“Food production must once again be an issue of sustainability, with the right to food and the protection of the environment being intrinsic rights,” Dr. Vandana Shiva an organic farmer, social activist and renowned environmentalist.
She issues a warning that the growth in global famine is a result of widespread chemical farming, which turns biodiverse land into monocultures that are too expensive for farmers to maintain and produce too few nutrient-dense foods for local consumption.
“Most communities that are truly agricultural villages in third – world countries suffer from hunger. They still lack food since they have to sell what they have grown to pay for the expensive chemicals and seeds,” she said.
She explained that the agricultural models that chemical farming has promoted are monocultures. In monocultures, the same acre of land is nutritionally insufficient. She further elaborated that hunger is on the rise as a result of increasing the production of products for international trade at the expense of local people’ access to nutrition.
“Five to ten times more nutrition could be produced by biodiversity employing ecological and organic approaches than by a monoculture. The entire planet must be fed. It must be nourished by cultivating food nearby, which must make up the majority of the food basket. There will be international commerce of some commodities. But staple foods shouldn’t be traded abroad,” Shiva mentioned.
The environmentalist narrated that the goal of turning the globe into a food-dependent society is to control the food supply, not to feed the population. The problem is that the expansion of agribusiness in the US has coincided with the US foreign strategy of purposefully causing local hunger in order to make the globe dependent on food supply, which can then be used to control nations and their capacity for decision-making.
“So hunger has become an instrument of war and food, responding to that artificially created hunger is an instrument for peace means you grow food locally you grow foods, the peace,” she said.
Food production, she cites, must be an issue of sustainability, taking care of the earth and the human right to food must be an inalienable right.
