With the election over, it's time to look at the growing global food crisis. Longterm, the U.S. needs to help mitigate climate change, which is aggravating that problem by contributing to water shortages and desertification. Sooner, we need to change the equation in which the shackling of agriculture to ill-advised financial programs has led to disaster.
In one country after another, International Money Fund programs, with their cycles of investment followed by debt collection, have forced large-scale conversions of food-producing land to cash crop operations. In the Philippines, Mexico and other countries, such programs knocked peasant agriculture to its knees and the second punch was administered by free trade agreements that sent subsidized corn and other vegetables, meat and poultry flooding in from the U.S., driving local farmers out of business. (N.B.: our politicians' interminable rabblerousing about the immigration issue has never brought out the fact that one reason Mexicans flock to the U.S. is that our policies wrecked their agriculture.)
Then there's plant patenting, which has wrenched farmers away from the ancient habit of saving and trading seeds from one harvest to the next planting. Around the world our agribusiness companies have promoted forms of agriculture requiring farmers to buy patented seeds, use the expensive pesticides and other inputs required to make the engineered plants grow properly, then buy the seeds again for each planting, tying the farmers to cycles of credit and cash outlay that spell disaster in a credit crunch. The current lending disaster is making it hard for farmers to borrow for fertilizer and equipment, and is expected to wreak havoc with agriculture in countries where government supports for it are weak.
Farmers, including groups like the international peasant organization Via Campesina, and food supply experts must replace financiers and speculators as decisionmakers about agriculture. The global grocery store concept based on cash-intensive import-export deals is failing, and shortages will worsen if policies don't promote stability for local farmers, not profits for big business.
