Vandana Shiva on Hunger: Beyond Agricultural Inputs to Sustainability

I think the first thing to recognize about hunger is that today it's a rural phenomena it's mainly in third-world countries it's mainly among communities that are actually agricultural communities so why are people who are growing food going hungry themselves they're going hungry because everything they have grown has to be sold in order to pay for the costly seats and the costly chemicals so a high-cost chemical intensive agriculture is a recipe for hunger secondly the models of Agriculture that chemical farming has promoted are monocultures monocultures are nutritionally impoverished the same acre of land using biodiversity using organic and ecological methods could produce five to ten times more nutrition than a monoculture can so maximizing the production of commodities for international trade is directly proportionate to the decrease in nutrition availability to local communities which is why hunger grows if we the world has to be fed it has to be fed by growing food locally to be used locally as the biggest proportion of the food basket some elements will be traded internationally but what is traded internationally should not be stapled foods what is traded internationally should be that extra flavor of spices from India and coffee from Guatemala that's all right but to turn the world into a dependency on staples has nothing to do with feeding the world it has a lot to do with controlling the food supply the United States evolved a phrase during the Vietnam War and the war phrase was food as a weapon the use of food as the ultimate weapon of control and the tragedy is the growth of agribusiness in the US has gone hand in hand with the u.s. foreign policy to deliberately create hunger locally in order to make the world dependent on food supplies through which you can then control countries and their decision-making ability so hunger is as become an instrument of war and food responding to that artificially created hunger is an instrumental for peace means you grow food locally you grow food the peace you grow food non-violently and the countries that are truly the worst victims of hunger could be the highest producer food Africa has the largest land per acre human being per capita Africa is an abundant continent and yet because of the deliberate policies it has today been turn into a continent of hunger India which has the best source the best monsoons the highest biodiversity should not have any problem we're growing in our food and yet 70% of our children are going hungry because the economic system is robbing them of their right to food so food production must once again be an issue of sustainability taking care of the earth and the human right to food must be an inalienable right these rights cannot be ensured through a marketplace where food has become a commodity and an subject of speculation we saw what speculation did in 2008 food prices doubled and the companies that control the food system double their profits wild rides took place in 40 countries

Channel: Food Farmer Earth

Views: 263,899

Keywords: hunger sustainable agriculture, monocultures, food sovereignty, Vandana Shiva, local food systems, biodiversity.

Id: jEqS6rnoyYc

Length: 3min 31sec (211 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020