Western Producer reporter Barry Wilson was in Rome as world leaders gathered to find solutions to a growing food problem.
ROME – On the edges of the official world food summit called to discuss solutions to rising food prices and the ensuing hunger and social unrest, a few hundred activists, aid organization workers and peasant representatives met to plot a different world.
They concluded that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is too wedded to an industrial model of agriculture as a way to deal with hunger.
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They argued that international organizations and governments should pay more attention to small-scale, low input farm operations, and should guarantee the right to food and the ability of countries to create whatever policies or border restrictions they want in the interests of food sovereignty.
A statement from the forum, titled Terra Preta (Portuguese for black soil), set the tone from the opening sentence.
“The serious and urgent food and climate crises are being used by political and economic elites as opportunities to entrench corporate control of world agriculture and the ecological commons,” it began.
The FAO meeting that included discussions about food aid, investment in more intensive agricultural models and balancing biofuel production with the need for human food “constitute an assault on small-scale food providers.”
Bob Hagerman, policy adviser at the Winnipeg-based Canadian Foodgrains Bank, said in an interview the FAO experience was disappointing.
The purpose of the conference was to debate the reasons for and solutions to the inadequate production of food.
“Small scale farmers are at the core of the problem and the solution and yet it was perplexing and disappointing that they were not given much of a voice at all at the conference,” he said June 5. “The overall impression is that the FAO listens to the big players and big business but not to the small, who are at the centre of it.”
Hagerman said the overwhelming mood at the civil society meeting he attended was that the official meeting used the wrong assumptions.
“Here in the civil society forum, this meeting is seen as a start but it is also seen as leaving the failed power structures (aid and dependence) in place,” he said.
Hagerman said there was a strong consensus that the proposals at the World Trade Organization talks are the wrong way to go, creating more market freedom for agribusiness and less protection for small-scale farmers who cannot compete with imports from industrial agriculture.
Yet the official FAO declaration calls a WTO deal a key part of the solution.
“I think that is disappointing because the overwhelming analysis is that small-scale producers cannot compete with subsidized product and none of the small-scale farmers here saw a WTO as it is proposed as being in their interests at all,” he said.
The activists’ solution to the biofuel debate is that rich countries should develop a less petroleum-intensive economy and lifestyle so new sources of industrial fuel would not be required.
