Sunday, 4th of may. 10am, Sala del Dottorato, Perugia.
Speakers:
Francesco Piccinini, direttore fanpage.it
Sipho Moyo, Africa executive director ONE
Iain MacGillivray, special advisor UN food agency
Frederick Kaufman, autore Bet The Farm
Antonella Cordone, advisor on indigenous peoples
Massimo Alberizzi, direttore Africa Express
The tile for today’s panel is “the untold story of food politics”. The central question, the first that Piccinini addresses to a mixed panel of experts (journalists, UN staff, NGO workers) is: why are those stories untold by the media?
The answer is in the complexity of these issue itself, according to journalist Frederick Kaufman. The stories of food, land, energy and water have all become one story, requiring a much more complicated, in depth analysis to be told.
To catch this story, (cit.) “ is to catch a big wave at a very early stage”: we have now witnessed another food crisis, starting around 2007-08, and rebounding around the globe with its luggage of civil unrest. There were many contributing factors, but the result was to draw attention to the issue of scarcity. With a growing population and diminishing resources, food is becoming more precious than ever. This has triggered the interest of actors which previously never dealt with food: hedge funds, big multinationals, financial dealers. Hence when we speak about investment in agriculture we have to distinguish amongst different varieties: investment by whom, and for who?
There is today a growing interest in agriculture because of its multiplier effect, as pointed out by Iain MacGillivray of IFAD (UN agency for food and agriculture investment). This means that the returns of investment in agriculture are up to 11 times more effective towards poverty reduction than investments in any other sector, including oil and mining.
It is in smallholder farmers that we should direct our and our governments’ attention to, says Sipho Moyo of ONE, an international campaigning and advocacy organization. They make up 70% of Africans, and contribute by 80% to the continent’s food production, however they often go unheard, because such a large and dispersed group has no means to unite and organize their grievances in an effective fashion. This is why ONE launched a campaign directed at African government to respect their 2003 commitment of dedicating 10% of their budget to agriculture. This investment is crucial for developing the necessary infrastructure (roads, storage, market information), training, ensuring tenure of land, diminish gender disparities – all necessary steps to empowering smallholders in Africa.
Massimo Alberizzi, director of the reporting project Africa Express, does not entirely agree: for him, there’s an emergency which should be addressed first: the political use of food and access to food in conflicts in Africa. He reported on Somalia, where government impeded distribution of food aid in territories controlled by guerrillas. In their turn, guerrillas refused food aid to keep populations under control. In South Sudan the same happens: in refugee camps, 1M people goes hungry because governments favor or impede food distributions along ethnic lines. These stories go untold because it is more news worthy to report on deaths from armed conflicts, rather than on the sufferings and fatalities caused by the indirect effects of struggle.
Antonella Cordone, expert on indigenous peoples at IFAD, speaks about another emergency, less visible but even more consequential: that of biodiversity. In a 100 years we have lost up to 75% of biodiversity on our planet, and most of the world is fed on only 30 plant varieties. This is because most of our foodstuffs, as noted by Kaufman, is protected by patents by a few food giants.
One solution to the privatization and diminution of our plant resources, explains Cordone, is to abandon the prejudice in favor of western science and technology, and observe and learn from the valuable knowledge and approach to nature of indigenous people worldwide. They are the guardians of our biodiversity, counting innumerable varieties of seeds which are not commercialized and which maintain precious genetic traits (resistance to salinity, to altitude, to frosts…) which marketed seeds have lost.
The story of food and food politics, it emerged from this discussion, it is incredibly dense of interests, perspectives, and interconnected issues. It is a story that rarely features in mainstream media, but one which we will need to start hearing a lot more about, if we are to address the challenges laying ahead.
Paola Tamma