For the first time in history, the number of people in the world experiencing hunger has exceeded one billion this year, up by 115 million since 2007. Every six seconds a child dies because of hunger and related causes. One out of four children–roughly 146 million–in developing countries is underweight.[1][

Ironically, the overwhelming majority of the hungry population live in agrarian economies, mainly in the villages of Asia and Africa. And women, who are the world’s primary food producers, are much more affected by hunger and poverty than men. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calculates that three out of four hungry people live in rural areas. Half of them are farming families, surviving off marginal lands prone to adverse climatic conditions like drought or flood. One in five belongs to landless families dependent on farming and about 10 percent live in communities whose livelihoods depend on herding, fishing or forest resources.[2]

With no access to better livelihoods in the countryside, many migrate to cities in search of alternative employment. Most end up settling for precarious employment with meager incomes living in the bourgeoning shanty towns in the cities throughout the developing world where 25 percent of the world’s hungry population now live.[3]

Undernourishment leads to illness and death of people. But hunger is also a symptom of deeper maladies in society.

Manufacturing food insecurity

Centuries of colonialism ravaged the societies and destroyed the self-sufficiency in food of countries throughout Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. Agriculture was redirected from producing for the subsistence needs of the local population to cash crops demanded by imperial centers. Feudal landlords and colonial masters squeezed and starved the peasantry who comprised the vast majority of the population in the world.

In the so-called post-colonial period, the Green Revolution of the 1960s to 1980s was supposed to solve the problem of hunger. Research institutions funded by private foundations propagated new methods of farm production based on a package of high-yielding seed varieties (HYVs), chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation which boosted yields per hectare. This was promoted by the US and other major powers as an alternative to land struggles and Red Revolutions that promised land reform and development to the masses.

Cereal production did increase dramatically, particularly in Asia and Latin America where the Green Revolution package was widely adopted. In Asia alone, rice production almost tripled and wheat production increased 5.5 times between 1961 and 1999.[4] And yet there were only modest gains in reducing the number of undernourished people in the world, including in Asia where 65 percent of the world’s hungry are found.

The output gains resulting from the Green Revolution masked the deeper and longer-term ecological and social crises that it eventually helped create.

The spread of monoculture farms of HYVs based on a very narrow genetic base meant a significant loss of agrobiodiversity and reduced resilience of agro-ecological systems. Irrigation demand led to the massive reduction of water tables; increased chemical use led to greater salinization and soil erosion that reduced land productivity in the long-run.[5]

Smaller farmers often went into debt to be able to avail of the Green Revolution package of HYVs, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. So the peasantry was increasingly squeezed not just by landlords, but also usurers as well as transnational corporations who were supplying these new production inputs.

Inclement weather and other shocks resulted in unpayable debts which led many farmers to lose their land. Wealthier landowners took over more land, increasing land concentration and displacing millions of peasants to fragile hillsides and shrinking forests. The increased level of mechanization on larger farms also removed a large source of employment from the rural economy, increasing migration to urban slums.

So the lasting impact of the Green Revolution is not the increase in the world’s capacity to feed the hungry. Its real success lies in paving the way for the increased control by international monopoly capital over food production in the world.

This tightening stranglehold of monopoly capital over agriculture and the global food system was deepened, extended and accelerated by neoliberal restructuring of the global economy during the 1980s and 1990s.

Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forced indebted third world countries to remove subsidies for staple food production, dismantle commodity price controls on staples like rice and corn, reduce the availability of credit (where it existed) to local farmers and generally starved the countryside of public expenditure support.[6]

Unfair trade rules enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and bilateral trade agreements forced developing countries to reduce tariffs, remove quantitative restrictions and reduce support for domestic production, including agriculture. On the other hand, the advanced industrialized countries continued to subsidize their own agricultural production and dumped their surpluses in the third world.

Poor countries turned to exporting minerals, cash crops and other primary products or low-value added manufactures in order to earn the foreign exchange to pay for rising imports and mounting debts. The consequence of this neoliberal restructuring has been the weakened capacity of developing countries to produce food for their own populations and the deprivation of hundreds of millions of people of the means to access food.

The case of Haiti is a perfect example. Over 30 years ago Haiti produced nearly all the rice the country needed. But it lost its rice self-sufficiency after procuring a foreign financial loan from the IMF which forced it to liberalize its market, causing the flooding of cheap subsidized rice from the US. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country, including disguised food aid, that many stopped working the land. But when global food prices spiked in 2008, rice prices soared beyond what the majority of Haitians could afford. This provoked riots that claimed at least five lives and brought down the government in 2008.[7]

Feeding on hunger

On the other hand, neoliberal restructuring of agriculture has increased monopoly capitalist control over agriculture and the entire food value chain from seeds to supermarkets.

Almost three decades ago, there were thousands of seed companies in the market. Now only 10 companies control two-thirds of the global seed market and seed sales. Only 10 pesticide companies control 89% of agrochemical sales. And one should note that the top six agrochemical manufacturers are also the seed industry giants.

Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Groupe Limagrain dominate 44% of the commercial seed market in the world. Nestle has a virtual monopoly over the global dairy market since 2004. Dole Foods and Chiquita, two US companies control almost 50% of the banana market.

