Agriculture, Food Security and Inclusive Growth - SID Netherlands ...

any gain would be in the short-term, and we would be saving ourselves only by
reducing the ability of the next generation to feed itself. They also have warned
that adequate nutrition was something other than the access to a sufficient
amount of calories, and that focusing only on protein-energy deficiencies led to
a neglect of the need for adequate diets, sufficiently diverse to support healthy
lives.
Their message was a simple one, although simpler to enunciate than to
implement: it is not one food crisis that we are facing, they were saying, but three
crises together: (1) a poverty crisis, the result of small-scale farmers receiving
too little support and rural-to-urban migration increasing as a consequence;
(2) an ecological crisis, the result of ways of producing food that depend on
external inputs and that exert an unsustainable pressure on the ecosystems;
and (3) a nutrition crisis, in which undernutrition coexists with even larger rates
of micronutrient-deficiency forms of malnutrition because of the focus of ‘green
revolution’ approaches on the production of basic cereals, rich in carbohydrates
but poor in essential vitamins and minerals.
Alternatives to the global corporate food system
Those who shape the movement have much more to offer than an impatience
with the usual answers that are given to the questions posed by the situation of
the food systems today. They have an alternative to propose. This alternative can
be summarized under four main pillars.
1. We need to rebuild local food systems that link urban populations to local food
producers. This means reverting a tendency towards increased globalization of
food chains and the growing role of international trade in the provision of food,
particularly in the least-developed countries (LDCs). A number of problems are
associated with the current pathway. First, the dependency of poor developing
countries on food imports is a source of vulnerability: as price shocks on
international markets shall become more frequent, the result both of weatherrelated
events and of financial speculation on what are relatively thin markets,
the addiction of these countries to imported foods (typically affordable only
because they are heavily subsidized in the countries of origin) will become an
ever more serious liability than it is today, and the food price crises of 2008 and
2010-11 are in that respect a harbinger of what lays ahead. The food bills of LDCs
increased five- or sixfold between 1992 and 2008, typically accounting for around
25 percent of their current food consumption, and putting these countries at a
considerable risk. In 2011, the food bills of these countries soared by one third
even in comparison to the previous year.
16 | AGRICULTURE, FOOD SECURITY AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH