Since 1947, the orga­ni­za­tion has released The State of Food and Agri­cul­ture — an annu­al assess­ment of agri­cul­tur­al con­di­tions, social trends and their eco­nom­ic impli­ca­tions. The new­ly-released 194-page 2016 report is all about cli­mate change and food secu­ri­ty — par­tic­u­lar­ly what ris­ing sea lev­els, more fre­quent heat waves and droughts mean for the world’s food sup­ply and the peo­ple who depend on it.

“[T]he erad­i­ca­tion of hunger, food inse­cu­ri­ty and mal­nu­tri­tion; the elim­i­na­tion of pover­ty and the dri­ving for­ward of eco­nom­ic and social progress for all and, the sus­tain­able man­age­ment and uti­liza­tion of nat­ur­al resources, includ­ing land, water, air, cli­mate and genet­ic resources for the ben­e­fit of present and future generations.”

The Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion of the Unit­ed Nations (FAO) — an inter­gov­ern­men­tal glob­al alliance with the mis­sion of end­ing hunger and pover­ty wher­ev­er it exists — was for­mal­ly estab­lished in 1945 in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Today, head­quar­tered in Rome, and cur­rent­ly present in over 130 coun­tries, the group’s pri­ma­ry objec­tives remain:

In short, the FAO calls for the broad imple­men­ta­tion of more eco­log­i­cal­ly con­scious farm­ing meth­ods and the ​“realign­ment and inte­gra­tion” of more sus­tain­able food and cli­mate poli­cies. One-fifth of green­house gas emis­sions are gen­er­at­ed in the world’s agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, the report says, and meet­ing that chal­lenge — by adopt­ing more sus­tain­able and effi­cient meth­ods of pro­duc­tion while meet­ing grow­ing demand as the plan­et warms — will be an enor­mous undertaking.

(Image: fao​.org)

This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true for the 475 mil­lion small­hold­er farm fam­i­lies in devel­op­ing coun­tries who suf­fer the most from glob­al warm­ing. Mak­ing the case that ​“hunger, pover­ty and cli­mate change need to be tack­led togeth­er,” the report states:

Unless action is tak­en now to make agri­cul­ture more sus­tain­able, pro­duc­tive and resilient, cli­mate change impacts will seri­ous­ly com­pro­mise food pro­duc­tion in coun­tries and regions that are already high­ly food-inse­cure. These impacts will jeop­ar­dize progress towards the key Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals of end­ing hunger and pover­ty by 2030; beyond 2030, their increas­ing­ly neg­a­tive impacts on agri­cul­ture will be widespread. Through its impacts on agri­cul­ture, liveli­hoods and infra­struc­ture, cli­mate change threat­ens all dimen­sions of food secu­ri­ty. It will expose both urban and rur­al poor to high­er and more volatile food prices. It will also affect food avail­abil­i­ty by reduc­ing the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of crops, live­stock and fish­eries, and hin­der access to food by dis­rupt­ing the liveli­hoods of mil­lions of rur­al peo­ple who depend on agri­cul­ture for their incomes.

To view the FAO’s full 2016 report, click here.

Where do seed patents, cor­po­rate land­grab­bing and GMOs fit in?

Slow Food, a glob­al (albeit grass­roots) orga­ni­za­tion found­ed in 1989 and head­quar­tered in Italy, is com­mit­ted to ​“a world in which all peo­ple can access and enjoy food that is good for them, good for those who grow it and good for the plan­et.” Accord­ing to its web­site, this involves a net­work of over a mil­lion activists, chefs, experts, youth, farm­ers, fish­ers and aca­d­e­mics in more than 160 coun­tries. In 2004, Slow Food launched the Ter­ra Madre project to pro­mote the small-scale and sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion of qual­i­ty food around the world. Today, 2,400 com­mu­ni­ties are participating.

In its reac­tion to the FAO report, Slow Food prais­es the UN’s acknowl­edge­ment of the ​“direct link between agri­cul­ture and cli­mate change, and the back­ing giv­en to agroe­col­o­gy.” How­ev­er, Slow Food also calls the FAO report’s silence on cer­tain aspects of the cur­rent cor­po­rate food mod­el ​“deaf­en­ing.” When it comes to a fair and sus­tain­able food sup­ply, Slow Food crit­i­cizes the FAO’s report for fail­ing to ade­quate­ly address the ​“indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion of meat” as well as ​“the prob­lem of land­grab­bing.” Slow Food also takes issue with the fact the report con­tains ​“no iden­ti­fi­able stance” on genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied foods.

In its pub­lic response, Slow Food states:

Accord­ing to the report, ​“farm­ers, fish­ers and pas­toral­ists are hit hard by ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and the increas­ing fre­quen­cy of weath­er-relat­ed dis­as­ters. By 2030, the neg­a­tive impacts of cli­mate change will put an increas­ing squeeze on food pro­duc­tion as the essen­tial nutri­tion­al val­ues of crops, such as of zinc, iron and pro­tein, will diminish.” Fur­ther­more, as empha­sized by FAO, ​“the impacts of cli­mate change are more strong­ly observed in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, where there is a high­er depen­den­cy on agri­cul­ture both as a source of income and for sustenance”. Pao­lo Di Croce, Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of Slow Food, declares: ​“The only way to reduce food-relat­ed green­house gas emis­sions is to adapt to an agroe­co­log­i­cal approach, and end sup­port for indus­tri­al­ized agri­cul­ture and the glob­al­ized export mar­kets. Slow Food voic­es its belief that good, clean and fair food for all is a human right, and that cor­po­rate con­trol of the food sys­tem has led to hunger, pover­ty, and cli­mate change. By act­ing local­ly, and sup­port­ing small-scale agri­cul­ture, we can make a dif­fer­ence globally.” Slow Food encour­ages every­one, around the world, to grow their own food where pos­si­ble, and to sup­port their local farm­ers. Of course, in order to grow food, we need soil — and we need to face up to the cri­sis of soil degra­da­tion which affects farm­ers across the globe. We need wide-rang­ing and imme­di­ate ini­tia­tives to pro­tect our soil (such as People4Soil, which demands that the Euro­pean Union rec­og­nize soil as a com­mon good), based on agroe­co­log­i­cal meth­ods. The FAO report itself states: ​“Diver­si­fi­ca­tion and bet­ter inte­gra­tion of food pro­duc­tion sys­tems into com­plex eco­log­i­cal process­es cre­ate syn­er­gies with the nat­ur­al habi­tat instead of deplet­ing nat­ur­al resources. Agroe­col­o­gy and sus­tain­able inten­si­fi­ca­tion are exam­ples of approach­es that improve yields and build resilience”. Slow Food agrees with this perspective. Nev­er­the­less, while the bat­tle against cli­mate change is clear­ly relat­ed to devel­op­ments in the food indus­try — from its pro­duc­tion and trans­porta­tion to the ener­gy required to deal with the obscene amounts of food waste we pro­duce — one of the major sources of car­bon emis­sions, the live­stock indus­try, which gen­er­ates between 10 and 25 per cent of all green­house gas emis­sions, is bare­ly men­tioned in the FAO report. Eat­ing less meat and more puls­es is a neces­si­ty for our future, and pub­lic sup­port for indus­tri­al­ized meat pro­duc­tion must be stopped. Slow Food notes also the con­spic­u­ous absence of sev­er­al major threats to glob­al food secu­ri­ty in the 194-page report. First­ly, land grabs are men­tioned just once, and in the con­text of the Euro­pean Union! Inde­pen­dent obser­va­to­ry the Land Matrix has record­ed the sale of 2% of the world’s arable land to pri­vate investors since the year 2000, an area larg­er than the Unit­ed King­dom. Where once-pas­toral lands are con­vert­ed for inten­sive mono­cul­tur­al crop pro­duc­tion, this also con­tributes to cli­mate change. Final­ly, giv­en the ongo­ing debate on GMOs, the FAO report’s silence on the mat­ter is deaf­en­ing. Were GMOs unequiv­o­cal­ly con­sid­ered an instru­ment in the fight against cli­mate change, Slow Food would expect the report to say so. Yet the report does not men­tion GMOs once. Beyond ques­tions of safe­ty, the threat to food secu­ri­ty comes from the sim­ple fact that GMOs are patent­ed, and there increas­ing use is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to cor­po­rate con­trol of the food chain. Patent­ing genet­ic mate­r­i­al has shift­ed the bal­ance of eco­nom­ic pow­er from farm­ers towards big busi­ness in their aggres­sive pur­suit of prof­it, as small-scale farm­ers are forced to become cus­tomers of GM seeds every new sea­son. If FAO is seri­ous in its com­mit­ment to sup­port­ing small­hold­er farm­ers, which would seem evi­dent in the fact that the first of the ​“Key Mes­sages” in the report’s third chap­ter is: ​“Glob­al pover­ty can­not be erad­i­cat­ed with­out strength­en­ing the resilience of small­hold­er agri­cul­ture to cli­mate change impacts”, then sure­ly we must reduce the depen­dence of these small­hold­er farm­ers on patent­ed GM seeds.

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