It’s necessary to “degrow” the “corporate food regime” that over last five decades has impoverished the climate, water resources, local communities and crop diversity, and has not solved the problem of hunger.
This was the argument made by Eric Holt-Giménez, Executive Director of Food First, an organization whose mission is to work towards ending hunger by bringing about food justice, at a presentation Friday at the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which took place in Leipzig, Germany.
Holt-Giménez made his address via video during a session entitled “The food challenge. Struggling for just and ecological food systems.”
The food sector has been growth-focused, but this has not stopped the problem of hunger, Holt-Giménez said, pointing the example of 2008, which was a year of record harvests and record profits for agricultural giants like Cargill and ADM amidst record hunger.
“Clearly something has to change, and simply growing more food isn’t going to solve the problem of hunger,” he said. “This contradiction runs even deeper when we realize that most of the hungry people in the world are farmers. They’re peasant farmers,” most of whom are women, he added.
Yet “peasant farmers produce most of the food in the world — and they do it on less than a quarter of the agricultural land on the planet.”
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“So there’s a tremendous amount of inequity bound up in the food system which creates poverty and in turn creates hunger even in a world of abundance.”
Yet institutions of power repeat the claim that the amount of food the wold produces must double by 2015, Holt-Giménez said. “This is simply part of productivist ideology of an extractive and regressive food system — regressive in that it does not redistribute the wealth within the food system, but it concentrates the wealth in fewer and fewer hands. “
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