Food retail trade is also controlled and dominated by a few giant grocery or supermarket giants. According to the ETC, the combined grocery retail sales of the top 100 global food retailers amount to US$1.8 trillion in 2007 or 40% of all grocery retail sales worldwide. Supermarket giant Wal-Mart accounts for 10% of the grocery revenues earned by those belonging to the top 100 and it accounts for 25% of the revenues earned by those on the top 10.

While the world is going hungry, these giant agribusiness and biotech companies are reaping millions of dollars in superprofits due to their monopoly control over grains and seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and other farm inputs. Monsanto for one reported in 2008 that its net income for three months up to February 2008 doubled over the same period in 2007 or from US$543 million to US$1.12 billion.[8] Cargill’s profit, on the other hand, increased by 86% from US$553 to US$1,030 billion over the same period, while the Mosaic Company, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, increased its earnings from US$42.2 million to US$520.8 million.[9]

Monopoly capitalist control of agriculture has created a profoundly flawed global food system that produces too much (unhealthy) food for those who can afford it, while depriving those who are hungry and poor–including those who produce and process the food. It has deepened the decades-old crisis of agriculture and food production in underdeveloped countries rooted in the legacy of feudal land monopoly, the landlessness of farmers, the backwardness of their tools and production, and persistent exploitative relations such as tenancy, usury, overpricing of inputs by TNCs and traders, and underpricing of farmers’ produce by traders and middlemen. All these are compounded by neglectful governments that would rather support elite interests than uplift farmers’ conditions.[10]

This is the state of the global food system that has engendered the current food crisis which no amount of talk at the highest political levels of global governance (such as the World Food Summit) can even begin to address without changing social relations and fundamentally re-orienting existing institutions and policies.

Upholding Food Sovereignty

This fundamental re-orientation must begin by upholding food sovereignty as the core principle behind food and agricultural policies at the local, national and international levels.

At the global Civil Society Organizations’ parallel forum during the World Food Summit in 2002, farmers and social movements defined Food Sovereignty as:

“...the right of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labor, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies.”[11]

People’s access to and control over productive resources is the foundation of food sovereignty. Hence genuine agrarian reform is necessary in different countries in order to redistribute land, capital and other productive assets and ensure access to water, seed, energy sources and other inputs to those whose livelihood depend on these resources. This also requires breaking the monopoly control of agribusiness corporations and landlords over these resources as a matter of equity and social justice. The primary beneficiaries of such reforms should be small producers particularly women and other marginalized sectors.

Agricultural production must be weaned away from chemical-intensive, large-scale industrial monoculture farming towards ecologically sound, sustainable methods of production which rely on local ecosystems and traditional knowledge as well as appropriate farmer-controlled technologies. Public institutions must help develop and encourage the adoption of crops and farming methods that are adaptable to site-specific conditions; improve soil and water conservation; increase small-scale farm diversification; safeguard biodiversity; reduce the use of fossil fuels and other inputs; and improve labor productivity by, among other means, encouraging cooperative and collective effort among small producers. Irrigation, storage facilities, roads, transportation and other support infrastructure must also be assured. Patenting life-forms and genetic resources must be prohibited.

Food production must be primarily geared towards meeting the needs of local communities. Access to food must be premised on the absolute right to food of every person – food that is nutritious, safe, culturally appropriate and affordable. The realization of this right must not be contingent on the purchasing power of consumers. At the same time, the right to decent work and a living wage for all must be ensured by governments.

Food sovereignty has no meaning without democratic participation. This means promoting the voice and participation of peasants, farmers, workers, indigenous people and other marginalized groups in society, especially the women among them, in identifying needs and priorities, formulating policies and evaluating programs and projects that would truly ensure the realization of the peoples’ right to food. At the international level, it means respecting the national independence of countries and their right to craft their own policies while ensuring that major powers do not dominate or control multilateral fora and decision-making bodies.

Only by respecting the right and the power of communities, peoples and nations to determine their food and agricultural policies can the world begin to rid itself of the blight of hunger.

Endnotes

1    United Nations World Food Programme. http://www.wfp. org/hunger
2    Ibid.
3    Ibid.
4    Norman Borlaug. The Green Revolution Revisited and The Road Ahead. Special 30th Anniversary Lecture, The Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo, September 8, 2000. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/borlaug/index.html
5    Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset with Luis Esparza, 1998. World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Oakland: Food First Books and New York: Grove Press.
6    Paul Quintos. “The new aid agenda for agriculture.” Reality Check, January 2008. http://www.realityofaid.org/rchecknews.php?table=rc_jan08&id=1
7    Bill Quigley. The U.S. Role in Haiti’s Food Riots, counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04212008.html
8    Lean, Geoffrey, “Giant Food and Biotech Corporations Make Billions of Profit from Growing Global Food Crisis,” at < http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_12088.cfm>.
9    Ibid.
10 Rosario Bella Guzman, “The Global Food Crisis: Hype and Reality,” PAN-AP, Issue No. 7, July 2008.
11 Political statement of the NGO/CSO Forum on Food Sovereignty, WFS FYL. 2002

Paul Quintos is a Policy Officer of IBON International. Minerva Lopez is a staff officer of PAMALAKAYA, a national fisherfolk organization in the Philippines.