The World Food Programme’s Nobel prize is timely – but food security depends on radically transforming our food systems

During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, as lockdown restrictions scrambled supply chains, the national peasant movement Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas set up an online farmers’ market and delivery system on Facebook, so urban dwellers in Manila could access locally grown grain, fruits, and vegetables. 

In Argentina, as thousands lost their jobs and homes, the grassroots organization Union de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Union of Land Workers), supplied vulnerable communities with fresh food. These “sovereign food canteens”, said UTT’s Lucas Tedesco, are powerful reminders that small producers “are the ones who feed our fellow citizens.” 

In Zimbabwe, when markets shuttered and farmers’ crops were left to rot in their fields, the farmers’ organization Pelum Zimbabwe mapped farmers, transporters, processors, and other vendors, to connect them to consumers and demonstrate to Zimbabwean policymakers that better access to locally-grown healthy foods reduces hunger, and strengthens community resilience. 

With the pandemic leaving so many families uncertain about their next meal, the Nobel Peace Prize award to the United Nations’ World Food Programme is timely. COVID-19 has plunged millions around the world into poverty; global hunger is likely to double. By the end of 2020, the number of people facing acute food insecurity could swell to a quarter of a billion. 

But let’s be clear: We’ll never be truly food secure without radically transforming our food systems. 

Even as it acknowledged the honour, the UN agency, which provides food assistance to almost 100 million people worldwide, noted that aid is not a long-term solution. Gernot Laganda, head of climate and disaster risk reduction at the WFP, stated clearly: “You won’t get to zero hunger with humanitarian aid alone.”

As food systems funders supporting agroecology, we have seen that food handouts are not an effective antidote to hunger.

Agroecology goes beyond tackling the incidence of hunger to uproot its structural causes. In recent months, we have seen clearly how movements for agroecology fostered networks of producers—in the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and beyond— able to feed themselves and their communities in this moment of crisis. 

By farming in sync with nature, agroecological farmers grow abundant and diverse foods, regenerate natural ecosystems, strengthen resilience to health and climate shocks, and bring healthy food to local markets.

More than a set of farming techniques, agroecology is a movement for social justice, improving nutrition without compromising food sovereignty—the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. 

Agroecology resists the misguided Western policies that have impoverished smallholders worldwide, policies like promoting synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds through the Green Revolution historically, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa today.

By directly empowering family farmers, agroecology diminishes the need for imported food aid – too often ultra-processed foods, surplus commodity crops, and GMO grains that are a boon to agribusiness while undermining small farmer livelihoods. 

In the past few years, agencies within the United Nations have publicly recognized the importance of agroecology to end hunger. In 2018, former U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General José Graziano da Silva issued an urgent challenge to the global community: “It’s time to scale up the implementation of agroecology.” 

We’ve been pleased to see that initiatives such as the World Food Programme’s Home Grown School Feeding Initiative link “school feeding programmes with local smallholder farmers” in 46 countries including Kenya, Honduras, and Haiti. But the agency must do far more to strengthen local food economies.

In 2018, only one third of the 3.6 million metric tons of WFP’s total food purchases were characterized as “locally grown commodities,” and less than 4% of the organization’s food aid ($31 million) was purchased directly from smallholder farmers. (WFP data does not report what percentage may have been agroecologically produced.)

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is. We urge the WFP to seize this moment to embrace agroecology, and address the roots of hunger, learning lessons from the food leaders we’re funding in the Philippines, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and beyond. 

Private philanthropy alone cannot offer sufficient support to the vibrant, global agroecology movement. We need the WFP to play a lead role, deploying public resources to support innovative civil society organizations and government agencies.

When we support humanitarian relief that builds lasting change, we ensure our dollars don’t just deliver one-time handouts, but drive a fundamental transformation of our food systems. Only then will we yank up the roots of hunger and seed a more peaceful, equitable, and resilient world. 

Header photo: Romeo Ranoco/Reuters

The post Food Security Can Bring Peace—But Agroecology Makes It Last appeared first on Real Food Media.

As many have been saying for a long time (ah-hem, my mother), the biggest crisis in our food system isn’t a scarcity of food, it’s a scarcity of democracy. The world is producing 2,900 calories for every man, woman, and child on the planet—more than enough—and yet one in three children is malnourished. One in three!  And most of those children are malnourished not because they don’t have enough calories, but because they’re consuming too many of the wrong calories. Consider that 62 percent of teenagers in high-income countries drink one sugary drink a day or that only 42 percent of babies under 6 months are exclusively breastfed. Being clear on root causes is how we get clear on solutions. 

If the problem is not productivity, but rather democracy, then the solutions will clearly not be found in technological solutions, but in policy ones. We need to be asking: Who is calling the shots about what foods are regulated and what foods are taxed? Who has a say over what farming practices are incentivized and what agricultural research is funded? Who’s deciding the role food companies can play in our lives, from what marketing to kids is allowed to who sits at the table at governing bodies like the World Health Organization? 

To make real, transformative change in the food system, more of us—regular people and communities, not corporations—need to be asking those questions (and answering them). To fix our food, in other words, we need to fix our democracy.

