Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

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agroecology and the struggle for food sovereignty
Q: I gather that one of the main roles of the NFFC is to call attention to the
destructive cycle of agribusiness today. How are family farmers under threat?
A: Well, throughout history farmers have lived in poverty and have been paid low
prices for their commodities. One of the reasons for this is that they’re dealing with
Mother Nature, cultivating the land and using natural resources. If there are good
times, people expand their production and prices go back down. And when prices are
going down, individual farmers aren’t able to adjust to the situation in a rational
manner. They produce even more, because as individuals, producing less is only
going to reduce their earnings even more.
Consequently, they are caught in the poverty/resource degradation cycle. Their
response to poverty or low prices is to increase production, which only drives prices
lower. In the process, they are degrading their resources, making land less productive.
This only increases poverty. That cycle only stops when agricultural production
diminishes and food prices go back up. Since the Depression, it’s been recognized that
society has to do something through political processes to take farmers out of that
cycle.
Q: There is a lot of rhetoric about the need to save the family farm. Obviously, that
rhetoric doesn’t match the reality of what politicians are signing into law. On the
other hand, in Mexico, the government doesn’t use this sort of rhetoric. When they
signed NAFTA, they publicly stated that they were trying to reduce the rural
population. What difference does the family farmer rhetoric make, since we are
seeing a rural exodus in both countries?
A: The rhetoric is easy to explain. Family farms are an important part of our past.
People want to think of their food as produced on family farms. When they leave the
city, they don’t want to drive through faceless corporate agriculture. Therefore,
politicians are going to say that’s what they support. The reality is quite the contrary.
The prescriptions they have enacted are cooked up by corporate economists to
increase the power and profitability of big multinational agribusiness corporations.
The main aim is cheap commodities to increase profits and to increase competitive
access to foreign markets.
Q: I hear you saying that corporations have an unhealthy amount of control over
the process of allocating funds and making farm policy. One goal of this workshop
is to talk about how activists and NGOs can have a greater impact on these sorts of
decisions that affect agriculture. What do you think is a good strategy for breaking
down this unfair distribution of power?
A: The sentiment that policy people in Mexico were expressing – that we need to get
people out of the rural areas – was expressed in the United States once, right after
World War II. They said that we had too many farmers, too much food, farm
programs were guaranteeing too-high prices, and society would be better off if we got
rid of inefficient farmers, the small farmers, and relied more on efficient farmers. The
small farmers could move to cities and do things that society needed to get done.
Policies were made to move farmers off the land.
yale school of forestry & environmental studies