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Which Future of Food? 

Food for All, Health for All, Work for All or End of Food, End of Health, End of Work with control over food in the hands of the 1%.

Food and Nutrition are the flow, and currency of the cycles of life. Food is the great connector in the web of life. It connects the soil organisms with the plants, the insects, and the animals.

Food is a gift from the Earth given to us from the work and labour of women, farmers, farm workers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, gardeners, and mothers.

Real farmers produce real food, which nourishes the soil, plants, and animals – including humans. Real farming has sustained the Earth and her civilisations over millennia. The principles of real farming: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, natural, organic farming are based on diversity and care. They maximise photosynthetic biomass for multiple functions and uses by recycling organic matter and working in alignment with the law of return.

As Albert Howard, in his book The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture reminds us: “All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration.”

Real food is the right of all beings. To eat is to be alive. To eat real food is to be well and healthy. Real food is at the heart of the health of the planet, as well as our health and well-being.

Industrial food systems based on fossil fuels and chemicals are less than a century old. In a few decades, industrial food systems have destroyed the Earth’s systems, human health and livelihoods as they have directly violated the ecological laws and laws of justice.

Industrial systems are based on:

  • Monocultures instead of diversity
  • Careless technologies of spraying poisons to kill insects, plants, fungi
  • Inefficient use of the blessings of sunlight, reducing photosynthetic biomass, and creating negative productivity with external inputs
  • Extracting fossil fuels and soil fertility
  • Separation of plants from animals

The anti-ecological industrial food systems have contributed to:

An industrial, globalised, commodity production system with no limits is contributing to ecological destruction of the earth’s living processes and the planet’s health. It has contributed to the emergence of new infectious diseases when forest ecosystems are invaded (such as Ebola, HIV, ZIKA, Monkeypox and so on) as well as the increase of non communicable chronic diseases such as, cancer, diabetes, infertility, and neurodegenerative diseases. The ecological emergencies are the metabolic disorders of the planetary system just like the metabolic disorders that are leading to the public health emergency.

The current price crisis and incoming hunger crisis is also not a symptom of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but a symptom of a system that has gone too far. According to the FAO, the World Bank, and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), there is currently no risk of global food supply shortages.

Since food has been reduced to a financial asset and commodity, excess speculation due to food financialization is behind the crisis. Which means steep price increases  for the consumer and bigger corporate gains for financial players and big agricultural firms. What is crucially being overlooked by most diagnoses of the current food crisis is how the problem does not lie in a lack of supply, but instead in how the food system is structured around power.

It is time to abandon our resource intensive and profit based economic systems that have created havoc in the world, disrupting the planet’s ecosystems and undermining society’s systems of health, justice, and democracy.

The shift from fossil fuel driven corporate globalisation to localization of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative.

We must put into practice the international consensus on the need to create an alternative to industrial agriculture and the large-scale distribution model.   The creation of local ecological economies based on “bread labour” and co-creativity with nature is the only way to sustain the earth and human societies through the rejuvenation of real work. 

The ethical, ecological response is to Return to Earth and her ecological laws to ensure food for all, health for all, work for all.

The anti ecological response is to put the industrial food system on steroids. To destroy real farms, real farmers, real food and force hyper industrial monoculture farms, run on robots and AI, to produce raw materials of carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids for lab based industrial fake food systems. This is the dystopia of “farming without farmers” and “food without farms” that the rich polluters who have contributed most to climate change are imposing undemocratically on the world as false totalitarian solutions to climate change.

Industrial food systems are based on separation and specialisation as one dimensional monocultures.

“Never does nature separate the animal and vegetable worlds. This is a mistake she cannot endure, and of all the errors which modern agriculture has committed this abandonment of mixed husbandry has been the most fatal. ” ― Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture

First they created monocultures of plants and animals, separated them from each other, and broke the cycles that create sustainability and permanence. Animals were pushed off the land and put in factory farms, and food grains were diverted from people to factory animals and CAFOs, leading to nitrogen and methane emissions. Now animals are being killed and farmers are being driven off the land.

Reclaiming Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is our ecological and ethical duty to the Earth, to our earth family and humanity.