Header photo: Future of Food panel at SOCAP 2019. Pictured (L-R): Roy Steiner, Rockefeller Foundation; Anna Lappé, Real Food Media; and Deb Eschmeyer, Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. Photo by SOCAP. 

The post Getting to the Roots of Hunger at SOCAP appeared first on Real Food Media.

Dig into our Food MythBusters resources and citations from the script:

• Script and citations: English | Español
• Screening Guide and companion reading materials

The post Food MythBusters: Do we need industrial agriculture to feed the world? appeared first on Real Food Media.

The post Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizon, Brazil, and Beyond appeared first on Real Food Media.

At Real Food Media, we work to debunk some of the key food myths pushed by food and agribusiness corporations, which face an existential threat from the growing interest in, and demand for, greater sustainability and fairness in food.

We produced short films to take on two of these myths. We encourage you to watch them, share them, and dig deeper. The transcript and citations for each video are included, along with a companion reading guide to learn more about the issues. Since we first launched these videos, they have been seen by more than 1 million people online and have been used in classrooms, workshops, conferences, and more.

Myth: We need industrial agriculture to feed the world.

In this video we take on the persistent myth that we can’t feed the world without toxic chemicals or genetically engineered seeds. And, we showcase the power of sustainable agriculture to address the root causes of hunger in a world of plenty.

 Downloads:

• Script and citations: English | Español
• Screening Guide and companion reading materials

Myth: We want the junk food and packaged products filling our shelves.

In this video we expose the billions at work to influence what we desire, what we buy, and the particularly pernicious marketing of soda and junk food to children and teens.

 Downloads:

• Script and citations: English | Español

The post Food Mythbusters appeared first on Real Food Media.

Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

The post Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups appeared first on Real Food Media.

Fifteen years after the book’s original publication in 2002, Luis Medina, a graduate Food Studies student at New York University, hopes to bring these stories to the screen by traveling through four continents to discover people who find solutions to hunger, poverty, and landlessness in their communities.

“These stories need to be shared now more than ever. At this point in history, people fear for their democracy. Film has the power to engage our senses and compel us to act in ways a book does not,” says the director. “I believe all people want to make a positive difference in the world, to be of something bigger and life serving, but so often we are afraid and feel powerless. “Hope’s Edge” seeks to inspire us to take action by showing regular people around the world doing what we never thought possible.”

The book itself was a follow-up to Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, which challenged the idea that society needs to produce more food to feed the world.

According to the Friends of the Earth report Farming for the Future, we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. Still, as consequence of a model of food production which significantly contributes to climate change, environmental degradation, and poor diets, around 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity in food, it’s caused by a scarcity in democracy and unequal access to land, water, credit, and fair markets, preventing people from acquiring the resources necessary to feed themselves.

“Hope’s Edge” finds new spaces for people to find the courage to take action by showing others effecting change, challenging inequalities, and finding solutions to hunger, poverty, and landlessness around the world.

Originally published in Food Tank

Click here for the “Hope’s Edge” Kickstarter campaign.

Hope’s Edge

Read more on the Hope’s Edge website.

The post Documentary to Highlight Those Finding Solutions to Hunger, Poverty, Landlessness appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé

Nearly two decades ago, I stood on a train platform in the city of Bhatinda in the north Indian state of Punjab at sunrise. Flies buzzed. Young men dozed nearby with legs curled up for warmth. Next to me stood Afsar Jafri, an organic farming advocate who had been with us for days, taking my mother and me on a tour of nearby farmlands devastated by decades of chemical agriculture and communities thrown into crippling debt as a result. It had been a bleak journey. Yet, there in that train station, as the sun rose, I couldn’t help but notice our guide wasn’t exuding hopelessness. In fact, quite the opposite.

Curious, we asked how – in light of all we had seen and all he and his colleagues were up against – he seemed so hopeful. Jafri answered with a clarity that surprised me at first: His source of hope, he explained, came from being engaged, from working every day to change the fate of all those farmers we had met, and the many more beyond them. Action itself, he said, was his wellspring of hope, not any sure promise that the dire conditions we witnessed would lift anytime soon.

Until that moment, I had thought of hope as an emotion for the naïve, for people either too closed-minded to see how bad things were or too flip to realize the gravity of it all. I thought that to absorb reality – a warming planet, billions going hungry, endless war, persistent bigotry – meant tossing hope out the window.

I see hope differently now – and that morning in India was a turning point. Hope is not derived from a calculation: Are things bad, and getting worse? Or good and getting better? Hope arises from action.

But hope isn’t synonymous with optimism. Optimism, or pessimism for that matter, comes from a sort of hubris that you know how things will turn out – for better or worse. Hope, instead, grows from knowing the future has yet to be been written, and hope emerges from doing our part to write it.

At this moment, facing an administration whose leaders have trumpeted racism and xenophobia and denied climate change, and who have attacked immigrants and Muslims along with women and people with disabilities, I must say, this seems a particularly hopeful take on hope. But it’s also a radical one. As the author and activist Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

And consider Howard Zinn’s wisdom: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic,” wrote Zinn in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. “It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness…. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Let us then be victorious together.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

Photo by Mandias, Richard Ha

The post Hope’s Edge appeared first on Real Food Media.

The post World Hunger: 10 Myths appeared first on Real Food Media.