Food Rebellions!

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There has been much debate about the causes of this crisis; the volatile price of oil, the agrofuels boom, impacts of climate change, increased demand for meat and financial speculation on grain all clearly played a part. But what both of these books argue is that these are just proximate causes. Determining the ultimate causes involves tracing the fate of agriculture in the global South during the past 50 years and shining a light on what amounts to a corporate takeover of the world’s food systems.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the 'green revolution’ unleashed on the South, a system of industrialising agriculture particularly through the use of pesticides. Although this increased yields in the short term, particularly in Asia, it left a legacy of debt and environmental pollution that nevertheless benefited seed and pesticide companies enormously and also saw agriculture concentrated into fewer hands.

Although encouraged by the World Bank, the green revolution was a state-led process. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s, the state fell out of favour and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund used the power they had as a result of the debt crisis to force developing countries to junk state marketing boards, agricultural subsidies, grain reserves and other 'market distortions’. Agriculture was reorientated towards cash crops for export.

More recent free-trade agreements with the North have dealt the final blow, undermining local production through a flood of subsidised food products from the US and Europe. Thus the scene was set for the current crisis.

Walden Bello's The Food Wars explains this process very well, taking the Philippines, Africa, Mexico and China for a chapter each, as well as examining the role of agrofuels in the current crisis. A final chapter looks at the alternatives, in particular profiling the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, and its proposal for democratic control of the food system via 'food sovereignty’.

Patel and Holt-Giménez, meanwhile, take a very similar approach (their book even has a foreword by Bello). Yet while The Food Wars concentrates on the economic history of the crisis, and probably beats them on clarity here, where Food Rebellions! really comes into its own is in the substantial space which it devotes to solutions.

Their book is full of evidence that smallholder agriculture based on ‘agroecology’, basically organic or near-organic farming, can actually be more productive than large-scale industrial monocultures. Scientific research into improving such forms of agriculture struggles to receive funding, while patentable technologies like GM get vast sums. Nevertheless, adaptations of traditional peasant knowledge have led to the development of more efficient sustainable farming in recent years – techniques which have then been spread through initiatives such as the ‘Campesino a Campesino’ movement in Latin America.

The call for a local, sustainable approach to farming from the environmental movement has become familiar in the UK, but it isn’t just agriculture’s contribution to climate change that means this approach matters. The resilience of agriculture in the face of climate change, especially in the South, depends on the diverse cropping of agroecological farms, which can be highly adaptive in the face of climate change impacts. Yet the biotech firms and their allies, who include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are pushing GM crops as a part of a new ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Both these books are useful in making the argument that we don’t need GM to ‘feed the world’ as Hilary Benn has recently suggested.

Agricultural globalisation has been a disaster for the climate, for biodiversity, and for the small producers of the global South, many of whom have been forced to abandon farming and try to scrape a living in the mega-slums around major cities. Yet peasants are now organising against this immiseration, and insisting that they and not the North’s official development experts have the solutions to the food crisis. As in so many areas of our lives, while these solutions may have technical and cultural sides to them, in the end they come down to winning the battle of democracy against the power of capital.

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These are some of the questions that came to my mind when I read the synopsis of this book and –true to the questions that it inspires – Food Rebellions has provided a very interesting exploration of the international food crisis and the different dimensions of our society in which it is rooted. It brings together critical questions of sustainability, assesses international systems and organisations like the World Bank, the IMF and multinational corporations and shows how they are failing people in their conduct, analyses contemporary food security issues – and all through a prism of a sustainable, people-first model.

The book strikes a good balance between delving into our present unsustainable food systems and introducing different voices from those who are working towards more sustainable agricultural practices.

The first half of the book tries to unravel the story behind the world food crisis, exploring how capitalist industrial production methods are pushing the rest of the world to adopt practices that are not conducive to the welfare of their people or the environment. It also explores the false hopes inspired by new technology initiatives, from the 'Green Revolution' to genetic modification to agro-fuels. It reflects well on how we are opening such a big window for technological interventions to take over our spaces, while devaluing traditional practices and wisdom like organic farming and small bio-diverse farms, which may in fact be the only way to meet our needs in a sustainable way. It reaffirms a faith in organic and sustainable agriculture with compelling support such as studies claiming that organic agriculture could actually increase global food productivity by as much as 50 per cent. It also opens an important discussion on how the World Bank and the IMF have been key players in manipulating the ‘developing countries’ to open up their markets, which has allowed countries like the USA to dump their excess food, thus disabling smaller agricultural producers. It separates the proximate and the long term policy flaws that have led to this global food disaster.

