Alimentazione e società in Africa

by Philip McMichael and Birgit Müller (September 2014)

Pause in the negotiations in the Red Room of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  How to govern the “global land rush”¹ was at issue in the final negotiations on the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems at the Committee for World Food Security (CFS) in Rome, held 4–8 August 2014.
For a week, a policy drama unfolded. On stage were private sector organizations, clearly supported by the United States, Canada, and Russia, that wanted to prevent any regulation of investments. Opposing them were Civil Society Organizations (CSOs)—supported by Brazil, Ecuador, and, to some extent, Indonesia and Sudan—that wanted commitments from the governments to assume their obligations to govern investments in such a way as to realize the right to food as a national priority.
Food producers and land and water users have experienced a long-simmering crisis. Over several decades, governments—with International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank pressure—and corporate markets have undermined or destabilized their production systems; investors and states have seized land, wetlands, and forests²; and farm, plantation, and food workers have suffered declining wages and exploitative working conditions. Altogether, these deteriorating conditions triggered, over the past quarter century, a vast range of struggle, mobilization, and development of alternatives in all regions. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the crisis came to a head, as financial speculation and monopoly pricing of agro-inputs, combined with rising energy costs of industrial foods and use of cropland for agro-fuel production, triggered a spike in food prices worldwide.
In June 2008, the Terra Preta Forum, organized by civil society alongside the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) World Summit on Food Security, noted:
The serious and urgent food and climate crises are being used by political and economic elites as opportunities to entrench corporate control of world agriculture and the ecological commons.
Crisis conditions provided cover for political and economic elites to impose their will. Transnational and domestic corporate investors, governments, and local elites took control over large quantities of land (and its minerals and water) to produce food, feed, biofuel, and other industrial commodities for the international or domestic markets. The World Bank entered into an alliance with the G8 countries and corporate philanthropists like the Gates Foundation, feeding the world the idea that private agricultural investment was the solution to crisis. Conversely, the obvious crisis in multilateral governance also made the reform of the CFS possible. This restructuring in 2009 opened up a space for the food-insecure populations themselves, among them small producers from all over the world. For the first time in United Nations history, civil society organizations and private sector organizations were sitting with representatives of governments around the table to discuss and make proposals about food policy issues. …

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