Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
food system. The global food events of 2008 may have demonstrated the turning of a
global tide - the point at whih the expansion of the market-based solution to global
food provisioning reahed its absolute limit and is now shrinking in the face of mul-
tiple ruptures at its now-decreasing margins.
This insight has not been absent from global debate, although its proponents
have generally been somewhat disempowered. The unjustifiable pervasiveness of the
hungry, the dispossessed and so many other 'externalities' within the business-as-
usual model has engendered an 'opposing' side founded in smaller scales, agro-eco-
logy, and food-related social movements. (We lay out this dihotomy here only as a
means to get to the heart of the mater.) International groups like La Via Campes-
ina and the Landless Peasants of Brazil (MST) articulate the position of farmers and
rural communities in the Developing World. Both 'sides' agree on the goal of feed-
ing the world. But the global movements for food sovereignty writ small, encompass
social action to atain more access to international meetings, the assurance of fresh
water, recognition of environmental limits and tehnical training for female farmers
among others. This 'blessed unrest', as Paul Hawken (2007) terms it, is the largest so-
cial movement in the world.
It has not only been from the fringes that the current state of world food relations
has been contested. Programmes suh as the Millennium Development Goals and
the UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food act as good faith initiatives to alle-
viate hunger, while their efforts are systematically undermined by the various rela-
tionships between states and corporations. The Declaration of Human Rights - the
foundational document of the UN and an embodiment of the humanist project since
the Enlightenment - has regretably become mere window-dressing for the mar-
ketization of the world's food governance structures. In this case, critique is disem-
powered not at the margins, but at the very centre of global governance.
he neoliberal mantra - couhed in the discourse of individual hoice that un-
derlies and justifies business-as-usual in the food system - argues that firms will fa-
cilitate the best distribution of resources and the greatest accumulation of wealth.
And in one sense, neoliberalism is a great success. But at what cost? This is where
the ideological gauntlet gets thrown down and we collectively avoid the moral dis-
cussion embedded in the assumptions on both sides.
Business-as-usual operates as an uneven playing field that is laden with dou-
blespeak. On one hand, corporations and Developed World agricultural producers -
US, UK, EU, Australia - promote free trade while subsidizing their farmers in vari-
