Interesting interview on CBC’s The Current today. Evan Fraser from the University of Guelph and co-author of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations and Frederick Kaufman, contributing editor with Harpers' Magazine and the author of A Short History of the American Stomach, discuss the link between political unrest in Egypt and rising food prices around the world. Apparently in just six months, the price of soybeans is up 46 per cent. The price of sugar is up 34 per cent and there is concern that if nothing changes we could see widespread food riots around the world. In one clip an Egyptian man and woman talk about their fears and frustration regarding the lack of affordable food. Their anger that the world's elite are benefiting financially via food shortages in Egypt is clear, leading Fraser to comment that it is not food shortages themselves that have led to revolutions throughout history but instead rage about profiteering.
The anger felt by people throughout the world suffering from hunger led Fraser and Kaufman to a discussion of the 'global land grab' by multi-national corporations and governments around the world. This is the process whereby millions of acres of foreign farmland, mainly in Africa, is being bought as a type of off-shore food production. I am helping to organize the upcoming Canadian Association of Food Studies Conference in Fredericton, and coincidentally Andre Magnan, Assistant Professor at the University of Regina, submitted a paper proposal today to discuss the 'global land grab'. Interestingly, his research studies the phenomenon in the Canadian context.
About the global land grab Magnan writes in his abstract:
"To date, little attention has been paid to the ways these processes are affecting land ownership and farm structure in the global North. In this paper, I explore a recent wave of corporate investment in prairie farmland as a lens on the process of food system financialization. Over the last five years, a number of specialized investment funds have been created for speculative investment in prairie farmland. Meanwhile, an altogether unique model of corporate farm ownership has arisen with the launch of One Earth Farms, a 150 000 acre grains and livestock operation run as a partnership between a Toronto investment firm and a number of First Nations bands. I trace these developments to changing government policy on farmland ownership, the speculative commodities boom, and continuing concentration of land and agricultural resources on the prairies." Fraser and Kaufman point out that this 'speculative commodities boom' is not going unnoticed by the masses of hungry people around the world. Levels of anger and frustration are on the rise as evidenced by the recent food riots in Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere.
The Current's interview with Fraser and Kaufman concludes with a conversation about the importance of citizen control of local food sources for political stability in both 'developed' and 'developing' countries. Kaufman argues that not only is food security of critical importance, but also “increasingly valued in individual countries is food sovereignty, [or], a country’s right to control their own sources of food”. Fraser and Kaufman point out that people are often searching for high tech policy solutions, but in reality problems with our current food system are very solvable and can be dealt with using simple solutions. For example, Fraser argues that in Canada we can increase food sovereignty by storing more food in our households. Fraser notes that our efforts to address local food sovereignty must not only be at the individual level but at a number of scales including regional policy and the reinvention of a national grain program.
To listen to this interview please see the link below.
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2011/02/08/global-food/
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/
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