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Defining our terms: Agroecology and sustainable agriculture in the context of Rio+20

Posted May 11, 2012 by Shiney Varghese   

Used under creative commons license from Grassroots International.

Farmers in Mozambique provide a viable alternative to the Green Revolution.

Earlier this month as the UN Conference on Sustainable Development was hosting one of the last meetings to bring out a final draft for the negotiations in Rio de Janeiro, I came across a flurry of reports issued by various entities, including the one by UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), entitled Sustainable Development in the 21st century (SD21) Report for Rio+20, which will serve as a roadmap during the Rio+20 conference this June. (In all fairness, I should mention that IATP contributed to the component of this report entitled, “Food and Agriculture: The future of sustainability.”) While all of these reports focus on sustainability, the call for sustainability in the agricultural sector is worth our attention for the simple reason that it is where one of the most crucial fights for world’s resources is taking place.

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Who owns the Philippines?

Posted April 25, 2012 by Jim Harkness   

Used under creative commons license from mathieu.fortin.

Three conflicts going on right now in the Philippines illustrate just how high the stakes are in struggles over rights and resources around the world.

I got an email this morning from Esther Penunia, secretary general of the Manila-based Asia Farmers Association and IATP board member, informing me that the Supreme Court of the Philippines has ordered that the country’s second-largest family-owned plantation should be divided up among 6000 farm families. (See the New York Times story on this decision.) Although the amount of land and number of beneficiaries is limited, the decision has a much larger significance. The distribution of land and wealth in the Philippines have remained staggeringly unequal since colonial times, and one of the most prominent popular demands following the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 was for land reform, but until now, the country’s plutocrats had skillfully used their influence over the government and courts to prevent any meaningful redistribution. After 25 years, the Philippines is taking a huge step toward realizing the People Power Revolution’s vision of equality and democracy. “We feel that this is social justice,” Esther said of the decision.

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Draft report on food security and climate change falls short

Posted April 24, 2012 by Doreen Stabinsky   

Used under creative commons license from farmingmatters.

Agroecological methods pay attention to soil health, through practices that increase soil fertility as well as soil’s water-holding and infiltration capacities.

Climate change will have significant impacts on world food security in our lifetimes. Indeed, we have already begun to feel the impacts from extreme events—droughts, heat waves, torrential rains leading to floods, with consequent impacts on crop production in Russia, Texas and the U.S. Midwest, Pakistan, Thailand, to name a few recent high-profile locations. Scientists predict that in the changing climate, extreme events such as these will increase in frequency and magnitude.

More insidious and potentially more threatening are slow onset events that over time will incrementally diminish or eliminate crop production in some parts of the world. These slow onset events—temperature rise, salt-water intrusion, loss of soil moisture and water supplies, loss of productive coastal areas due to sea level rise—will reduce crop yields and eliminate agriculture as a livelihood strategy for many.

So the decision by the newly reformed Committee on World Food Security to request its High-level Panel of Experts (HLPE) to conduct a study on climate change and food security was welcomed enthusiastically, especially by many of the civil society organizations working on food and climate change. At the end of 2011, the HLPE established a project team of experts from around the world to write the report. The mandate given to the team was to “review existing assessments and initiatives on the effects of climate change on the most affected and vulnerable regions and populations and the interface between climate change and agricultural productivity, including the challenges and opportunities of adaptation and mitigation policies and actions for food security and nutrition.”

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Defending UNCTAD’s role in agriculture and food security

Posted April 23, 2012 by Sophia Murphy   

 

UNCTAD—the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development—is holding its 13th quadrennial conference in Doha, Qatar this week (April 21–26). As South Centre Director, Martin Khor, underscored in his Triple Crisis blog last Friday, the meeting has generated considerably controversy, the first time UNCTAD has created such waves in more than a decade. Created in the 1960s as a forum for developing countries to explore global and regional macro-economic issues independently of the Western country-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, UNCTAD has never had an easy ride from the U.S., UK and other major powers. But for the first 20 or so years of its existence, UNCTAD received the resources and respect it needed to make a big contribution to supporting initiatives that supported development, from preferential trading schemes, to commodity agreements, to what were called “rules to control restrictive business practices” (today more commonly referred to as competition policy).

 

 

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Economic governance: A rich-country-only privilege?

Posted April 19, 2012 by Dr. Steve Suppan   

Professor Michael Greenberger strongly rebutted Professor Sachs’ contention that financial speculation was not a major factor in commodity price volatility and levels.

You might think that the devastating impacts of commodity price volatility on global hunger would require policy debates in multiple international organizations. Last week, the United Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA) held a high-level debate on how to address this very issue. The opposing views of panelists concerning the extent to which financial speculation is driving commodities prices comprised a vigorous debate. More troubling is an attempt to squelch U.N. agency policy analysis of this issue and other economic governance topics.

U.N. member countries with globally influential financial and commodity markets are attempting to remove economic policy analysis from the mandate of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This attack elicited an April 11 letter of protest from former UNCTAD staff, well as protests from developing countries that welcome UNCTAD’s analysis of the impact of financial speculation on commodity prices. According to the U.S. and EU, the U.N. should concern itself with capacity building to enable implementation of or adjustment to policies decided among the Group of 20 countries and at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

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Exporting obesity: The role of trade

Posted April 17, 2012 by Sophia Murphy   

Used under creative commons license from sierralx.

