Recently there has been an increased amount of attention being given by the media to what is being described as “food riots”breaking out in different countries such as Haiti, Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, El Salvador, and unfortunately, other countries as well where people are protesting the rising cost of feeding themselves and their household. Rising food prices; staples like rice and corn doubling in cost in some places, are impacting the poorest poor the hardest. The poverty in these countries is not new- people have been struggling to get by for a long time and that fact alone is not usually newsworthy for mainstream media. But poverty suddenly becomes prime-time when the poor throw stones.  

It is the news reports out of Haiti that disturb me the most because I have been there and have spent some time with folks that were already resiliently struggling to overcome the oppressive poverty that wraps tightly around day to day living. It has been my honor to walk with some farmers in Haiti and learn about their lives. The food riots result from a realization that power is not in your hands to change things and that the hands who hold the power also belong to ears that are not listening and minds that do not understand. The food crisis many are now facing results from a combination of factors that are well out of reach of peasant farmers and market women and the industrious poor of the developing world. Their voices are not heard when policy is discussed. Here is a series of reports from the Sun-Sentinel and youtube video from Reuters. 

We here in the U.S. are experiencing rising food prices as well as our neighborhoods are integral to the ‘globalhood.’ Our wealthy nation is home to millions who wrestle with food security; knowing whether or not they will have enough nutritious food to eat each month, or week, or day. Rising food prices are forecast to continue. There is an interconnectedness between what Americans in poor neighborhoods experience as food insecurity and what our neighbors around the ‘globalhood’ experience as hunger and malnutrition and death. Food is our common denominator and we all are participants in an unjust food system.

The way the wealthy nations and the impoverished nations feed themselves and one another is unjust; the trade system is both vulnerable and destructive and is reportedly leaning like a house of straw, or wheat, closer and closer toward collapse. Our industrialized global food system that is designed to develop dependence on imports is simply not sustainable. The recent food riots are symptoms of a greater crisis, one that will certainly repeat itself time and again unless we re-think food. The bottom-line for this dilemma is, well, the bottom-line; food is no longer understood as food but has instead become a commodity for corporate profiteering and global food security is no longer in the hands of farmers standing in the soil but is instead in the hands of corporate executives sitting in board rooms. 

What is needed is a system that can withstand the shifting storms of market forces; a system rooted in food sovereignty. Food Sovereignty, as first defined by this statement from Via Campesino, is “the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets; and to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.”

I am not an alarmist shouting that the sky is falling but there is an increasing risk of serious crisis ahead and for the poorest it has arrived. I am no economist or agronomist or pessimist, but I read. I can try to put it all in perspective in my own words and with an eloquent voice that sounds informed and knowledgable I may impress you. But instead, I will humbly step aside and introduce Brahm Ahmadi of “People’s Grocery” in West Oakland. Take a few minutes to learn from his own words in this powerful little video presentation on food systems.