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

interview: naylor
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Corporations like Cargill, Continental Grain, and Archer-Daniels Midland have
created a really big empire here based on the use of grains and oilseeds. If you set up
the proper transportation facilities, you can ship them anywhere in the world. You
can also transform grains. You can take the protein and the carbohydrates and the oil
and create animal feed. You can also put them through various industrial processes to
create a myriad of unhealthy snacks and bakery products.
The big profits that result allow for a lot of leeway to design and market these
products. So it’s in the corporations’ interests to have very cheap grain and oilseed
prices. If the United States had a program to set a floor under those grain and oilseed
prices, or if people in the United States said, “Raising all those grains and oilseeds is
really detrimental to our environment, so we’re going to have a Conservation Reserve
Program or Conservation Security Program,” it’s going to cost a lot of money. And if
something like that happens, multinational agribusiness will encourage more development
of grain and oilseed production in Argentina, Brazil, or almost any place
where there is arable land. So action in the U.S. alone is not enough.
Because of this big empire of transportation and processing and marketing facilities,
the price of feed grains and oilseeds will affect almost every farmer’s livelihood
on the planet, unless they are so far away from the modern transportation system that
these food products have no access to their local markets. Fewer and fewer farmers are
in that situation.
For many years, it was the United States that supplied most of the grains and
oilseeds on the world market. Until a few years ago, 70 percent of corn, 80 percent of
soy, and up to 30 percent of wheat came from the United States. Sixty percent of corn
and 50 percent of soybeans still come from the United States. So until recent years,
regulating the price and supply in the U.S. would have affected prices globally.
Today, the strategy of multinational corporations – with the cooperation of the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund – is to encourage production in other
countries and to set up the facilities so that these goods can be transported all over
the world. Now it’s less possible for a price floor in the United States to prevent grain
and oilseed prices from being too low. Without international cooperation, it’s not
possible.
There’s Amazonia, or the cerrado in Brazil. It’s the policy of the Brazilian government
[along with] the IMF and the World Bank to encourage new transportation
facilities, and new ports and railroads, [so that] those lands can produce corn or
wheat or oilseeds for this industrial food system, and this can affect every farmer on
the planet. So today, all of these big exporting countries need to cooperate to have a
fair price for their own farmers.
Q: I am working as a consultant for The Nature Conservancy-Brazil, writing a report
about how to certify soybeans as being grown in an environmentally friendly
and socially just manner. Certification initiatives are often pretty small-scale –
Band-Aids, maybe. What do you think about their potential effectiveness?
A: I think certification systems raise people’s understanding of the problems. Just like
fair trade coffee – it helps people realize that farmers in Guatemala aren’t making any
yale school of forestry & environmental studies