The U.S. is, by far, the largest exporter of snack foods to Mexico.

The effects of trade liberalization (so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA) on the economy, jobs, the environment and even food security have all been studied closely, but as more and more governments start to confront the large and growing costs of poor diets on human health, new questions are emerging about the relationship between free trade agreements and the growing global obesity epidemic. When countries agree to liberalize the exchange of goods and capital among themselves, are they unwittingly also agreeing to share chronic diseases?

In a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, IATP takes a hard look at how the deregulation of trade and investment undermines human health. The article is co-authored by three IATP staff, Dr. David Wallinga, Karen Hansen-Kuhn and Sophia Murphy, together with Sarah Clarke, a graduate student at Tufts University and Corinna Hawkes, an environmental geographer with an extensive background on the links between health, food and global trade and finance.

The article looks at how NAFTA contributed to what nutritional experts call an “obesogenic environment” in Mexico. An explosion in the availability of low-quality, calorie-dense foods in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA coincided with Mexico going to second place worldwide for the highest percentage of overweight and obese people in its population (the USA takes first place).

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International Day of Peasant Struggle

Posted April 16, 2012 by Dale Wiehoff   

The Eldorado dos Carajás massacre took place on April 17, 1996 in Para, a state in southern Brazil. On that day, the police gunned down 19 peasants from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement) or MST who were demanding access to land.  The anniversary of that massacre is commemorated around the world as International Day of Peasant Struggle.
 
The focus of this year’s anniversary is land grabbing, “a global phenomenon led by local, national and transnational elites and investors, with the participation of governments and local authorities, in order to control the world's most precious resources.”
 
At a recent European Union parliamentary conference on land grabbing, IATP’s President, Jim Harkness spoke about land grabbing inside the U.S. and China. In addition to controlling land and natural resources that come from the land, Harkness discussed the financialization of land grabs, where land speculation is driven by the potential of future profits, not even the opportunity for gain by use. Speaking on Global Agricultural Policy in an Age of Land Grabs, he said, “Land grabs are the most deadly manifestation of this brutally predatory way of organizing economies…”
 

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Reflections on the right to water as we move towards Rio+20

Posted March 22, 2012 by Shiney Varghese   

Used under creative commons license from CGIAR Climate.

Today, even as the world celebrates World Water Day, some countries at the United Nations are trying to remove the reference to the “right to water” from a document that will guide the international development path in the coming decade.  

It was less than two years ago, in the summer of 2010, that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a resolution recognizing water as a human right. This was followed by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UN HRC) adopting a resolution on “human rights and access to safe drinking water and sanitation,” which made these rights legally binding. The recognition of the right to water at these U.N. bodies, and the developments since, such as the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on right to water and the resolution by the World Health Assembly recognizing right to water, have helped place water rights on the global agenda.

These successes were partly the result of collective efforts of water justice activists over the last 10 years. IATP's own advocacy on right to water was a direct response to the reference to water as a “need” [instead of a right], in the Ministerial Declaration of the 2nd World Water Forum in 2000.

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Farmers markets and food support: An idea whose time has come

Posted March 21, 2012 by JoAnne Berkenkamp   Madeline Kastler   

Some ideas just make sense. One such idea is enabling low-income members of our community to purchase fresh, locally grown foods at the farmers market.

Farm-fresh, healthy choices at farmers markets are now easier to buy for Minnesotans who receive food support or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Farmers markets across the state are investing in EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) debit card technology, allowing them to accept food support benefits. In 2011, sixteen markets across the state accepted EBT cards with over $67,000 in EBT sales.

IATP partnered with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County and participating markets to help catalyze the expansion of EBT at farmers markets in Minneapolis over the last two years, providing technical support and leading community outreach and promotional efforts. By last summer, six markets in Minneapolis were accepting food support benefits. The main Minneapolis Farmers Market alone registered $36,500 in EBT sales to low income shoppers in 2011, up 169 percent from 2010.

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Governments agree on voluntary rules to control land grabs

Posted March 16, 2012 by Sophia Murphy   

Used under creative commons license from The Advocacy Project.

The right to work the land is directly related to the food security of many communities around the world, constantly at risk of being taken away by international investors.

Three years of negotiations on guidelines to govern the tenure of land, fisheries and forests (commonly referred to as the Voluntary Guidelines, or VG) came to a successful close on Friday, March 9 in Rome. Under the auspices of the newly reconfigured Committee on World Food Security (CFS) (housed at the FAO with a secretariat shared among the FAO, the World Food Program and the International Fund for Agriculture and Development, or IFAD), the negotiations were contentious and important.

Ninety-six governments, accompanied by U.N. agencies, civil society organizations, farmer organizations and private sector representatives worked through three rounds of negotiations over as many years to come to agreement. The talks were chaired by the United States, whose negotiators earned the praise of the participants for their commitment to finding agreement across often significant divides. The conclusion of the VGs (see the FAO press release) marks an important step towards providing some protection for small-holders and communities around the world, who have found their productive assets (arable land, or fishing waters, or forests) under siege by a wave of investor interest from private companies and wealthy food importing countries.

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