MANILA, Philippines — PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP) joined various rural people’s groups in a rally in front of the Philippine agriculture ministry to mark World Hunger Day – a response by food sovereignty movements to the official World Food Day of the United Nations (UN) last Oct 17.
PANAP, the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), and the Asian Peasant Coalition (APC) earlier released a joint statement calling to “unchain our food from the shackles of imperialism.” 44 organisations from 14 countries have endorsed the statement so far.
“Imperialism is causing food and climate crises and the starvation of people around the world, and the destruction of our planet. Imperialist competition for economic and political spheres of influence in the name of super-profits has plundered the world, destroyed the climate and environment, restructured food and agricultural production to serve the whims of the global market instead of people’s needs, financialised the world economy that resulted in skyrocketing costs of food, spurred wars of aggression, spawned pandemics, etc. – all to the detriment of food security and food sovereignty of the people,” part of the statement read.
According to the latest report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the state of the world’s food security, about 768 million people globally went hungry in 2021, around 46 million higher than in 2020. More than half of the hungry people live in Asia (425 million), and more than a third in Africa (278 million).
Advance agroecology
The public rally on World Hunger Day is also the culmination of PANAP’s 16 Days of Global Action on Agroecology. The Penang-based group said that for rural communities facing hunger, agroecology allows overcoming the food crisis.
From Oct 1 to 15, PANAP partners from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and others organised food festivals, learning exchanges, training, fora and public dialogues, rallies, etc., to highlight how rural peoples confront the worsening global hunger through agroecology.
As an approach to food production, agroecology is a direct alternative to agricultural systems heavily reliant on hazardous and destructive technologies and commodities such as the Green Revolution varieties to genetically modified (GM) seeds and chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Aside from harming the environment and people’s health, these products and inputs are also so expensive that they drive poor farmers into bankruptcy and starvation.
Stop land grabs
While agroecology could help farmers address the environmental destruction and hunger caused by the predominant corporate agriculture, it is impossible to undertake if the farmers are landless or do not control the land they till. People-led agroecology as a sustainable and community-empowering approach to food and agriculture production can only achieve its full potential if the rural peoples control and own the land and other productive resources.
But land has been increasingly the target of corporate takeover, financialisation and speculation, and plunder by transnational corporations (TNCs) and the local elite. Land grabs continue to displace rural communities and concentrate a massive size of farmlands in the hands of a few.
According to the International Land Coalition’s 2020 report, while small-scale farmers run 80% of farms, the largest 1% of farming enterprises manage more than 70% of farmlands worldwide.
Such steep inequality in control over farmlands results from, among others, the growing interest of the biggest financial firms and speculators to invest in and take over agricultural lands. Companies that do not have anything to do in farm or food production – from property holder BlackRock to the various financial managers of Bill Gates – are expanding and consolidating their control over the world’s agricultural lands for profit-making.
PANAP said that this illustrates one of the many ways that imperialism and the operations of its monopoly corporations and finance capital drive global hunger.
In their World Hunger Day statement, PANAP, APC, and PCFS emphasised that “resistance against imperialism to transform our food systems to become just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable through the implementation of genuine agrarian reform, the assertion of food sovereignty, promotion of people-led agroecology is indispensable in the people’s struggles and campaigns to truly address the food and climate crises.” ###
Reference: Arnold Padilla, Programme Coordinator, arnold.padilla@panap.net
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