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From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing 'market incentives' (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production. The corporate-biased law doesn't help either, because: "The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality." In other words, we don't even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing -- here's an example: "In the past 10 months, the government's food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices."So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry. Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying. Most of the Earth's fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that "there is now little room for further agricultural expansion." One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: "The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?" Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food? It's not that the Earth can't produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can't produce the food. In fact, as I've warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits. For us to keep eating, it's true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That's why real solutions aren't being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it's not so bad...
www.nafeez.blogspot.com Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in International Relations, Globalisation, Empire, and 20th Century History, at Brunel University in West London and the University of Sussex in Brighton. Since 9/11, he has authored a critically acclaimed trilogy of books revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric of the "War on Terror", The War on Freedom, Behind the War on Terror, and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. His fourth book is ,"The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry" (Duckworth, 2006). In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about his research on international terrorism. His work has been featured in the Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer, Sky News, and Channel 4, among other outlets.
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