Book Review
Introduction
In part 1 of Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed we learn that: “Slow Food, the movement that has put the culture of growing and eating good, healthy, diverse food at the heart of social, political, and economic transformation, brought together 5,000 members from 1,200 food communities in 130 countries.” “Over the past few decades, food production, processing, and distribution has shifted out of the hands of women, small farmers, and small producers and is being monopolized by global corporate giants such as Cargill, Monsanto, Phillip Morris, and Nestlé.” “Small producers everywhere are being displaced and uprooted by the unfair competition from heavily subsidized agribusiness. The vibrant energy of Terra Madre came from the resilience of producers who had continued to save and share their diverse seeds, live their diverse cultures, speak their diverse languages, and celebrate their diverse food traditions.” “In Terra Madre’s world, small farms produce more than industrial farms while using fewer resources; biodiversity protects the health of the soil and the health of the people; and quality, taste, and nutrition are the criteria for production and processing, not toxic quantity and superprofits for agribusiness.” “By eating organic, we are saying no to toxins and supporting the organic farmer. By rejecting GMOs, we are voting for the rights of small farmers and people’s right to information and health. By eating local, we are taking power and profits away from global agribusiness and strengthening our local food community.” “Eaters are also co-producers and a critical link in creating a sustainable, just, healthy food system because we are what we eat. In making food choices, we make choices about who we are.”
MANIFESTOS ON THE FUTURE OF FOOD AND SEED
EDITED BY VANDANA SHIVA
SOUTH END PRESS 2007
PART I
Introduction: Terra Madre: A Celebration of Living Economies by Vandana Shiva
- In a world dominated by fear and fragmentation, dispensability and despair, a magical gathering of food communities – Terra Madre – took place in Turin, Italy, in October 2004.
- Slow Food, the movement that has put the culture of growing and eating good, healthy, diverse food at the heart of social, political, and economic transformation, brought together 5,000 members from 1,200 food communities in 130 countries.
- Terra Madre was a gathering of small producers who refuse to disappear in a world where globalization has written off diversity of species and cultures, small producers, local economies, and indigenous knowledge. Not only are small farmers and local food communities refusing to go away, they are determined to shape a future beyond globalization.
- Over the past few decades, food production, processing, and distribution has shifted out of the hands of women, small farmers, and small producers and is being monopolized by global corporate giants such as Cargill, Monsanto, Phillip Morris, and Nestlé.
- Small producers everywhere are being displaced and uprooted by the unfair competition from heavily subsidized agribusiness. The vibrant energy of Terra Madre came from the resilience of producers who had continued to save and share their diverse seeds, live their diverse cultures, speak their diverse languages, and celebrate their diverse food traditions.
- This was not the world of the World Trade Organization (WTO), where only agribusiness exists; where agricultural trade basically means soya, corn, rice, wheat, and canola; where one company (Monsanto) accounts for 94% of the world’s genetically modified organisms (GMOs); and where most food grown is not eaten by humans but by billions of captive animals in factory farms.
- In Terra Madre’s world, small farms produce more than industrial farms while using fewer resources; biodiversity protects the health of the soil and the health of the people; and quality, taste, and nutrition are the criteria for production and processing, not toxic quantity and superprofits for agribusiness.
- Diversity provides the ground for us to turn our food systems around – diversity of crops, diversity of foods, and diversity of cultures. Diversity provides both the resistance to monocultures and the creative alternative. Our strength is our uniqueness and variety, a strength that can be eroded only when we give up on it ourselves.
Another paradigm for food
- Terra Madre provided an opportunity and platform to articulate another paradigm for food. Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, called upon everyone to defend the rights, knowledge, and creativity of small producers all over the world and to abandon the gap between consumer and producer.
- By eating organic, we are saying no to toxins and supporting the organic farmer. By rejecting GMOs, we are voting for the rights of small farmers and people’s right to information and health. By eating local, we are taking power and profits away from global agribusiness and strengthening our local food community.
