Mark Dick, a GP based in Northern Ireland and the author of Towards Oikos, with the concluding part of his series on a better food system on the other side of crisis. See previous posts here.
Over the last four articles in this series on a better food system, I have focused on the UK, following the cyanobacteria scandal in Northern Ireland in 2023. But the problems I have been discussing are global in nature. We need to see these issues in their global perspective, and the situation is often more extreme and more urgent in other parts of the world.
Hunger and malnutrition are still leading causes of death and needless suffering. This is a matter of distribution, not overall shortage – we could even describe it as a form of organised crime – because there is enough food to supply everyone with 2,100 kilocalories per day. Two billion people also lack the vitamins and minerals essential for good health.
The advances of the Green Revolution suggests there are no insurmountable biophysical reasons why we could not feed humanity in decades to come. But agriculture has created serious long-run vulnerabilities, especially in its dependence on stable climates, crop monocultures, industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides, petroleum, antibiotic feed supplements (beware antibiotic resistance) and rapid, efficient transportation.
Food is the weak link in our civilization. Rising food prices can be caused by various things, including extreme weather, conflict, phosphorus shortages and oil prices. Whatever their cause, they can not only lead to protest and revolt but contribute to bankruptcies and failed states. Reducing food waste and rebalancing diets towards more plant-based options, as described earlier, could help to safeguard democracy as well as protecting the environment.
As Mike Davis describes in Late Victorian Holocausts, hunger is a problem of political economy – the poor do not eat no matter how much food there is. It is a matter of distribution, not just of food but also of power. No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press (Irish famine excepted). If there is a link between democracy and fighting hunger, then perhaps the key to overcoming hunger worldwide lies in the creation of a global democracy?
Greater global cooperation wouldn’t just assist with distribution. It would also help to reduce protectionism, which has a direct impact on international trading conditions and disadvantages the poorest. The WTO Agreement on Agriculture of 1995 allows the continuation of existing internal price support at a level of 80 per cent, and caps new internal subsidies in developing countries at 10 per cent as a proportion of their total agricultural production. This favours the industrialised countries, as the starting level for them is extremely high and they have reformed subsidies in such a way that in strict legal terms they are not classified as a distortion of trade, while structural adjustment programmes force developing countries to reduce import barriers. The rich are rich because the poor are poor.
The commodity markets exert considerable international influence impacting strongly on the poorest. There is a worldwide competition between the basic needs of the poorest and the substantially better resourced needs and wants of the affluent. This is unjust and is also destabilising. Ensuring food security is one of the global public goods with the highest priority.
The G20 is unable to pass binding regulations: they are not elected to fight world hunger. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has no global powers either, certainly less than the IMF, WTO and the World Bank. A World Food Board was proposed in 1946, to stabilise prices by intervening to buy and sell when needed, but it was blocked by the UK and USA. Having reserve provisions (which cannot be bought up cheaply by traders and exported) would bring about a transfer of national sovereignty to the global level where there would have to be a democratic parliamentary body answerable to all citizens. None of these measures replace the role of trade. A trade system which is free and open but at the same time fair is very important for global food security.
Global food policy needs not only to be institutionally strengthened but also to be democratised. The interests of small farmers must be given more weight. The Committee on World Food Security brings together a wide variety of stakeholders in this way, but what is needed really are sufficiently specific and binding regulations for the tenure of land, fisheries, and forests under world law. Members of a world parliament would be able to lobby for improving the lives of those in less affluent states by linking membership benefits of the WTO to observance of labour and environmental standards.
To return to the pollution crisis that prompted this series, global governance applies to water as well. Basic access to water is a fundamental political, economic, and social right. But in 2010 there were three billion people with unreliable access to water and two billion drinking unsafe water.
Water scarcity in many regions of the world is a bigger conflict risk than oil, and there is a justice dimension to water as well. ‘Virtual water’ is water used in the production of foods and other goods that are then exported – often invisibly moving water from the global South to the affluent North. Global water policy is poorly developed and badly fragmented. Citizens must be able to participate directly in the management of water and ecosystems, at local and global levels. The proposal for the establishment of a specialised world water parliament should be combined with the wider goal of a world parliament with real powers.
To conclude this series, perhaps we can look to a local and practical example of how things could be different. Jubilee Farm is the first cooperatively owned farm in Northern Ireland. It combines animal and crop agriculture, and it combines environmentally sensitive farming with social projects that reach vulnerable communities. It is an explicitly Christian organisation that is rooted, in their words, in ‘care, community, conservation’.
Although some Christians dislike the term ‘stewardship’ as they feel it unjustly sets humanity above and apart from nature, it is still a useful term to describe the approach to the land at Jubilee Farm. It also captures what Professor John Barry frequently asserts, quoting US Senator Gaylord Nelson, that ‘the economy is a fully owned subsidiary of the environment’. Without creation care there is no livelihood for anyone or anything, perhaps not even cyanobacteria!
- More on food and farming
- Feature image by Elaine Casap/Unsplash
Joy in Enough 