Intense over-farming means there are only 100 harvests left in the soil of the UK’s countryside, a study has found. Meanwhile we are also seeing a sharp decrease in bio-diversity in the UK which has a disastrous knock-on effect on our wildlife. Lack of pollinators means reduction in food.
Professor Nigel Dunnett, also of the University of Sheffield, said that in order to ensure we can produce food for future generations we must start to see towns and cities as the future of farming. “We need to dramatically rethink our approach to urban growing and use the little space we have as efficiently as possible. Cities must become places of food production.”
The problem is not lack of food, rather its distribution. Access to food is dictated by wealth and profit rather than need. "Free trade" is promoted over the Right to Food. Half the world’s grain now feeds factory-farmed animals and a huge proportion of food crops are turned into bio-fuels to fuel cars, taking food from the hungry.
The power of seed and pesticide companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta, of gigantic supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, and of grain traders such as Cargill has grown so strong that they exert a massive influence over national food policies. This ensures that agribusinesses still receive billions of dollars in subsidies and policy support. The language surrounding the usual trade agreement deal is about ‘protecting' investment', reducing ‘unnecessary' barriers and ‘harmonising' regulations. In principle, the notion of trade that is free and fair sounds ideal. But, across the world, the dominant ideological paradigm allows little scope for either. Markets are rigged, commodity prices subject to manipulation and nations are coerced or destabilised in order that powerful players gain access to resources and markets.
The solution to global hunger is within our grasp, but it requires a fundamental reform of the global economic system: a wholesale shift from industrial farming to agro-ecology and food sovereignty. The urgent need for wholesale system change presents an unprecedented challenge. People are realising that the ownership of our food supply has been consolidated into the hands of a few powerful multinational corporations and that the abundance of 'cheap' food comes at a high cost to society, to individual rights and to our collective future. The industrialisation of food has had fundamental health, environmental and economic consequences that can no longer be ignored. By placing a high value on cheap food we have unwittingly allowed corporate agribusiness to outsource the true cost of production onto society. The result has been the pollution of our rivers and streams, damage to citizens' health and a severe breakdown in our rural communities where small farmers have been pushed off the land.
It is clear now however that, for every death from hunger, there is no genuine technical cause. For every child's life that hangs in the balance, sufficient food has always been available within a matter of hours' - if not in some cases minutes' - distance. It’s not a logistical problem or a matter of distribution. Neither is it an error in the market: the system is operating as it is meant to. The countries of Africa have been a major target for land-grab with agriculture on an industrial scale reaping substantial profits for investors. Corporate agriculture, however, is not about food production or satisfying the needs of the undernourished or downright starving but about producing profit. How long can it be at this rate before its limits are reached – dispossessed millions starved to death in favour of a tidy accumulation for the few?
But isn't the market meant to send signals between consumers and producers ? That's its claim to fame surely, that it efficiently lubricates supply and demand, matching the two. In reality the signal which the market often responds to is not one regarding supply and demand but the one identifying profitability. The entire edifice of the money system is not geared to satisfying the needs of the majority for even the simplest means of living, such as food. Instead the objective is nothing more or less than profit, and it is an objective shared by the small minority who own and control the means of producing wealth to the exclusion of the rest of us.
If you are an individual capitalist, why sell your entire warehouse of grain for a small profit per unit ? And just to watch the market price drop? Far better to make just as much profit by restricting the amount you sell, and keeping the price high, and make just as much profit, while keeping your stock levels up for making a killing during the next famine. The invisible hand of the market can send all the signals it wants, but there is often an invisible hand picking up a telephone to tell fellow capitalists to keep stuff back, restrict sales and keep prices up. This society offers little security - food or otherwise - except the security to make profit.
“We’re still talking about much slower population growth than we just came through,” said University of Michigan population researcher David Lam. “The world population doubled between 1960 and 1999, and we’re never going to do that again. The population is leveling off and it’s going to eventually level off under any of these scenarios, whether that’s before 2100 or after.”
Statistician and sociologist Adrian Raftery of the University of Washington stated in response to the 12 billion figure: “A rapidly growing population will bring challenges. But I think these challenges can be met.”
This report is a good jumping off spot
The important caveat is that we need a rational socialist society to be sustainable. Under our current, wasteful, ownership-based economic system, population growth is a huge problem. Each additional person becomes a “consumer” that buys, owns, and discards most of the material objects they come into contact with. In Africa, no less than half the food produced is destroyed before it reaches its local marketplace: with refrigeration and good roads, the developing world could avoid this horrendous waste. Without challenging this wasteful system, population is a huge problem. The idea of population control when the population that needs “controlling” aren’t even the ones making the biggest impact seems rather authoritarian to me. We can reduce our environmental impact while still extending access to life-sustaining resources to all without having to discuss inhumane ideas of how to depopulate the planet.
The big question is how to move from a model in which everyone recognises the profit imperative whether they love it or hate it; profit on a large scale or small, profit from agribusiness or market stall, from pure accumulation to simple survival, from the greedy to the needy, profit which favours minority over majority in all areas. Everyone recognises it but far fewer question the possibility, the sense, the imperative of implementing a different model, not a few reforms here and there to give temporary help to this sector or that, but one which takes into consideration the needs, aspirations, ideas and ideals of the many rather than the few.
Food production should be about meeting the self-defined needs of people, not a profit-motivated venture for corporations, agribusinesses and their boards and shareholders. Food security is about meeting the dietary needs of all people, at all times, enabling them to live a healthy life and not to be constantly in fear of the vagaries of the market. Only by addressing the monetary element, by coming to terms with the absolute necessity of removing it and any profit motive from the food supply will farmers, consumers and all the peoples of the world have the security of knowing that sufficient food is available to all, at all times and in all situations. Food security for all the world's citizens is just not possible in a capitalist system. This land is our land. Reclaiming the commons for the peoples of the world is a vital part of the socialist revolution. Given that the number of people suffering and dying from the effects of world poverty it should be obvious that we must go far beyond mere protests, organise to abolish the profit system and replace it with a world of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for needs. Such a socialist world would be able to stop people dying from hunger immediately and rapidly increase world food production to reach a point where every person on the planet would have free access to sufficient good quality food to maintain good health. Now, more than ever, the struggle to rid the world of famine starts here – not with the begging bowl and pleas for charity, but by breaking the criminal conspiracy of the capitalist system.
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