Food - A Saner Way

Cuidelines for an alternative food future

FOOD AS A RIGHT: Food must be treated like other human rights. It can no longer be used as a source of speculation for profit or as a political and economic weapon.

In emergency situations, food should be made immediately available to those in dire need of it. Its distribution should be taken out of the market entirely if the market cannot provide it at a reasonable cost.

Food is essential to life, and productive food-growing land should not be devoted to biofuels, extractive industries, or urban sprawl just because they make more money.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY: The global food system must be re-geared so each country prioritizes its own agricultural potential rather than relying on trade controlled by global corporations.

For many years, Southern agriculture has been starved of resources, outreach services, and appropriate research. The World Bank has led the rest of the development funders in abandoning the farmers in the South over the last two decades. While international trade in (fair trade) foodstuffs should continue, it must take a back-seat to a more self-reliant approach.

More emphasis on local and regional markets will make domestic consumers less subject to the manipulation of grain and rice prices on the Chicago Futures Exchange.

ECO-AGRICULTURE: Agriculture needs to be significantly de-industrialized. The current high-tech approach is squandering soil fertility and a scarce water supply, turning what should be renewable resources into non-renewable ones.

We cannot replace the building blocks of life with nitrogen fertilizers, toxic agrochemicals, and manipulated seeds much longer. This system gobbles up a third of the world's scarce fossil fuels, making it a major source of climate deterioration.

Instead of following the dictates of corporate high-tech, agricultural science needs to focus on approaches that support small farmers, the soil, and other resources on which agriculture depends. We cannot afford another "green revolution" based on the centralization and privatization of the very basis of life.

FARMER-CENTRED AGRICULTURE: Driving farmers off the land is no way to produce food. In the South, it is far better to have someone producing food than eking out an existence in an urban slum.

The dis-economies of scale which accompany large corporate farms are neither economic nor ecological. It is by now a commonplace that small-scale intensive agriculture (long practised in places like Japan) makes more efficient use of land and often produces higher yields.

Farmers working on small-scale holdings are much more likely to have an intimate, caring knowledge of their land than the poorly paid agricultural workers of an absentee landlord. Optimal farm size will vary, depending on crops and ecosystem, but we can no longer afford the large-scale monoculture of recent times.

HEALTHY DIETS: Fast-food restaurants, instant meals, factory farms, junk food - all have come to make up an industrial diet associated with many dietary diseases. We need to rethink this diet; place meat - which consumes so much of the world's grain supply - more on the periphery of our meals; and be willing to pay farmers to grow good organic produce.

We need more choice in our diets: monoculture is endangering biodiversity by reducing the varieties of fruits, vegetables, grains and meat we eat to a few standard varieties. Here we can learn from the South, with its wider range of edible foods, many of which are still taken from the wild.

- Richard Swift.