Global: Hunger and Global Warming

When, as we speak, it is been discussed in Copenhagen how to reorganize human activities that accelerate climate change in global scale, threatening the life of a large number of people living in this planet, it is impossible to leave aside the issue of hunger, which since 2005 it has once again started to spread in the world. The solution for this obscene problem is closely linked to climate change. The meeting of the parts called by the United Nations for Food and Agriculture- FAO, in mid November, in Rome, attracted very little attention from rich countries, whose heads of State abstained from participating, with the exception of Italy, the host country.

But what is the scale of the problem? In 2009, FAO estimates more than one billion the number of people underfed, in other words, one in each habitant of the planet. Asia contributes with 640 million “starving” people, Africa and Middle east with 310 million, Latin America with 53 million and amazingly, rich countries with 15 million. Nowadays, every six seconds a child dies of hunger in the world and the perspectives in the short term are frightening. According to Olivier de Schutter, FAO Special Rapporteur for the right to food, “all the conditions for a new food crises (sic) in the next two years have been put together, it is not a matter of knowing IF it will occur, but rather when” (Source: Le Monde, 16/11/2009). In spite of the statement of the Rapporteur, the political weakness of the FAO can be verified when we look at the projections for hunger reduction, with the pact of the country members, which it was repeatedly revised for worse: in 1991, a target was established to cut it in half, by 2015, the number 840 million malnourished. In 2005, the target was raised from 420 to 750 million, but there was no reduction of the malnourished but rather a rise to one billion people (Refer to image Bellow, published in the conservative paper Le Figaro, 16/11/2009). Besides, the Rome meeting closed without rich countries committing to the demands of Jacques Diouf, FAO General Secretary for 15 years, neither in the terms of financial contributions requested nor in regards to the proposal for “Hunger Zero”, the first of the Objectives for the Millennium, established in 2000. Ironically, we also live with half a billion people affected by health problems originated by excess or inadequate diet, many of them are poor, and can only access foods to “appease” hunger, but which are not nourishing enough and cause problems such as obesity and other illnesses.

During the FAO meeting, Via Campesina and other social organizations organised a parallel event, where they intensified the defence of the concept of “Food sovereignty”, counterposing “Food security”, a divergence that transcends semantics. In practice, “food security” as it is understood by governments represented at FAO, it is based in making new financial resources available for the intensification of the so called “Green Revolution” and its fundaments are the intensive development of monoculture in large land holdings - involving irrigation and the use of chemical fertilizers – the use of selected seeds, which very quickly was blurred with genetically modified seeds, agro-chemicals, produced and controlled by a very limited number of companies.

In its turn, the proposal for “food sovereignty” restated by organizations that congregate small farmers, landless rural workers, peoples of the forests and fisher folk, among other groups, is based on the “fundamental human right of all peoples, nations and States to define their own systems and food production policies”, in order to assure everyone’s access to adequate and healthy foods, which respect people’s cultural diversity, including the food and linguistic knowledges and traditions. The organizations that attended the parallel meeting drafted a document “ Policies and actions to eradicate hunger and malnutrition”, available at the site www.eradicatehunger.org in Spanish, French and English, presenting in broad detail the gearings of the dominant system for food supply, as well as alternatives to overcome the problem of hunger in the planet. The document discusses: a) deficiencies and limitations of the dominant process of food supply for the world population; b) a conceptual vision for food sovereignty; c) access ways for sustainable agriculture; d) relationship between environment, climate change and agrofuels; e) relationship between markets, price policies and agricultural subsidies; f) the role of States and international institutions.

The autumn of the Green Revolution

Until the beginning of the 19th century, the Green revolution was exalted as the one responsible for the transformation of India from a country, strongly dependent on food imports into a nation with record world production of rice, wheat and other foods for exports, even though millions of Indians were malnourished. Time has shown that the techniques employed acted as a true dropping of productive arable land in India, which slowly lost its fertility. If at first, agrochemicals worked as defensives against some agricultural pests, in time they strengthened them, the arise of new pests, micro-organisms malnutrition, parts of the fauna and flora responsible for natural soil fertilization, besides affecting pollinating insects which contribute for the productivity of the crop. Therefore, it is requires the increasing use of fertilizers to compensate the drop of fertility of soil, with the consequent rise of production costs. On its turn, intensive irrigation had the double side effect of significantly lowering the levels of underground water and salinizing the soil. Simultaneously, the use of “selected seeds”, controlled by a few companies, has reduced the diversity of crops and the actual environmental biodiversity.

