Feeding the world - facts versus fiction

Rather than growing food to meet the needs of local communities for a healthy, diverse diet, industrial agriculture produces crops to sell on world markets. While world crop production has trebled since the 1950s, more people go hungry now than 20 years ago. Small family farmers are driven off their land and local people cannot afford to buy what is grown. Too often, the result is a downward spiral of environmental destruction, poverty and hunger.

 

Food security will not be achieved by technical fixes, like genetic engineering (GE). People who need to eat need access to land on which to grow food or money with which to buy food. Technological 'solutions' like GE mask the real social, political, economic and environmental problems responsible for hunger.

The case of Argentina, the number two producer of GE crops in the world and the only developing country growing GE food crops on a large commercial scale, shows that GE does not lead to an increase in food security. Millions of tons of GE soya are exported every year from Argentina for cattle feed, while millions of Argentineans go hungry.


The real causes of hunger:

Poverty and lack of access to resources: Hunger and malnutrition are a direct result of a lack of access to, or exclusion from, productive resources, such as land, the forests, the seas, water, seeds, technology and credit. Seventy-five percent of the world's hungry are politically marginalised people who live in rural areas. An example of the grossly unequal distribution of land that directly contributes to hunger: in Latin America, 80 percent of agricultural land is in the hands of 20 percent of the farmers; the other 20 percent of the land is in the hands of the remaining 80 percent.

Unfair trade regimes: The current agricultural trade system puts the South in an impossible situation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) annual state subsidies of their national agricultural sectors exceed Sub-Saharan Africa's entire Gross Domestic Product. Subsidised exports, artificially low prices and WTO legalised dumping by the rich countries characterise the current unfair model of agricultural trade faced by poor countries.

Orientation of research towards industrial agriculture rather than towards the needs of marginal farmers: Research often neglects the development of agricultural techniques that reduce the inputs needed and that are easy to control. Agricultural research at international and national levels is highly orientated towards industrial agriculture.


In-Depth:

IAASTD Briefing 

Food first

Action Aid

Record Harvest Record Hunger

Golden Rice: Reality v Fiction

The future of farming: Industrial Agriculture and the Growth of GM is adding to the problem of world hunger

Presentation made by Father Roland Lesseps at the Bio-Tech meeting at the Vatican in September 2004

Presentation to the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace