Olivier De Schutter is spot on: How to address Power & Poverty in a crisis-prone food system
In less than 15 minutes the IPES-Food expert – also the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and currently the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights – provides a concise and eloquent global food system analysis. Yes, the kind of analysis we will be conducting for Uganda with our 40 future founders at Rootical.
We are faced with an inert system, an industrial food economy, with a LOT of vested interests.
❌ Farm workers are paid low wages
❌ Farmers receive low prices for their produce
❌ Industrial farming methods rely heavily on mechanisation and huge amounts of synthetic inputs
❌ At the cost of the environment and our health (#externalities, #truecostaccounting, #TCA)
The 3 levels of negative impact of these industrial farming methods are:
Major environmental impacts: loss of biodiversity, increased greenhouse gas emissions, damages to soil health – reducing the ability of soils to function as carbon sinks and water harvesting sponges.
Significant health Impacts: diets shifting to more heavily processed foods with greater role of animal proteins in our diets, which is making the populations sick, low income groups in particular.
Social impacts: shaped by the policies supporting this kind of farming where small farms are disappearing as they simply can’t achieve the economies of scale, can’t be competitive in this capital intensive – and subsidized – way of farming.
Image by Oleksandr Ryzhkov on Freepik
This all has been done in the name of mass production to satisfy the needs of mass consumption. It has been done in the name of producing as much as possible to keep prices low for everyone including low income households to be able to feed themselves. But it is failing!
There are 5 major social inequities that result from the industrial farming systems developed under the ‘Green Revolution’ flag.
Record high food prices and volatility by the merger between the energy (petrol) and food markets. Not because we are not producing enough or a mismatch between supply and demand. It is a result of having our food production heavily dependent on the use of fossil energies. When gas & oil prices go up - food prices also go up. We have heavily financialized our agriculture systems and markets.
Huge profits by very few agri-food corporations. Increased power concentration in the food system. Four major grain traders control 80% of the trade in cereals globally, for example. This includes the hedge funds & investment funds that speculate on the volatile food commodity prices.
Global increase in hunger, instead of receding. The Green revolution has increased hunger by forcing countries to invest heavily in cash crops for export, not local food. Instead of producing more food crops like sweet potatoes, sorghum and millet for feeding the local population, export products like rubber, cocoa, coffee, tobacco are rather pushed for, in order to reimburse a debt in dollars or euros to produce for global markets.
“Export led agriculture is a new form of colonialism”, Isaac Muhofa affirms. “This marginalises small scale farmers and local food systems, and instead results in a handful of producers controlling land and food resources to satisfy the needs of rich countries’ consumers”.
Nutrition inequality. Healthy eating is becoming expensive; also in wealthy countries. This makes them the first victims of obesity and associated non-communicable diseases such as type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and or gastrointestinal cancers.
The big food (commodities) – low prices movement, undermines Governments’ abilities in food governance, as the people’s awareness and support for inclusive and healthy food policies. “Big foods to reduce prices are not the answer – it's those smallholder farmers and farm workers across the globe who can save us to reduce food miles and produce healthy foods”, adds Isaac Muhofa.
Image by bedneyimages on Freepik
For change to occur, we need to meet 4 conditions:
Listen to the farmers & work with them to identify solutions that they can be part of.
Address food poverty not by food aid or charity but by strengthening social protection and increasing wages so that people don’t make food choices based on what is cheapest.
Address the power of big agri-food corporations: competition policy and antitrust-regulation is an important ally provided competition policies are not simply geared towards consumer welfare and keeping the prices low but rather also further protect the sellers from the monopolies and oligopolies of big buyers.
Debt relief to address the perpetuation of the colonial patterns in the food system, in which they have a huge debt to reimburse and are forced to produce raw materials that are processed by the “rich counties” and then sold back to them in the form of finished food products.
“Rootical would probably add a 5th point here: changing the way our agri-food companies are financed, managed and owned,” says Hannes Van den Eeckhout, “by exploring what steward ownership can look like in the context of Uganda.”
Olivier De Schutter concludes: alliances are crucial to win this fight over what we eat.
This article is a contribution by Isaac Muhofa, Venture Builder at Rootical, based on one of our heroes.
📺 Watch the full speech by Olivier De Schutter here.
Do you feel like you want to do something about these issues in Uganda? Join the Rootical journey as a potential founder and consider applying now.
