Peter Rosset*

 

Around the world it seems more and more
that the time has come for La Via Campesina
(http://www.viacampesina.org). The global alliance of peasant and
family farm organizations has spent the past decade perfecting an
alternative proposal for how to structure a country's food system,
called Food Sovereignty. It was clear at the World Forum on Food
Sovereignty held last year in Mali, that this proposal has been
gaining ground with other social movements, including those of
indigenous peoples, women, consumers, environmentalists, some trade
unions, and others. Though when it comes to governments and
international agencies, it had until recently been met with mostly
deaf ears. But now things have changed. The global crisis of rising
food prices, which has already led to food riots in diverse parts of
Asia, Africa and the Americas, is making everybody sit up and take
note of this issue.

But, what are the causes of the extreme
food price hikes? There are both long term and short causes. Among
the former, the cumulative effect of three decades of neoliberal
budget-cutting, privatization and free trade agreements stands out.
In most countries around the world, national food production capacity
has been systematically dismantled and replaced by a growing capacity
to produce agroexports, stimulated by enormous government subsidies
to agribusiness, using taxpayer money.

 

It is peasants and families farmers who
feed the peoples of the world, by and large. Large agribusiness
producers in most any country have an export "vocation."
But policy decisiones have stripped the former of minimum price
guarantees, parastatal marketing boards, credit, technical
assistance, and above all, markets for their produce. Local and
national food markets were first inundated with cheap imports, and
now, when transnational corporations (TNCs) have captured the bulk of
the market share, the prices of the food imports on which countries
now depend have been drastically jacked up.

 

Meanwhile the World Bank and the IMF
have forced governments to sell off their public sector grain
reserves. The result is that we now face one of the tightest margins
in recent history between food reserves and demand, which generates
both rising prices and greater market volatility. In other words,
many countries no longer have either sufficient food reserves or
sufficient productive capacity. They now depend on imports, whose
prices are skyrocketing. Another long term cause of the crisis,
though of lesser importance, has been changing patterns of food
consumption in some parts of the world, like increased preference for
meat and poultry products.

 

Among the short term causes of the
crisis, by far the most important has been the relatively sudden
entry of speculative financial capital into food markets. Hedge,
index and risk funds have invested heavily in the futures markets for
commodities like grains and other food products. With the collapse of
the home mortgage market in the USA, their already desperate search
for new avenues of investment led them to discover these markets for
futures contracts. Attracted by high price volatility in any market,
since they take their profits on both price rises and price drops,
they bet like gamblers in a casino. Gambling, in this case, with the
food of ordinary people. These funds have already injected an
additional 70 billion dollars of extra investment into commodities,
inflating a price bubble that has pushed the cost of basic foodstuffs
beyond the reach of of the poor in country after country. And when
the bubble inevitably bursts, it will wipe out millions of food
producers throughout the world.

 

Another important short term factor is
the agrofuel boom. Agrofuel crops compete for planting area with food
crops and cattle pasture. In the Philippines, for example, the
government has signed agreements that commit an area to be planted to
agrofuels that is equivalent to fully half of the area planted to
rice, the mainstay of the country's diet. We really ought to label
feeding automobiles instead of people as a crime against humanity.

 

The major global price increases in the
costs of chemical inputs for conventional farming, as a direct result
of the high price of petroleum, is also a major short term causal
factor. Other factors of recent impact include droughts and other
climate events in a number of regions, and a conspiracy involving the
CIA to destabilize certain governments not well-liked by Washington.
In Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, the private sector and the TNCs
are working hard to export food items sorely needed by the local
population, or otherwise prevent them from reaching market, as a way
to delegitimize the leaders of those countries.

 

Faced with this global panorama, and
all of its implications, there is really just one alternative
proposal that is up to the challenge. Under the Food Sovereignty
paradigm, social movements and a growing number of progressive and
semi-progressive governments propose that we re-regulate the food
commodity markets that were de-regulated under neoliberalism. And
regulate them better than before they were deregulated, with genuine
supply management, making it possible to set prices that are fair to
both farmers and consumers alike.

 

That necessarily means a return to
protection of the national food production of nations, both against
the dumping of artificially cheap food that undercuts local farmers,
and against the artificially expensive food imports that we face
today. It means rebuilding the national grain reserves and parastatal
marketing boards, in new and improved versions that actively include
farmer organizations as owners and administrators of public reserves.
That is a key step toward taking our food system back from the TNCs
that hoard food stocks to drive prices up.

 

Countries urgently need to stimulate
the recovery of their national food producing capacity, specifically
that capacity located in the peasant and family farm sectors. That
means public sector budgets, floor prices, credit and other forms of
support, and genuine agrarian reform. Land reform is urgently needed
in many countries to rebuild the peasant and family farm sectors,
whose vocation is growing food for people, since the largest farms
and agribusinesses seem to only produce for cars and for export. And
many countries need to implement export controls, as a number of
governments have done in recent days, to stop the forced exportation
of food desperately needed by their own populations.

 

Finally, we must change dominant
technological practices in farming, toward an agriculture based on
agroecological principles, that is sustainable, and that is based on
respect for and is in equilibrium with nature, local cultures, and
traditional farming knowledge. It has been scientifically
demonstrated that ecological farming systems can be more productive,
can better resist drought and other manifestations of climate change,
and are more economically sustainable because they use less fossil
fuel. We can no longer afford the luxury of food whose price is
linked to the price of petroleum, much less whose industrial
monoculture production model — with pesticides and GMOs — damages
the future productive capacity of our soils.

 

The time has truly arrived for La Via
Campesina and for Food Sovereignty. There is no other real solution
to feeding the world, and it is up to each and every one of us to
join mobilizations to force the changes in national and international
public policy that are so urgently needed.

 

* Peter Rosset is based in Oaxaca,
Mexico, where he is a researcher at the Centro de Estudios para el
Cambio en el Campo Mexicano. He is on the Board of Focus on the
Global South. This is his own translation of the original, at
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/05/09/index.php?section=opinion&article=025a1pol