Just as Nadia El Hage says in her “Call to Action to peasants, herders, indigenous peoples and all eaters caring about good food, Hands-Off Agro-Sylvo-Pastoral Cultures”: “The current food policy environment is led by an implicit global agenda seeking to replace land-based animal production with lab-produced proteins. This trend is backed by a global campaign against livestock production, and organically-grazed animals in particular. In Northern Ireland, an industry-commissioned study calls for a reduction of over one million sheep and cattle to reach net-zero carbon emissions.  The New Zealand climate change minister has recently unveiled a plan to tax, from 2025, deer, sheep, goats, and beef burps in order to tackle the country’s sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Public money is committed to tackling climate change by forcing farmers into emission trading schemes that allow exacerbating business-as-usual with more feed additives imports into feedlots, rather than converting industrial livestock systems into regenerative operations.”

There has been a deliberate confusion created between factory farms based on exploitation, and animals on small ecological farms which are an essential part of an integrated system. As a consequence, animals are often seen as the main problem of modern food systems, with many arguing in favour of discarding them. It is crucial to understand the difference between both systems: Whereas small scale farmers integrate animals as vital diversity in a functional agro-ecosystem and do not torture and overpopulate their fields with them, factory farms feature huge numbers crammed in deplorable conditions while emitting GHG emissions and relying on huge public subsidies.

We are seeing how this global agenda to erase land-based cultures, ignores the very crises they have created. Just as is the case with Brucellosis disease spreading through buffalos in Italy, caused by CAFOs, the twisted agenda uses this as a means to push false solutions to climate change and food shortages. The culling of these animals, necessary because of industrial production, is now also destroying the livelihoods of the real small-scale producers of mozzarella. Amid this destruction of real food, and real food culture, Fake Food companies, like German start-up company Formo, received record funding to produce lab ricotta and mozzarella. Allowing them to take advantage of the destruction already caused by the industrial system.

Let us prepare for a Recovery –  through Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign – where the health and wellbeing of all peoples and the planet are at the centre of all government and institutional policy, community building and civic action. 

“Let us align our creative potential with the higher planetary laws and higher laws of humanity which make life and wellbeing possible for all” —Dr Vandana Shiva

CALL TO ACTION FOR SEED FREEDOM AND FOOD FREEDOM, SEED SOVEREIGNTY AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY

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  1. Right to Save and Share the open pollinated seeds that provide us with nourishment and Climate Resilience. No to Patents on Life and Patents on Seed
  2. Right to health and safety, Food Sovereignty and Food Freedom. Right to Biosafety Regulations that regulate GMOs – old and new. Deregulation violates the democratic rights of citizens and the rights of Mother Earth and the integrity of her species.
  3. Farmers Rights and Rights of farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk to livelihoods and to their right to provide society with real, healthy, nourishing food.
  4. Freedom of all beings from poisons and agrochemicals that are the basis of industrial agriculture. Right to practise diverse systems of farming with nature: agroecology, regenerative farming, organic and natural farming.
  5. Freedom from fossil fuels and negative energy systems that use 10 times more external energy inputs than they produce.
  6. Right to food for all  and freedom from speculation and monopolies that create price rise and scarcity, stealing food from the poor and vulnerable. Food is a public good and governments have a duty to regulate financial giants and ensure no one goes hungry.
  7. Freedom to conserve our biodiversity of plants and animals, and participate in our diverse cultures and knowledge systems that regenerate the planet, our life, health and freedom.
  8. Our Bread, Our Food, is our Freedom. We are co-creators and coproducers with our fellow being who are members of one Earth Family: our animals on farms and pastures, the fish in the waters, the earthworms and mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, the insects that weave the web of life and the food web.
  9. Kissinger had declared “Food is a Weapon”. In today’s world of fake science and fake economics, patented “fake food” is the new weaponisation of food. It is being imposed through systems of food racism, food facism and food totalitarianism. We will not let this racism destroy the earth, our health, our freedom. We are sowing the seeds of Food Peace, making peace with the Earth and ensuring no one goes hungry, no one is unhealthy because of an unhealthy, disease-creating industrial food system. Food peace is Food Sovereignty, Food Democracy, Food Freedom. Food peace is Food for All, Health for All, Work for All.

Source – https://navdanyainternational.org/cause/call-to-action-our-bread-our-freedom-2022/