Human rights: Food for questioning your own thoughts ‘Fulfill the right to food we must’
HRR 732
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the need for further activism to counter the current agri-food production paradigm mostly focusing on two needed lines of action. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. As we are getting towards the end of the UN Decade on Nutrition –and with little to show for progress— all those working in food and nutrition and concerned about the consequentiality of their work ought to take-on the needed added ‘advocacy’ (activism?) challenge as part of their role as claim holders in the struggle for the right to food.
2. Mainstream nutrition and food science continue to serve the short-term interests of corporations and governments. This, since policies have been and are condoning corporate profits –which now means pandemic obesity and diabetes. Governments and corporations continue to cooperate in a concerted colossal drive to generate more production, more goods, more profits, more gross national product, more people consuming, more methods of agriculture and manufacture that are more intensive and more rapacious, plus adding more artificial ingredients –and, as should be well-known by now, all more pathogenic. (Geoffrey Cannon)
Here are (just) two fronts for advocates/activists to lean their muscle power on:
Agroecology
3. The ruling agricultural paradigm totally disregards what we, human rights (HR) activists, consider to be a pre-requisite: genuine land reform. The oppressed and dispossessed, whose labor anchors the paradigm, are not the core decision-makers on how and for whom food is produced, distributed, and consumed. Reciprocity, complementarity, sharing and collectivizing labor, seeds, livestock breeds, knowledge, land and food –all core food sovereignty governance principles*are, therefore absent. Land for growing millets, pulses and dryland rice, that should be cultivated for communities to feed themselves, goes to growing cash crops. Farmers thus produce for the market and are gearwheels for distant supply chains.
*: Food sovereignty is the food system’s understanding in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution. This stands in contrast to the present corporate food regime in which corporations and market institutions control the global food system. Food sovereignty emphasizes local food economies, sustainable food availability, and centers around culturally appropriate foods and practices. Beware: Corporates leaning on the UN want to take away from food sovereignty the category of a human right!
4. The inequality of the current agricultural system excludes caste and oppressed agricultural workers from purchasing and consuming the higher priced food that was produced by their own labor. The income they earn from selling their crops eventually goes to purchase the cheapest ultraprocessed foods in the market (see below). This raises fundamental questions about the needed shift to agroecology** that has a greater chance of increasing overall well-being, access to safe food, and wealth for farmers rendered poor.
**: Agroecology is a holistic farming practice that seeks to reconcile agriculture and local communities with natural processes for the common benefit of nature and livelihoods.
5. In reality, the ruling paradigm accumulates benefits for the historically privileged landowning groups, while sustaining inequality and discrimination. Markets for produce are embedded within a vast system that is ultimately greenwashing capital at the center often through multi-stakeholder platforms and networks populated by agro-chemical corporations that continue to run an aggressive chemical warfare against the environment.
6. Furthermore, loans are primarily available from private investors and have to be serviced by individual farmers following a design that is pre-decided by the lenders. Parts of this global agricultural governance structure are digitally and remotely controlled, complete with central surveillance and end-to-end food traceability making the model severely constrained a) by the huge inequality of land and resource ownership, b) by non-inclusive and hierarchical systems of knowledge regarding resource production, c) by deceitfully labelling agroecological production schemes being linked to export via agribusiness-controlled value chains and global greenwashing (so, beware of a fake agroecology schemes), d) by monetized systems of exchange, and e) by practices governed by institutions that work to defend the interests of capital and not labor that deceitfully push towards distorted pathways that are certainly not agroecology.
7. Such fake agroecological models are built on an entrenched superstructure of inequality, exploitation, and dispossession. Their powerful promoters seek to ‘lock in’ agroecology into transition pathways that are designed to sustain capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy; they close down options for true agroecological pathways aimed at radically transforming the dominant agri-food regime. Telling success stories to scale up this fake type of agroecology is indeed a remarkable example of global greenwashing that deflects attention from more just and sustainable agroecological transformations. (all from Sagari Ramdas and Michel Pimbert)
Ultraprocessed foods (UPFs)
—Disclaimer: What we wrongly call UPFs are not really foods, they are ultraprocessed edible products commonly referred to as junk food.
8. Ultraprocessed*** edible products are the ‘star performing products’ of the dominant agribusiness system (or of “capitalism coming through our mouths”–to use Eric Holt Gimenez’s phrase). They generate the highest profit margins for Big Food and they destroy local gastronomies.
***: To refer to ultraprocessed products, Claude Fischler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Fischler) uses the concept of NIEOs (non-identified edible objects).
9. UPFs profusely use chemical additives (which Carlos Monteiro calls ‘contaminants‘) such as colorants, flavorings, and other substances that only create an ‘illusion of diversity’ of products that, essentially, have the same basic ingredients, many times coming from transgenic monocultures). In addition to being palatable, UPFs are often deliberately addictive (sugar, monosodium glutamate, among others). UPFs also have residues of pesticides.****
****: Brazil’s Veneno no Pacote Report highlights this fact (https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=veneno+no+pacote#ip=1 , in Portuguese).
10. The first ultra-processed products were the commercial breast milk substitutes (where using ‘formula’ makes the newborn become a customer from the earliest infancy —a flagrant infringement of the Convention of the Rights of the Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child). There are many organizations working on counter-advertising interventions. (A quite creative one is called ‘Proyecto Squatters’. They run a campaign for the discussion of ultra-processing where the children’s characters depicted on the packages are prosecuted for crimes against children; https://www.anred.org/2021/10/25/ultra-procesados-por-manipular-y-malnutrir-a-las-infancias/ , in Spanish).
Bottom line:
11. Here you have, then, the mere guts of two of the barriers to the fulfillment of the right to food that call you to act: pick your choice and get active.
12. Otherwise, ponder the overall remedy: The transformation of food systems will ultimately require challenging the market-oriented and multi-stakeholder forms of governance. With this, has come the massive expansion in the size and global reach of Big Food and Big Soda, and the power these corporations wield (with their lack democratic accountability) in relation to both states and public interest CSOs. Technical ‘problem-solving’ and overly-circumscribed policy approaches that depoliticise food systems are thus utterly insufficient to generate the change we need, within the narrow time-frame we have.
13. There have indeed been multiple calls for a transformative shift in how we ‘build back fairer’ and not just ‘better.’ There is a growing number of progressive social movements spanning social justice, environmental sustainability, gender empowerment, health equity, labor rights, and indigenous sovereignty (to name but a few) that, all, in differing ways, challenge the current form of Capitalism as a system that is no longer ‘fit for purpose’. The struggle for a new political economy for food systems thus aligns with many others, all seeking transformation into an eco-just political economy driven by the goals of ensuring a planet fit for human habitation and participatory forms of
governance fit for social equity. (Phillip Baker et al)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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