It's
necessary to "degrow" the "corporate food regime" that over last five
decades has impoverished the climate, water resources, local communities
and crop diversity, and has not solved the problem of hunger.

This was the argument made by Eric Holt-Giménez, Executive Director of Food First,
an organization whose mission is to work towards ending hunger by
bringing about food justice, at a presentation Friday at the Fourth
International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and
Social Equity, which took place in Leipzig, Germany.Holt-Giménez made his address via video during a session entitled
"The food challenge. Struggling for just and ecological food systems."

The food sector has been growth-focused, but this has not stopped the
problem of hunger, Holt-Giménez said, pointing the example of 2008,
which was a year of record harvests and record profits for agricultural
giants like Cargill and ADM amidst record hunger.

"Clearly something has to change, and simply growing more food isn't
going to solve the problem of hunger," he said. "This contradiction runs
even deeper when we realize that most of the hungry people in the world
are farmers. They're peasant farmers," most of whom are women, he
added.Yet "peasant farmers produce most of the food in the world — and they
do it on less than a quarter of the agricultural land on the planet."

"So there's a tremendous amount of inequity bound up in the food
system which creates poverty and in turn creates hunger even in a world
of abundance."

Yet institutions of power repeat the claim that the amount of food
the wold produces must double by 2015, Holt-Giménez said. "This is
simply part of productivist ideology of an extractive and regressive
food system — regressive in that it does not redistribute the wealth
within the food system, but it concentrates the wealth in fewer and
fewer hands. "Degrowth, however, has gripped the food system as well, he said,
because as big farms are getting bigger, small farms are getting
smaller. Despite this, small farms continue to be more productive than
their bigger counterparts.

So what will it take for degrowth to occur in the right way in the
food system? That will require food sovereignty, a system that is local,
redistributive and adheres to agro-ecological principles, he said.

That's a food system that stands in contrast to the
chemical-dependent system introduced in the so-called Green Revolution
and trade policies like NAFTA, but is one that ensures access to land
and an "end to corporate monopoly rule.""Clearly we need to degrow corporate power," he said. "Clearly this
means a complete transformation of the corporate food regime."

We need "reforms that transform" the current capitalist food system,
and that will take alliance building between progressives and radicals
to make a strong enough movement to bring about such reforms, he said.To see Holt-Giménez's full remarks as well as those by the other
panelists, watch the video below uploaded by Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung:

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