Who Really Feeds the World-THE FAILURES OF AGRIBUSINESS AND THE PROMISE OF AGROECOLOGY

We are facing a deep and growing crisis rooted in how we produce, process, and distribute our food. The planet’s well-being, people’s health, and societies’ stability are severely threatened by an industrial globalized agriculture driven by greed and profits. An inefficient, wasteful, and non-sustainable model of food production is pushing the planet, its ecosystems, and its diverse species to the brink of destruction. Food, whose primary purpose is to provide nourishment and health, is today the single biggest health problem in the world: nearly one billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, two billion suffer from diseases like obesity and diabetes, and countless others suffer from diseases, including cancer, caused by the poisons in our food.

Instead of remaining a source of nourishment, food has been transformed into a commodity: something to be speculated on and profiteered from. This leads to rising food prices and creates social instability everywhere. Since 2007 there have been fifty-one food riots in thirty-seven countries, including Tunisia, South Africa, Cameroon, and India.

The food system is badly broken on every measure that counts: sustainability, justice, and peace. Today, an alternative has become an imperative for our survival, so let us begin by asking the question, “Who feeds the world?” Food and agriculture have become sites for major paradigm wars. Under each paradigm, a certain type of knowledge, economics, culture, and, of course, farming is being promoted. Each paradigm claims to feed the world; in reality, only one does. The dominant paradigm is industrial and mechanized, which has led to the collapse in our food and agricultural systems. This crisis is not an accident; it is built into the system’s very design. At the heart of this paradigm is the Law of Exploitation, which sees the world as a machine and nature as dead matter. This paradigm sees humans as separate from nature, and every part of nature as separable from the rest: the seed from the soil, the soil from the plant, the plant from the food, and the food from our bodies. The industrial paradigm is also based on seeing humans and nature as mere inputs in a production system. The productivity of the Earth and its people is made invisible by a sophisticated intellectual infrastructure that puts the twin constructs of capital and corporations at the center of its economics.