The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)'s 2021 report notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. This number could increase by nearly double before the Coronavirus pandemic is contained, according to projections from the UN's World Food Programme.

This hunger is not caused by overpopulation as most people think and argue, it’s because agribusinesses are pushing small farmers all over the world into city-slums where access to food depends on income. World hunger is caused by a food system that is unequal, profit- driven and agribusiness dominated. In this food system, the basic need for food for millions is sacrificed to satisfy the hunger for profits of the few. As a result, billions do not have the means to buy food. Historical research shows that famines are not mainly caused by a lack of food supply, but by the lack of the means to access food. One third of all food produced is either lost during processing and transportation or it is wasted.

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To counter these problems, a solution has been proposed. The concept of food security is defined as “economic access to food and guaranteeing food to all people through income and food distribution policies”. Food sovereignty was defined by a food/agriculture that secures - ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'.

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Environmental groups such as La Via Campesina and others held the International Forum for Food Sovereignty in 2007 wherein, they elaborated six core components of food sovereignty:

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I. To center the needs of people rather than the needs of capital

II. To value food producers, namely by creating policies that value peasants and enrich their livelihoods.

III. To strengthen food system by ensuring that local, regional, and national networks collaborate with and value those who produce food and those who consume food.

IV. To localise the control of food production; in other words, to give those who produce food the right to define how to organise the land and resources.

V. To build knowledge and skills, which insists on taking local knowledge about food production seriously and further developing it scientifically.

VI. To work in harmony with nature by minimising harm to ecosystems through agricultural practices that are not destructive to the natural world.

 

Corporate exploitation of peasants has been documented throughout history and has been known to occur. Liberalised trade in food creates distortions in its production and distribution.

 

Trade liberalisation poses the problem of cheaper imports, causing a fall in crop prices but also bringing more volatile prices by the entry of international prices into domestic markets. This liberalisation threatens the crop production in developing countries like India in order to fit the demands from developed richer states.

 

Hedge funds, investment banks and pension funds overpower agriculture with speculation via commodity derivatives and these methods are unconcerned with the basics of the agricultural market. This illustrates and encourages the money power to distort the food production system. This distortion is rooted in land grabs by agribusiness corporations, such as Unilever and Monsanto, that destroy the relation between people and land by sparking huge mass movements of populations.

 

A consensus was formed with farmers and peasant groups to create steps to a just food production and distribution system. Through the demands and knowledge of various peasant and farmer groups and their understanding of the system, the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research has distilled these points in solving world hunger through a new and just food system.

 

The first step would be to give economic power to the masses. This can be achieved by implementing agrarian reform for peasants so that they have access to land and the resources to farm that land, instituting local self-government in rural areas,

where peasants wield the political power that is needed in order to shape policies that benefit their lives and that shield their ecosystem; developing suitable forms of production that promote collective action to take advantage of economies of scale; strengthening systems of social welfare so peasants are secured during bad times.

 

More than the distribution of economic power, the second step would allow for development and implementation of measures to ensure that the agricultural system is remunerative. This can be achieved by preventing the disposal of cheapened foodstuff from food systems in the Global North that profit from huge subsidies, expanding the access of rural farmers to affordable bank credit & providing relief from informal lenders; creating policy to guarantee floor prices for agricultural produce; developing publicly funded, sustainable irrigation systems, storage facilities, and similar infrastructure.

 

The final step would be to design a democratic international trade system. This can be achieved by democratising the World Trade Organisation by greater national participation of countries in the Global South and peasant organisations in the making of rules for deliberation and the process of rulemaking and greater objectivity in trade dispute mechanisms. Results would indicate a decreasing reliance upon the Global North platforms for shaping policy and setting claims organisations such the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes are controlled by the Global North and completely work in their interest.

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Written by: Sumer Gupta

Edited by: Vidhi Channa

Designed by: Jiye Park

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