Real Solutions to the Global Food Crisis

A few words worth repeating...

Published on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

A Women’s Declaration to the G8: Support Real Solutions to the Global Food Crisis

by MADRE

To:

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda (Japan)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Canada)
President Nicolas Sarkozy (France)
Chancellor Angela Merkel (Germany)
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (Italy)
President Dmitry Medvedev (Russia)
Prime Minister Gordon Brown (United Kingdom)
President George Bush (United States)

This year, the world’s eight richest governments (the G8) meet
against the backdrop of a global food crisis. With prices for all major
food commodities at a 50-year-high, world leaders are discussing
pervasive “food shortages” that threaten to destabilize dozens of
countries. But worsening hunger is the result of cost inflation, not
any absolute food shortage. In fact, the world produces more food than the global population can consume.

The root cause of the food crisis is not scarcity, but the failed
economic policies long championed by the G8, namely, trade
liberalization and industrial agriculture. These policies, which treat
food as a commodity rather than a human right, have induced chaotic
climate change, oil dependency, and the depletion of the Earth’s land
and water resources as well as today’s food crisis.

Yet, in the search for solutions, the G8 is considering expanded
support for the very measures that caused this web of problems. Calls
for more tariff reductions, biofuel plantations, genetically modified
crops, and wider use of petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical
pesticides are at the forefront of discussions in Japan.

These measures cannot resolve the global food crisis. They may, however, further boost this year’s record profits for agricultural corporations. There are viable solutions to the food
crisis, but they will not emerge from a narrow pursuit of the financial
interests of multinational corporations.

For nearly 30 years, the G8 has insisted that corporations replace
governments in shaping and implementing national agriculture policies
in the world’s poorest countries. This demand has not maximized
efficiency or reduced poverty, as promised. In fact, it has ushered in a sharp rise in hunger and malnutrition. As the World Bank itself acknowledged in its 2008 World Development Report, the private sector has failed as a substitute for government when it comes to agriculture.

In fact, corporations have no legal duty to reduce poverty or fight
world hunger. Governments, including the G8-and not the private
sector-are the ones mandated to resolve the global food crisis. The international human rights framework,
which governments are obligated to uphold, is the starting point for a
global New Deal on agriculture. In particular, the human rights of
small farmers-the majority of whom are women-and rural and Indigenous
Peoples must be protected in order to meet the twin challenges of
feeding people and protecting the planet.

As women’s human rights advocates working with communities on the
front-lines of the global food crisis, we call on the G8 to promote a
worldwide shift from industrial to sustainable agriculture and to enact
the economic policies needed to support this transition.

The Imperative of Sustainable Agriculture

In April 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) released an independent, four-year study
conducted by over 400 experts. The study was co-sponsored by the World
Bank and multiple agencies of the United Nations and endorsed by over
60 governments. It confirms that large-scale, chemical-intensive
agriculture is a major contributor to pollution, climate change,
deforestation, social inequity, and the destruction of diversity, both
biological and cultural. The study urges a fundamental overhaul of
agricultural policy towards sustainable farming, including small-scale
and organic agriculture.

The IAASTD report follows numerous other credible studies
demonstrating that small-holder organic farms can produce enough food
for the global population and avoid the environmental destruction
associated with industrial agriculture.

We emphasize that support for small farmers must include a focus on
women, who produce most of the world’s food. Indeed, in much of Africa,
where the food crisis is at its worst, women grow and process 80
percent of all food.

However, the capacity of these farmers is badly undermined by laws
and customs that discriminate against women. In many countries, women
who grow the food that sustains the majority of the population are not
even recognized as farmers. They are denied the right to own land and
excluded from government programs that facilitate access to credit,
seeds, tools, and training.

We call on the G8 to:

• Recognize gender discrimination as a threat to global food security;
• Uphold the rights of agricultural workers under the International Labor Organization’s Conventions;
• Support national policies that provide small-scale farmers with
  access to land, seeds, water, credit and other inputs and that uphold
  the rights of farmers to make informed decisions about land use and
  food production.

The Imperative of Sustainable Economic Policies

A global New Deal on agriculture requires not only different modes
of farming, but a new policy environment for food production and
agricultural trade. National policies, including investment, funding,
and research, as well as international trade rules, must be redirected
in support of small farmers and sustainable agriculture. Towards that
end, the G8 should:

1. End Food Dependency

The G8, through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, has
required developing countries to reduce support to small farmers, cut
investment in food production, slash tariffs that protected domestic
agriculture, dismantle the marketing boards that once stabilized food
prices, and shift land use from food production to export agriculture.

