Solving the food crisis: the causes and the solutions

Emergency measures are urgently needed to make food accessible to poor people. But so are profound changes to a globalised food system in dire need of reform.

In the immediate term, the World Food Program (WFP) needs $755 million to close its funding gap and make emergency food available. The WFP should purchase this food as locally as possible from smallholders at premium prices, then distribute or sell at accessible prices to people that are too poor to buy it otherwise. This will reactivate the peasant sector, avoid “dumping” of cheap grains from abroad, and reduce the costs of relief, thus getting more food to hungry people.

If accompanied by a strong rural support system of production credit, transport, marketing and distribution, this will rebuild local food systems as it extends relief.

Another way to rebuild national food economies and to improve food security is to implement regulatory mechanisms that stabilise market prices, such as national grain reserves. We can also stabilise prices by supporting the immediate five-year moratorium on biofuels that former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Hunger, Jean Zeigler, has called for.

Another key remedy to address the global food crisis is to prioritise smallholder farming and agroecology. The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) recently released its final report in Johannesburg, South Africa. The result of an exhaustive four-year international consultation with 400 experts (similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the IAASTD calls for an overhaul of agriculture dominated by multinational companies and governed by unfair trade rules.

The report avoids genetically engineered “fixes” for food production and emphasises the importance of locally-based, agroecological approaches to farming.

The key advantages to this way of farming - aside from its low environmental impact - is that it provides both food and employment to the world’s poor, plus a surplus for the market. On a pound-per-acre basis, these small family farms have proven themselves to be more productive than large-scale industrial farms. And they use less oil, especially if food is traded locally or sub-regionally.

These alternatives, growing throughout the world, are like small islands of sustainability in increasingly perilous economic and environmental seas. As industrialised farming and free trade regimes fail us, these approaches will be key to building resilience back into a dysfunctional global food system.

Expecting solutions from the institutions that created the disaster in the first place is like calling an arsonist to put out the fire. Getting the poor back on the land and providing them the support presently being captured by the world’s agri-foods monopolies would be a truly systemic and durable solution to our current global food crisis.