- Eaters are also co-producers and a critical link in creating a sustainable, just, healthy food system because we are what we eat. In making food choices, we make choices about who we are.
- The industrialization and globalization of our food systems is dividing us: North-South, producer-consumer, rich-poor. The most significant source of our separation and division is the myth of ‘cheap’ food, the myth that industrial food systems produce more food and hence are necessary to end poverty. However, small, biodiverse organic farms have higher output than large industrial monocultures.
- Globalized, industrialized food is not cheap. It is too costly for the earth, for the farmers, and for our health. The earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species, and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt inevitable in industrial farming.
- Industrial farming is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. It is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy.
- Corporate agriculture uses 10 times more energy than it produces, 10 times more water than ecological agriculture. It is 10 times less efficient. If all the people involved in nonsustainable food production were counted, the labor efficiency of industrial food would be lower than that of ecological food.
- Industrial food is not cheap because it is efficient but because it is supported by subsidies and it externalizes all costs – the wars, the diseases, the environmental destruction, the cultural decay, the social disintegration.
- In India we are creating food democracy through freedom farms, freedom villages, and freedom zones. Organic farms free of chemicals and toxins and zones free of corporate (GMOs) and patented seeds are creating a bottom-up democracy of food to counter the top-down food dictatorship.
VOICES FROM TERRA MADRE
Chapter 1: Communities of Food by Carlo Petrini
- We never imagined that 1,200 food communities from 150 countries would converge together at Terra Madre. Founded on sentiment, fraternity, and rejection of egoism, these food communities have a strategic importance in designing a new society based on fair trade.
- These communities are depositories of ancient and modern wisdom. Cooking is language, identity, and a primary need of all humankind. No one food culture is more important than another. Each expresses a profound identity and its language through food. We have to respect these diversities. All foodstuffs are representative of the great wisdom of humankind and the never-ending fight against hunger.
- Terra Madre reveals not only evidence of this wisdom but also the environmental, social, and economic problems that affect our daily labor and must not be threatened by the logic of productivity, by the manipulation of genes, by the profit motive of a privileged few, by a lack of respect for the environment, by the exploitation of workers.
- The battle we are waging to defend the biodiversity of the planet is a battle for civilization. The right to own land and seeds is a sacrosanct right for all the world’s vegetable growers.
- The strong seed of the Terra Madre is the practice of the local economy, based on three principles: solidarity, support, and subsistence. In producing food locally, people adopt the habits that shorten distance between the producer and consumer, that contribute to the well-being of the community, that help those who work in the fields to prosper, that give health, that give beauty to their own land. The local economy is in perfect harmony with nature.
- The world’s food crises are a fact of life: water shortages; excessive use of chemical fertilizers, infertile soils; loss of biodiversity; global warming. The unsustainability of this economy is becoming clear.
- What is not clear is the degree of our own complicity, our own responsibility as individual consumers in this so-called developed world. The citizens of the so-called underdeveloped world must show us the way toward an economy that relocalizes consumption and agricultural production.
- The damage wrought by the many authors of the market economy is not simply the disaster being created; it is also the ridicule, the sneering, the derision of the local economy, declaring that local economies are not scientific.
- Food must be good, clean and fair. We are not condemned to eat badly. Clean because one cannot produce nourishment by straining ecosystems, ruining the air, and destroying biodiversity. Fair because the citizen must be paid; young people working the land must have dignity and fulfillment. They must be valued.
- Never as in this moment of time have consumers shared a common destiny. The safeguarding of our food heritage is a mutual obligation. Only if consumers become co-producers and fully grasp the fact that production is being threatened, can we leave this difficult moment behind us. We must seek out alliances in every community and become an active part in the fight against malnutrition and hunger.
Chapter 2: Agriculture: The Most Important of Humanity’s Productive Activities by Prince Charles