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Don’t Let Food Be the Problem – Producing too much food is what starves the planet.
Former U.N. special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter challenges the agency’s claim on hunger, stating that numbers, if anything, have remained steady and explains why local responses, not solely international actions, will defeat hunger.
By Olivier De Schutter
Foreign Policy
July 2015
[Olivier De Schutter (@DeSchutterUNSR), a legal scholar focusing on economic and social rights, served as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014.]
Excerpts:
On the consumers’ side, today food-policy councils in North America invoke sovereignty; examples from Toronto to Oakland are increasingly influencing experiments elsewhere. Sovereignty has given rise to farmers markets in Mumbai and Beijing, among other cities, and to school gardens and urban agriculture as citizens seek to reconnect to local farmers and, more broadly, to the food systems on which they depend.
…
The more I have worked with governments operating from the top down, the more I have come to believe in the strength of social movements to make change happen from the bottom up. Solutions that can be designed using local resources (in addition to, not instead of, external resources that may provide backup) are less vulnerable to outside market or energy shocks. The more diverse these solutions, the better local systems will be equipped to deal with contingencies.
Read the complete article here.
Source: http://www.cityfarmer.info/2015/07/24/dont-let-food-be-the-problem-producing-too-much-food-is-what-starves-the-planet/
