Tag Archives | Food

How early post-independence clarity on the link between food self-sufficiency and national sovereignty offers lessons for contemporary efforts.

Erika Takeo from Nicaragua’s Association of Rural Workers (ATC) and Rohan Rice, a writer and campaigner with the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign explain.

In the last dozen years after the 2008 world food price spike, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has become an inclusive forum for civil society and corporate interests to debate how best to advance food security. Unsurprisingly, CFS has long addressed food systems.

The UN has raised the alarm about the growing number of people (including children) suffering from hunger around the world due to the coronavirus and the economic crisis, while Ukraine exports agricultural products, depriving its already poor population of access to relatively cheap domestic food.

As hunger and food insecurity increases globally, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua has been working for the last decade to strengthen local food production and ensure food sovereignty in the face of sanctions.

With so much at stake, representatives of food producers and consumers need to act urgently to prevent governments from allowing a UN sanctioned corporate takeover of global governance of food systems.

The world has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies and societies.

In April 2020, a month after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the pandemic, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the numbers of people who lived with acute hunger around the world would double due to COVID-19 by the end of 2020 ‘unless swift action is taken’.

The problem before metropolitan capitalism therefore is: how to acquire control over the use of this tropical land-mass in order to obtain the products it needs?

Taking a fresh look at animal production also involves considering its effect on world hunger.

On 21 April, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley said that the world was experiencing a ‘hunger pandemic’. That day, the Global Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network released the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises.