EnviroThursday furthers global food crisis awareness
By: Leigh Bercaw
Issue date: 9/19/08 Section: Features
Macalester was graced by the presence of Jim Harkness, President of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, for EnviroThursday on Sept. 11 to talk about the "Real Roots of the Global Food Crisis." Intrigued by the concept of "real roots" (what wily false roots must have been deceiving us all this time!) and lured like a cow to pasture by the promise of free food, I decided to attend-but not without hesitancy.
Hypothetically, if I was unsure just what this crisis was, would I (hypothetically, of course) understand what was going on? Well, hypothetically, the answer was yes.
So what is this "global food crisis"? In a nutshell, we're experiencing the downside of a global agricultural system prone to increasing volatility, characterized by increased concentration of market power, longer and longer supply chains, lack of support for domestic farming, loss of farmland and bad grain reserves-making China's "strategic pork reserve" look pretty appealing.
I, being an ex-grocery bagger, can attest to the full spectrum of people affected: the health-conscious vegan grumbling about the rising cost of organic granola, the shoplifter facing charges who can't afford to feed his family and surely college kids too, evident through the five heaping plates of first-years determined to eat their way through the cost of tuition. All of which seems insignificant compared to the "10,000 farmers who committed suicide in Punjab over the last decade."
How did this come about? Harkness presents a reasonable explanation.
In the early eighties, the U.S. agricultural policies combined the power of high-yield crops with mechanization to produce an industrialized beast-our farming system-which flooded developing nations with low-cost agricultural products and led to globalization of labor, "undermining the very conditions on which our food system depends."
As reports of increasing food shortages in Haiti, the Philippines and Mexico (all adopted the U.S.'s agricultural policies most enthusiastically) begin to frequent newsstands, the question remains: what to do?
Hypothetically, if I was unsure just what this crisis was, would I (hypothetically, of course) understand what was going on? Well, hypothetically, the answer was yes.
So what is this "global food crisis"? In a nutshell, we're experiencing the downside of a global agricultural system prone to increasing volatility, characterized by increased concentration of market power, longer and longer supply chains, lack of support for domestic farming, loss of farmland and bad grain reserves-making China's "strategic pork reserve" look pretty appealing.
I, being an ex-grocery bagger, can attest to the full spectrum of people affected: the health-conscious vegan grumbling about the rising cost of organic granola, the shoplifter facing charges who can't afford to feed his family and surely college kids too, evident through the five heaping plates of first-years determined to eat their way through the cost of tuition. All of which seems insignificant compared to the "10,000 farmers who committed suicide in Punjab over the last decade."
How did this come about? Harkness presents a reasonable explanation.
In the early eighties, the U.S. agricultural policies combined the power of high-yield crops with mechanization to produce an industrialized beast-our farming system-which flooded developing nations with low-cost agricultural products and led to globalization of labor, "undermining the very conditions on which our food system depends."
As reports of increasing food shortages in Haiti, the Philippines and Mexico (all adopted the U.S.'s agricultural policies most enthusiastically) begin to frequent newsstands, the question remains: what to do?
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