Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In the global South, many small farmers and landless peoples who can
no longer produce their food migrate to urban areas, helping to create
what Davis (2006) poetically calls a
Planet of Slums
. Others are pushed
toward migration to the United States and Europe, where they continue
to experience high rates of hunger (Wirth, Strochlich, and Getz 2008).
Still others attempt to continue farming on increasingly marginal lands,
creating environmental damage through massive soil erosion (Holt-
Giménez 2006; Stonich 1994).
Prior to structural adjustment, food purchasing in the global South
could largely be done through domestic markets. Nations such as Mexico
(Stone 2009) and Haiti (Quigley 2009) maintained federal policies that
kept them largely food self-suffi cient. The mandated elimination of such
programs, and the opening of markets to outside commodities, increas-
ingly ties formerly agrarian people's food needs to transnational com-
modity markets. Often, subsidized commodity crops from the United
States and Europe undercut the cost of local production. But when trans-
national prices rise, the global poor have little protection, creating the
risk of massive hunger. This occurred during the world food crisis begin-
ning in 2007, in which the price of food staples rose rapidly. Analyses
of the highly debated causes of this crisis include increased oil prices
(Magdoff 2008), fi nancial speculation (Lappe 2009), the increased use
of crops for biofuels (Elliot 2008), and what Jaroz (2009) refers to as
the feedgrain-lifestock complex. The global food crisis is largely a crisis
of distribution rather than production. According to Josette Sheeran, the
head of the UN's World Food Program, “There is food on shelves but
people are priced out of the market” (quoted in Borger 2008).
As a result of this vulnerability, food rebellions erupted throughout
the global South (Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009). The United Nations
and wealthy governments offered billions in aid, but have not acknowl-
edged any link between transnational monetary policies and food short-
ages. Indeed the U.S. Congress blocked a proposal to make some food
aid in cash, rather than U.S.-produced commodities, in order to support
local production (Hanley 2008).
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Governments in the global South have
instituted temporary food subsidies, price controls, and export bans, but
no long-term reforms.
Against this backdrop of structural limitations, a variety of interre-
lated movements, networks, policies, and projects have emerged that
posit ecologically and economically sustainable agriculture as a means
to social and environmental justice. Each pursues the goal of food sov-
ereignty, positing both food access and the ability to defi ne food and