As a consequence, countless Indian farmers find themselves in no position to honour the commitments signed with Banks that financed the “modernization” of the agricultural activity they developed. Some sell the land, causing a sharp concentration of land, others opt out for suicide, and the numbers are rising among small farmers, in the opposite trend to national indexes.

The dominant food supply system has also demonstrated to be a powerful fuel for global warming. It is estimated that one third of all green house effect originate from agriculture and cattle ranching, as a consequence of the intensive use of chemical fertilizers produced from oil, the expansion of the meat industry and the destruction of green coverage for the production of agricultural commodities, which have to be transported to increasingly longer distances: it is easy to buy Indian rice in any Brazilian supermarket, as well as Mexican lemons in a countryside town in France.

Beneficiaries of the international food system

It would be appropriate to ask: who benefits from a productive system that leaves one billion people in food destitution and which contributes for global warming? Well, the nine large transnational corporations from the food sector have multiplied their profits during the period in which food crises has aggravated. Between 2006 and 2008, Monsanto, Cargill, Syngenta and Bayer tripled their earnings. Potash Corporation, the largest fertilizer company in the world, made US$ 5 billion in 2008, against “just” US$ 1 billion in 2006! (Source: Via Campesina: “Small scale sustainable farmers are cooling down the Earth”)Your browser may not support display of this image.

There are others players betting on the game of hunger. In the parallel meeting in Rome, worker´s organizations centred efforts in denouncing the policies that have been adopted by several countries on the world, where agricultural production is insufficient to feed their people, and therefore they are renting or buying agricultural land in poor countries in Asia, Africa and South America. The main “buyers” are Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India, Japan and China. The main countries which are having their land used for the production and export of food are Sudan, Indonesia, Uganda, Philippines and Argentina, nations where expressive population contingents have food difficulties. Due to the return of this colonial form of agricultural production ( or large land holding globalization), companies and banks from rich countries – such as Goldman Sachs in the US, Louis Dreyfuss in Holand and Deutschbank in Germany– produce reports about opportunities and investment risks and facilitate the purchase of farming land

In other words, the greater the need for food, more profitable the investments in land acquisition. It is reasonable to expect people’s reactions in countries where their territories are being given out, including international courts. It is not an accident that Saudi Arabia, one of the leading countries in the use of foreign lands for the production of food, “generously” covered the total cost of US$ 2.5 million for holding the FAO Conference in 2009.

Brazil wastes food

In Brazil, despite the implementation of the Zero Hunger Programme and other initiatives from society, it is estimated that there are 14 million malnourished people. One of the routes to be taken for overcoming the problem is the reduction of the high index of food wastage in the country.

According to Embrapa – Research Brazilian Company in Agriculture and Cattle Farming, published in Desafios magazine, Sept/Oct 2009, from the total wastage in the country, 10% occurs during harvest; 50% during food handling and transport; 30% in supply centres; and the last 10% are diluted between supermarkets and consumers.

Now the Brazilian Institute of geography and statistics – IBGE estimates that 67% of cargo in Brazil is transported through roads, the least advantageous for long distances. Transferring gravity pole areas of grain production from Southern and South-eastern regions to centre-western regions, conjugated with very bad road conditions in the country, makes transport costs for one bag of soy beans from Mato Grosso to the export harbour to reach nearly 50% of the cost of the grain. A research from the national Supply Company – Conab for crops between 1996 and 2002 estimates the grain loss in approximately 10% of production, which corresponded to 9.8 million tons. The wastage in a tropical climate country is aggravated by deficiency in storage and cooling structures for perishable goods.

Therefore, in spite of being a short term solution for the reduction of wastage in the expansion of Brazilian food offer, the government has allocated only R$ 500 thousand in 2010 for developing studies to carefully detail the reasons and alternatives to solve it.