Title: Climate Change, the Global Food Crisis and Food Sovereignty
Abstract: Strategies to prevent catastrophic climate change appear to conflict with solutions to the global food crisis. In the wake of financial turmoil, commodity speculation, the agro-fuel boom, and related food-price spikes in 2007-08, more than a billion people now face chronic hunger (FAO). Meanwhile, programs sponsored or proposed by the World Bank and international agencies would pay governments, landowners and farmers, especially in the tropics, to conserve and extend forests instead of planting food crops. Assumptions supporting this approach are that increased international food trade will supply hungry regions, that sales of the environmental service of carbon sequestration by forests will raise revenues for food imports and economic development, and that the intensification and spread of large-scale, modern agriculture will supplant peasant farming and produce more food. However, about a third of global greenhouse-gas emissions arise from agriculture itself and from related land-use changes. Large-scale, high-external-input crop and livestock operations and long-distance food transport are fossil-fuel dependent and contribute the greatest share of atmospheric and water pollution from agriculture. A growing body of evidence points to a more promising alternative. Diversity-based, low-external-input agriculture, drawing on agro-ecological science and local farmer knowledge, is often equally or more food-productive and nutritious than industrial monocrop agriculture. Diversity-based smallholder agriculture and silviculture can be much less environmentally destructive and have at least equal ability, compared to industrial farming, to sequester carbon in vegetation and soils. This approach, combined with policies to strengthen food production for local, national, and regional needs, has the additional advantages of supporting local cultures and livelihoods and reducing vulnerability to externally-caused food-price shocks and shortages. The concept of food sovereignty provides the principles and policy guidelines for promoting this strategy.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-03-29
Language: en
Type: article
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