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Designing Food Systems To Protect Nature And Get Rid Of Hunger
By Vandana Shiva
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
http://www.zcommunications.org/designing-food-systems-to-protect-nature-and-get-rid-of-hunger-by-vandana-shiva
Excerpts:
Agriculture policy focuses on increasing yields of individual crops – not the output of the food system and its nutritional value. The food security system is based on the Public Distribution System, which does not address issues of nutrition and quality of food distribution. And nutritional programmes are divorced from both agriculture and food security.
The agrarian crisis, the food crisis and the nutrition and health crisis are intimately connected. They need to be addressed together. The objective of agriculture policy must not be guided by maximizing sales of costly seeds and costly chemicals which rob the soil, the farmers, and the people of nutrition. The objective of food policy cannot be based on promoting industrial processing of food. The objective of nutritional policy cannot be the creation of a malnutrition market. The chemicalisation of agriculture and the chemicalisation of food are recipes for denutrification of our food. They cannot solve the problem of hunger and malnutrition. The solution to malnutrition begins with the soil.
Hunger and malnutrition begin in the soil, and it is in the soil that solutions to hunger and malnutrition lie.
Industrial agriculture, sold as the Green Revolution and 2nd Green Revolution to Third World countries, is a chemical intensive, capital intensive, fossil fuel intensive system. It must, by its very structure, push farmers into debt, and indebted farmers everywhere are pushed off the land, as their farms are foreclosed and appropriated. In the poor countries, farmers trapped in debt for purchasing costly chemicals and non-renewable seeds, sell the food they grow to pay back debt. That is why hunger today is a rural phenomena. The debt creating negative economy of high cost industrial farming is a hunger producing system, not a hunger reduction system. Wherever chemicals and commercial seeds have spread, farmers are in debt, and loose entitlement to there own produce. They become trapped in poverty and hunger.
The agrarian crisis, the food crisis and the nutrition and health crisis are intimately connected. They need to be addressed together. The objective of agriculture policy must not be guided by maximizing sales of costly seeds and costly chemicals which rob the soil, the farmers, and the people of nutrition. The objective of food policy cannot be based on promoting industrial processing of food. The objective of nutritional policy cannot be the creation of a malnutrition market. The chemicalisation of agriculture and the chemicalisation of food are recipes for denutrification of our food. They cannot solve the problem of hunger and malnutrition. The solution to malnutrition begins with the soil.
Hunger and malnutrition begin in the soil, and it is in the soil that solutions to hunger and malnutrition lie.
Industrial agriculture, sold as the Green Revolution and 2nd Green Revolution to Third World countries, is a chemical intensive, capital intensive, fossil fuel intensive system. It must, by its very structure, push farmers into debt, and indebted farmers everywhere are pushed off the land, as their farms are foreclosed and appropriated. In the poor countries, farmers trapped in debt for purchasing costly chemicals and non-renewable seeds, sell the food they grow to pay back debt. That is why hunger today is a rural phenomena. The debt creating negative economy of high cost industrial farming is a hunger producing system, not a hunger reduction system. Wherever chemicals and commercial seeds have spread, farmers are in debt, and loose entitlement to there own produce. They become trapped in poverty and hunger.