Developing countries were forced to accept these demands as
conditions for loans needed to repay their debts to the financial
institutions, development banks, and governments of the North. Yet, it
is the G8 itself which is largely responsible for the debt crisis,
brought on by massive lending to illegitimate regimes and decades of
costly, ill-conceived development projects.

The economic policies demanded by the G8 have destroyed the
livelihoods of small farmers in the Global South, leaving millions of
people at the mercy of international commodity markets to be able to
buy food. The shift from food to cash crops has meant that women, who
are responsible for growing food, have lost access to valuable farm
land. As a result, rural families have lost a main source of food and
nutrition.

Economic policies driven by the G8 eventually transformed
food-producing countries in the Global South into net food importers.
In the 1960’s, developing countries enjoyed an agricultural trade
surplus of US $7 billion a year. Today, almost three out of four developing countries are net food importers, although they have the capacity to feed themselves.

We call on the G8 to:

• Move beyond the partial commitment it made to debt cancellation at
  the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland and enact immediate and unconditional
  debt cancellation for all developing countries;
• Allow governments to determine their own agricultural policies in consultation with citizens;
• Institute international mechanisms for market stabilization that
  protect the livelihoods of farmers and guarantee affordable food for
  all people;
• Endorse the call of Jacques Diouf, Secretary General of the United
  Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, for developing countries to
  be enabled to achieve food self-sufficiency.

2. Change Trade Rules

Trade rules demanded by the G8 and administered by the World Trade
Organization have bankrupted millions of farmers in poor countries,
undermined the role of women in agriculture, and contributed to the
current food crisis.

The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture forbids
governments in the Global South from providing farmers with subsidies
or low-cost seeds and other inputs. These farmers have been turned into
a “market” for international agribusiness companies selling seeds,
pesticides and fertilizers.

Women, who are traditionally responsible for conserving, exchanging,
and breeding agricultural seeds, are threatened by the WTO’s Trade
Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement. By granting patents to
corporations, the WTO transfers ownership of seeds-the basis of all
agriculture-from women farmers to multinational corporations.

The WTO has allowed wealthy countries to subsidize corporate farming
by $1 billion a day. The subsidies enable companies based in the Global
North to sell food internationally at a price below the cost of
production. Recently, British International Development Secretary
Douglas Alexander estimated that subsidies to Northern agribusiness
cost farmers in the Global South $100 billion a year in lost income because small farmers cannot compete with the subsidized cost of imported food.

We call on the G8 to:

• Recognize that food is first and foremost a human right and only secondarily a tradable commodity;
• Support a process for an international Convention to replace the
  WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture. Such a Convention must uphold the full
  range of human rights standards and should implement the concept of
  food sovereignty, whereby communities control their own food systems;
• Respect the rights of small farmers to save and exchange seeds between communities and internationally;
• Initiate a conversion of national agricultural subsidies from
  support for agribusiness to incentives for sustainable farming,
  including small-scale and organic farms.

These demands reflect the rights and priorities of the world’s food
producers, in particular, rural women, who are directly responsible for
feeding most of the world’s people.

Central to our policy proposals is the understanding that global
challenges regarding food, climate change and natural resource
depletion are interrelated and must be resolved together. Policies that
seek to solve one aspect of the problem by deepening another will only
worsen the crisis as a whole. We see this dynamic in the US and
European Union decision to subsidize the conversion of food crops into
biofuels: the move to address energy demands at the expense of food
needs has greatly exacerbated the current food crisis.

We urge the G8 to ground integrated solutions to the food crisis in
the framework of human rights. That framework, rather than further
pursuit of corporate profits, has the strongest potential to yield
policies that can resolve the global food crisis in tandem with the
other urgent issues of climate change and development being addressed
by the G8.

Sincerely,

Vivian Stromberg
MADRE
USA

Rose Cunningham
Wangki Tangni Women’s Center
Nicaragua

Adriana Gonzalez
LIMPAL
Colombia

Sandra Gonzalez Maldonado
Comité de Trabajadoras de la Maquila Bárcenas; Women Workers’ Committee
Guatemala

Anne Sosin
KOFAVIV - Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim; The Commission of Women Victims for Victims
Haiti