We Must Degrow the 'Corporate Food Regime': Food Sovereignty Advocate

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Tuesday, September 09, 2014
by Common Dreams

We Must Degrow the 'Corporate Food Regime': Food Sovereignty Advocate

The industrial system in place has 'fetishized growth' but has not addressed hunger, according to Food First's Eric Holt-Giménez

by Andrea Germanos, staff

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.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2014/09/10/un-bankruptcy-vote-could-stop-vulture-funds

[KurtNYC]

1. Link

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/09/09/we-must-degrow-corporate-food-regime-food-sovereignty-advocate

When the trains were built through Germany in the 1830s, much of the better food was exported. Cheap transportation led to a decline in what was available to farming communities as they made it easier to extract real wealth. Cheap transportation helped turn food into a commodity, where every farmer had to compete on price with an ever wider swath of farmers in Europe. One of the foods which did not transport well due to spoilage was cabbage so the farmers of the German countryside were left with an abundance of cabbage. The word "Kraut" emerged as a derogatory term, blaming the newly impoverished farmers for their poverty.

180 years later, almost every farmer in the world must compete on price and food is a commodity sold to multi-national food processors who make the majority of profits in the food and ethanol industries.