LOCAL ORGANISATIONS KEY TO SOLVING FOOD CRISIS, SAYS GROUP
THE global food crisis will deepen unless small-scale organisations are given a leading role in deciding how and where foods are produced and distributed, says the author of a new multimedia publication by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
The warning comes as government representatives and others met January 26-27, in Madrid for the UN’s High Level Meeting on Food Security for All.
“The Madrid conference on food security is largely dominated by agribusiness and international financial and trade institutions,” says Dr Michel Pimbert, director of IIED's Sustainable Agriculture, Biodiversity and Livelihoods Programme and author of the publication in an on-line statement to our correspondent yesterday.
“Small scale food producers are hardly given any space to show how they — and their local organisations — produce over 80 percent of the world's food, conserve biodiversity and the environment.”
Pimbert’s publication combines text and photos with video and audio clips to argue that local organisations are essential to sustain food systems, the environment and livelihoods.
“There can be no solution to the current food crisis if high level participants in Madrid continue with 'top down' and 'business as usual' policies and actively ignore the role of local organisations in sustaining food systems, livelihoods and the environment,” says Pimbert.
“These local groups are best-placed to develop the policies and institutions needed to govern local food systems and access to food,” he adds.
The publication is the latest in a series of online chapters of a larger publication called: ‘Towards Food Sovereignty. Reclaiming autonomous food systems’. The new chapter includes descriptions of:
- Collectives of marginalised women farmers in the drylands of India who manage an alternative public distribution system based on biodiversity- rich farming and local control over food in order to support the most vulnerable and excluded people.
- Eco-villages in Scotland in which local organisations manage integrated food, energy, water and waste management systems — to reduce environmental impacts and enhance human well being and freedom from a system founded on wasteful consumption and production.
- An example from cities in the USA in which poor urban dwellers – mainly Latino and African-American communities – are confronting food poverty and malnutrition by organising and re-connecting with the land to access fresh, health giving vegetables, fruit and other farm produce.
It includes audio recordings of key figures from MST – the landless movement in Brazil that organises to occupy and farm land left idle by huge foreign and national land owners.
More generally, the book highlights the role of local organisations in managing the land, in regulating access to food and resources, in dealing with climate and environmental change, and in the politics of decision making.
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