is um so I wonder um if there how the um sort of dominant Paradigm if if this is at all if you have some commentary on sort of engaging the dominant Paradigm of food security with ways of doing it without losing this kind of um sense of and alternative sets of values right so everyone's kind of alluded to that but and I have followup questions if that doesn't make sense necessarily so how how would the alternative framework of food sovereignty preserve that cultural diversity or how how to um you know engage with the large inter ational players governments and the sort of the global food system right um without necessarily or maybe maybe that's the right solution right is to speak in the language that's understood some some of the things that have been sort of scaled up are these ideas of uh uh Regional labeling denomination of origin type labelings especially in in Europe as a as a region one way is to been to to Value you know champagne can only be called champagne if it's produced in certain are this has been sort of applied to cheeses and milks and different kinds of meats and it's been a way to get actually quite a bit of economic value attached to these cultural specificities that has become then exported you know a lot of these now you know paraham is exported at huge profit to Elite slow food Gourmet consumers in North America so there's a certain danger in sort of trying to put that economic value on these very unique products because then then when they enter that Global Food Chain they become inaccessible quinoa in Bolivia is a perfect example people can't afford to buy quinoa in in Bolivia because it's become trendy in sort of as a healthy food in North America and almost all of it some the New York Times last year estimated 90% there aren't great figures on this but the estimate is 90% of kinima produced in Bolivia is exported so people can't even buy it not even if they had the money to buy it in um people aren't who are growing it aren't even eing it because it's so it's become so valuable but they're now exporting it so it's a hard question to answer because at a certain point you don't want people to stop going K how do you how do you capture that value within a local system without depending on the economic value being attached to it well there the other aspects of of self-determination and community and so on are things which seem to me much more difficult to reduce to a figure whereas you could say how much is you know how much is it worth people will pay how much more for this particular type of ham than some other type of ham so then you can say well the the value added is you know $12 a pound or something right but I mean the other issues the issues of the serenity issues really are not issues which are so easily brought down to what Phil brought up in the land grab I mean here you have sovereignty territorial sovereignty being put on the market so actually those things are all becoming marketized even those things we think that can't be you know our citizenship is now marketized through you know you're only a citizen if you have a certain income that's measured in GDP that's your contribution so I don't know if one of you have another response to that too but I think it's that's what's so scary is everything is being coming commodified in that way which is a real challenge to a local self-determination framework any other do you want to add to that add jump in on that or not not immediately I think it's I think it's a very difficult question um because uh Farmers groups or other you know social movements that are trying to achieve food sovereignty are still operating within the global food system as it currently stands so you can't uh it's it's difficult to get away from some of uh the the dangers of commodifying um things but I think that what food sovereignty approach is doing is trying to not make everything about the economic value but to to Reed Food Systems within uh local communities and to make people more aware of the cultural value the nutritional value the you know the con the social connections of food and doing so not make the dollar the sole reason why they are choosing to eat some foods over another so I I yeah I'd say a couple of other things there that um I was interested in hearing Hannah talking about quinoa and you know what's really interesting about that is it's not simply that people in the global North are pulling quino from um Bolivia um because it's it's now considered a trendy and it's it's it's a an item a valuable item to to eat here but um Farmers themselves have been um put on their heels so much by the what I would call the food regime that in many cases sometimes survival means having to participate uh in the short term at least in this in this commodity system um at at their own Peril because at some point if that system um intensifies of course it it will undermine their their ecological base so so that's a that's a real problem and I think that um ultimately one of the goals of food sovereignty is to to decommodify food as much as possible and if not um that certainly surrounded I I think um um Hannah mentioned or or maybe it was Rachel that um the idea of reemed the economy within the culture within the society within social rules is is a is a very strong part of that um but I I think about this issue in a slightly different way and I I think a little bit um more apoc apocalyptically along the lines that the industrial food system is not sustainable and one needs to anticipate its collapse um we can see signs of it collapsing um in in lots of different ways I mean more and more us farming is going offshore American farmers are going to Brazil land is cheaper than their their own land has been degraded those so those are some of the signs soil fertility is disappearing in this country so The Granary in the United States is is um has has a limited future so all of these issues I think are really important and um um before you start thinking that I'm just a gloom and doom Merchant what I see is the the local food movements that are cropping up all over the place the csas the farmers markets the you know the activity Urban agriculture in Detroit are all signals that um people are beginning to anticipate that they need to take care of feeding themselves and feeding their communities that the governments and the corporations are not going to do it for them and so I think that there's a lot of Hope just in that kind of um activity that's going on there's a process of repasz that's going on in California I have a graduate student who's gone out there to um the guy who made the graph actually um to to to do research on represenation young people are going back to the land um to to grow food for local markets because they're recognizing that um you know without access to land and food um communities are not are not going to survive so so a transition Town phenomenon which emerged in England and is now spreading across the world all of these I think are are parts of a a large scale movement that it's happening largely under the radar most people are not paying attention to it but um when you when you when you look at the data on how much Urban agriculture has just expanded in the last decade it's just it's just phenomenal so so I mean these are different ways of thinking about how to address the kind of question that Kathy's asking great so you've anticipated my next three or four questions which is okay so I'll sort of rephrase it and I want to make sure to ask and just building on what you just said um ask something that my students are particularly interested in and that is um I myself work in you know rural areas of Southern India so um the issues of peasants and small farmers and so on very familiar to me but then you know in teaching a class on food issues and urban agriculture in Chicago and as a non-sp specialist so how do we think about Urban in industrial Urban peasants exactly right so how do we translate a a powerful framework like food sovereignity into the a kind of you know industrial landscape like we find in us or Canada I know um that some of you have done some work on that so that I mean Detroit I mean is an interesting comparison because you might argue if you want to use a language of collapse that Detroit collapsed right so that Detroit is revived in a in in an amazing way as a consequence though of of a previous collapse right so is that so we have to wait till everything falls apart I mean and um then when the idea of um a right to produce as a precursor of a right to consume I have a good sense at least personally of what that would look like in a rural you know South Indian setting but what does the right to produce look like for our Urban peasants what does the right to produce look like for people on Southside of Chicago can I respond to that we have a lot of discussion about this in Vancouver because uh in Vancouver we have a very very active Urban coming from Vancouver Canada it's a very active Urban agriculture movement and also a very active uh rural sort of of per Urban farmers who are struggling to maintain their production systems and bringing their food into the City and on the one hand um in places like Detroit and places like Cuba where people are growing large amounts of food on vacant lots and and actually providing a significant portion of the food for the local food system the right the right to access that land the right to access vacant build buildings the right to ACC access vacant laws there's a very clear can see very clearly where the right to produce comes together with the right to consume in Vancouver we have an interesting conundrum where people are promoting Urban Agriculture and mostly it's Community Gardens and it's very kind of small pretty um to almost token amounts of food being produced and this has been sort of formalized into the into a theory and a concept of what's called Agricultural urbanism and and is being used by planners that if we can plan developments that include often token plots where you can plant a few flowers and a few carrot carrots that this can be an incentive to get zoning and bylaws change to incorporate more good agricultural land into the city so it's basically a license to pave you I went to a talk in the city of Syria which is the fourth largest city in Canada and it's a suburb of Vancouver and it has some of the best agricultural land in Canada Canada it's in the Delta farmlands right the mouth of the ocean it's very fertile and and they're just sprawling and sprawling and sprawling and they brought in Desmond desia who's at Columbia University who promotes the concept of vertical agriculture so skyscrapers which contain uh Hydroponics and a very sort of technified food production system and he's uh promoting this as a way to address food security as a way to grow food in the city for people in the city who need to eat food and and his idea that it's all sort of recyclable energy and this whole thing it's not never been tried so it's hard to say that how it will work but basically the mayor of Siri brought him in to try to convince people in the city council that Urban agriculture was the way to go so that behind the scenes additional planning could go forward to PVE over more rural agricultural land so we have to think about these things not in isolation but in how they work together like how does the right to produce where where should be F food produced where have people traditionally produced food how have they done so is that that way of producing food still relevant for today's society those are the kind of hard decisions that the societies are having to make where do we want our food to come from who should be producing it and those are those are choices actually that people have and that you you see that very clearly when stuff like zoning and and farmland preservation programs come come to the table well we weren't going to do that this time for a change actually for the first time ever let me just we're almost out of time we make sure we get a chance to chat with the speakers um just ask one more question then I guess is um and that has really to do with agroecology right um I'm I'm a big fan of agroecological Frameworks and you know as someone whose work is historical on on um you know what's thought sometimes thought of as traditional agriculture over hundreds of years it's it's it's sort of entertaining in a way or interesting to see the way in which Agri ecology has given a kind of scientific respectability you know to traditional agriculture that's been studied by anthropologists and geographers for a long time and sort of now we can say in sort of straight up scientific terms this it works you know intercropping uh you know um Pest Management you know and so on this is uh we have numbers now we can we can prove it and there's something so ironic I think about education programs that introduce reintroduce these traditional practices like um like intercropping right um and you know this is what um the kind of knowledge base that's the question actually is about the knowledge base right so um this is what's you know sometimes referred to as traditional knowledge or uh I wonder if there's a kind of agroecology you know parallel for traditional knowledge a way in which you know the kinds of long-term understandings that farmers have developed over Generations can be made made respectable you know in a in a world Forum yeah I think that's a really important question um because uh in Malawi for example traditional knowledge has been devalued um through colonial times and in the present day you know governments have exhorted malawians to grow like a modern farmer and a modern farmer is not an you know using traditional cropping practices it's using fertilizer and and uh hybrid ma seed and um I think there's a value to using agroecology as as a as a way of of merging Notions of indigenous knowledge with with uh you know scientific evidence that these kinds of practices that were practiced in the past actually have you know value um there's been tremendous devaluing uh through Colonial practices and and through the Contemporary age of of local knowledges one of the things that we found in our Agriculture and nutrition discussion groups and I talked about that with some students earlier today is that uh about three generations ago farmers in the north of Malawi used to grow a mix of grains not just maze but they grew sorghum they grew finger Millet they grew Pearl Millet and those indigenous grains are more drought tolerant and they grew them as a backup crop to ma Mae really became dominant in the last 100 years in Malawi um but that had been forgotten and it was actually in those Agriculture and nutrition discussion groups where the older women started to talk about hey we used to grow these grains and these were really great for when the rains weren't good so maybe we should think about trying them again and that's one of the reasons why you see an increase in sorum production in in the area so I think linking uh this agroecological approach to food sovereignty and to indigenous knowledge I think those are inter overlapping Concepts and and approaches okay just one very quick little thing that about the land Global land grab um because it's I think we've heard a lot about the the Chinese in Africa for example but not much about other countries um and of course uh also oil palm in Southeast Asia so I wonder if you could say just a little bit more about the just give us a clearer sense of the overall structure of this land grab and you know who's doing what to whom well there's there's quite a lot of controversy about the land grab because the the data is very difficult to to put together in a systematic way that um just in about two weeks ago I think Oxfam produced a um a report on uh what's called the land Matrix I'm not sure that Oxfam produced it I haven't actually had time to look at it because it's it's in the form of maps that um are interactive and you know that's not my my thing to do interactive mapping on on on the computer um wrong wrong generation but um um what it shows if you go and look look it up look up the land Matrix is um it shows the different sites around the world where land is being taken and who's who's investing in it and what have you but there's there's a controversy over um how much of it is actually being used and how much of it is actually just sort of sitting there idly um you know incurring value because um one of the one of the things that I find fascinating and one of the reasons why I think the land grab is so unique is that it's not simply about China or um Saudi Arabia going offshore to gain access to land for food for their own populations but it's um it's also about biofuels even more um but it's also about land speculation and I think that tells us something about financialization that because of the um the character of the neoliberal economy today which is premised on um not creating wealth but redistributing wealth if you stop and think about it the rising global inequality is phenomenal at the present time in this country I mean the Latin Americanization of the United States is just incredible um and it tells us something about um the so so if if neoliberalism is about redistributing wealth not producing wealth then investors don't have anywhere to go but to look to land as an investment for the for the long term because of climate change because of population growth um because of rising food prices because of rising Rising Energy prices because of water scarcity um so all of those factors I think um you know combine to to to expand the land grab and so so there's a lot of land that's being purchased or leased um that is not yet in use I I've been following this there's a there's a um a list serve called Farmland grab or one word Farmland grab. org that that gives out about every 10 days it gives out a listing of the um the key articles that have come out in the media all over the world on the land grab and I'm following what's going on in Australia and it's quite extraordinary the Chinese are investing in Australian land like crazy um because they know that in the long term that um they're best served by having access even if they're not using it now by but by by having access to um land offshore to um you know to feed to feed their population so so it's it's very difficult to sort of give you a clear geography of um of who and what is is doing the land grabbing but as a as a general phenomenon I think it speaks to a um a very clear crisis in the organization of the world food system on the one hand um and in the way in which agriculture is being essentially prostituted to investing um with no particular reason other than to earn value on that land and and that to me is um as as Zigler said back in in 2007 the UN Human Rights repur about biofuels that's a crime against humanity because it's not dealing with how we're going to manage the future how we're going to feed everybody and not just the rich which is essentially how the current Global Food system is organized only those people who can afford to buy the food can actually get the food but you know 50 to 50 to 70% of those of those of the world's population are not getting access to um adequate nutritionist Nutri nut nutritious food so that's a big issue and I think the land grab I think is um um is is the big is the elephant in the room okay well thank I thank our speakers very much the world beyond the headlines lecture series is a project of the University of Chicago center for international studies our nationally recognized programming is made possible with support from the Norman weight Harris memorial fund download recordings of other events and learn more about the world beyond the headline series at the center for international studies website c.u chicago.edu