The second part of the book brings a ray of hope, with inspiring insights into the importance of small, organic, bio-diverse farms in moving towards a sustainable future. It looks at how this crisis can be an opportunity to change and rectify our relationship with the means by which food is produced. It explores the African food situation with the struggles of the Green Revolution and offers agro-ecological solutions. The book builds a very strong case for adopting greener practices of production and allays concerns about insufficient yield caused by archaic production methods. It ends with very interesting appendices of voices from all over the world, demanding a secure and sustainable food order.

Throughout the book the authors use many examples to substantiate their arguments, presented in the form of text boxes, which are quite an interesting read on their own, and make the narrative very relevant to real problems around the world.

For me some important lessons to emerge are in the realm of international policy. It was very enlightening to understand the role of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, which forced ‘free markets’ on all their ‘beneficiaries’ and thus played a crucial role in inducing this crisis. Another inspiring lesson concerned initiatives in the USA, where on one hand their policies are inflicting unsustainable practices on the rest of the world, but on the other there are US farmers who are reverting to greener methods and building a healthier relationship with their food.

I felt that the book struck a good balance between building an argument, providing a lot of examples to substantiate views, and offering some possible solutions to the growing crisis. What really impressed me was the way in which it brings together economic policy, multi-national players, technological interventions, people and their suffering, and the possibility of addressing the crisis with definite solutions. It is a commendable effort at building a holistic critique of the current food system, and a strong argument for more emphasis on food sovereignty.

One of the book’s strengths is its straightforward dialogue: the language is accessible and makes complex structures easy to relate to. It is organised well with two clear sections – the first exploring the crisis and the second looking into solutions. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in issues related to food distribution/markets, the current global crisis, the role of capitalism and international organisations and hopes for an alternative future. I would also recommend, since food is such an intrinsic part of our lives, society, culture and economies, that this book be read by everyone with a concern for our present, our future, and our rights – and specifically our right to food.

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The book first presents the forces behind the world food crisis. Broadly, 'increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes… The future of our food systems is being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, speculators, and global monopolies.' Strong historical evidence is provided to support this argument and many tables, graphs and information boxes are utilised to further simplify the information. This is one of the most appealing features of this book. It is well-written and easy to understand to start with, but the incorporation of extra information features serves to condense and illustrate the authors' points succinctly.

Specific attention is given to the impact of the food crisis on gender roles. This 'side effect', if you will, is a major problem in developing economies and has huge ramifications, not only in the economic sphere. The authors emphasise the severity of this issue. The global food crisis not only leads to economic problems for affected societies, but also causes social crises. Raj Patel introduced this in his brilliant book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System(London: Portobello Books, 2009). I still recall in great detail the information on the massive increase in suicides among Indian and Mexican farmers. Why is this occurring? Because of the economic policies and institutions that control the food market.

Part Two of Food Rebellions! tackles solutions to the crisis. These are laid out clearly, and focus on grassroots involvement first and major economic involvement second. While many key economic players will be quick to dismiss these solutions, it is imperative that society starts to include the voices of those who are directly affected. The authors write that, in the United States, 'low income and historically marginalised communities already disproportionately suffer from diet-related disease and food insecurity. These communities have taken the lead in food justice struggles nationwide.' By using a bottom-up, two-way communication model focused on local communities, change can happen.

The book ends on a positive note: 'The food crisis has brought us together. We can end the injustices that cause hunger. There has never been a better time.' Through the use of solid research and convincing, well thought-out arguments, this book offers us a means to an end of the global food crisis.

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PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What were the primary materials and experiences informing your work?

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: At Food First, we’ve been following the food crisis for over 30 years, during which time many many people from the social movements have taught us where the true roots hunger and environmental destruction lie. We have included their insights and their testimonies, inspiration and vision for food justice and food sovereignty in this book.

More frivolously, one of the experiences that mattered most in the writing of this book was Eric’s back injury – he couldn’t lie down or stand up for a month, and over Christmas he spent the entire time reclined in a chair writing, turning a good manuscript into a great one.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: How would you define the term 'food sovereignty'?

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: Food sovereignty seems to mean all things to all people, and that’s no accident. The widely accepted definition speaks of ‘people’s right to control their food and agriculture policy’. What it calls for is a democratisation of the food system. This turns out to be revolutionary: What, after all, is real democracy? It’s a situation of radical equality in which every person, regardless of income, race, gender, class or, ultimately indeed citizenship, can shape the politics and policy of the food system.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: A major theme of your book is the need to genuinely democratise both food systems and the decisions taken around them. You discuss the tension between calls for a 'green revolution' from international organisations like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and those of the continent's grassroots movements for African agroecological alternatives. How would you describe these competing views on developing agriculture?

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa starts from the unimpeachable observation that African agriculture needs investment. But from that point, it rather rapidly goes off the rails, developing a model of agriculture that is driven not by the needs and successes of the world’s poorest farmers, but by the world’s richest foundations. The rise of ‘Philanthropy capitalism’ is necessarily at odds with democracy – in the latter, people decide their own fates. In the former, the fates of the world’s poorest people are shaped by the richest men. For instance, the ‘We Are the Solution’ campaign seeks to address the food perspective from a genuinely African perspective (not merely parroting policy written in Seattle, relying on foreign dollars). The farmer federations and women’s organisations launching this campaign see the solutions to hunger in Africa as addressing both the structural causes of hunger as well as advancing African agroecological practices to production.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: As a challenge to the often-assumed superiority of top-down and executive knowledge around agriculture, what will be the key means of promoting grassroots voices and ensuring the centrality of local expertise in the future of the global food system?

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: AGRA, like the original Green Revolution, is a campaign for the corporate colonisation of African food systems. African farmers and civil society are mounting a counter-campaign, based on food sovereignty and agroecological solutions to hunger, rather than genetic engineering. One of the misconceptions around food sovereignty is that it is in some way anti-science, that it mistrusts expertise. On the contrary, if we are to overcome the ecological disasters that industrial agriculture has wrought, we’ll need a great deal of science, research and expertise. Ensuring that this expertise is democratically controlled isn’t some political pipe dream – it’s already happening. Eric’s work on the Campesino a Campesino movement in Central America is a study of a living example of this democratic exchange of expertise, but it’s happening in Africa too, from Mali to Malawi.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Your chapter on Africa touches on the need to 'cultivate farmers' enthusiasm' in the effort to mobilise the continent's agricultural majority and ensure that smallholders themselves develop their own sustainable methods.

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: Enthusiasm is that quality which can’t be bought, but without which there is no social change. All [Bill] Gates has is money, but what he can’t buy is enthusiasm. We need to amplify the voices of the farmers’ federations and the women’s organisations who are enthusiastically advancing genuinely democratic solutions to the food crisis.

With the dominant role of international NGOs and the imposition of external knowledge over the last 30 years or so however, the experience for many African people has been a sustained loss of confidence in their own knowledge and capacity for solutions. If people are accustomed to looking outside for help, how can they be encouraged to trust in local knowledge and look first to themselves?

We need to be careful about a reactionary impulse to head to ‘100 per cent African’. Capital can hide its power behind local faces – take AGRA, for example, in which ‘African owned’ might mean ‘owning the Africans’! Luckily, there are so many examples of both successful traditional and agroecological approaches to food production in Africa that people don’t have to look any farther than the continent to find the solutions to their problems. Of course, international solidarity matters, but the terms of that solidarity need to be mutual, not unilateral. What we try to do is tell the stories of agroecological success more broadly, in the face of outside intervention in African agriculture. We’re not opposed to exchange, but we’re concerned to broaden the number of people who set the terms of that exchange.

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: What would you say are the changes required in the immediate future to tackle the food crisis and move towards a sustainable end to world hunger?

The immediate concern is local and sustainable purchasing of food aid (which the US doggedly resists, and which the EU dances around), but the shift toward sustainability requires changes both in the international agricultural trade environment – specifically, agriculture needs to be removed from the WTO so that countries can develop their own policies around how to feed themselves – and in the relationship between science and the public. At the moment, agricultural science is increasingly privatised, and for solutions to be sustainable, they need to be socially and democratically owned.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What do you see as the connection between the arguments laid out in Food Rebellions! and Raj Patel’s now famous book Stuffed and Starved?

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: We see them as very complementary. Stuffed and Starved was finished at the beginning of 2007, and it was aimed at people who might not have thought about food and the food system before. It’s very much an introductory book. What Food Rebellions does is take the ideas in Stuffed and Starved to the next level, with more theoretical rigour and more up-to-date information from struggles around the world.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: And where to from here? What are your plans for moving this campaign forward? Does the new Obama administration offer hope?

RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: Food First is working to look behind the myths of a green revolution in Africa. Bending the Obama administration to a sensible agriculture position is going to take a lot of work, though. They’re very much in the thrall of conventional agricultural interests. Obama was, after all, the Senator from Illinois, an agribusiness hub – he writes about his regret at having to stop flying in the Archer Daniels Midland jet (though he did get to meet ‘the people’ when he flew commercial first class).

We’re working on another book that will invite representatives from social movements around the world to think strategically about how we implement the promising and sustainable solutions which are currently on the margins of international food policy, so that they can become the mainstream. This book talks about the root problems and solutions, and in the next book people will discuss how exactly we’re going to get there.