“The current food crisis and other international crises urge us to build and promote truly sustainable and people-based solutions to hunger and poverty”, said Mariann Bassey, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth Nigeria according to a press release issued by FoEI. The activist is also the coordinator of the Food Campaign of Friends of the Earth Africa.

The conference organized by FoEI was called “Agribusiness and Hunger policies in Africa: who are the real beneficiaries?” and La Via Campesina Africa was one of the social movements present.

The goal of the event was to analyze the impacts and threats of the expansion of agribusiness in that continent, to work on strategies to resist agribusiness and promote real, people-based solutions to hunger.

FoEI took the opportunity to launch two new reports related to these issues that include case studies about small-scale farming, struggles for access to land and the protection of biodiversity.

One of the reports, “Women and Food Sovereignty: The voices of rural women from the south”, provides an overview of the situation of peasant women in the Global South. The other, “For the Land that Feeds us: Experiences of struggle and victories to continue building food sovereignty in different territories” is a case study report with examples of communities and small farmers that produce or obtain their food locally and sustainably, instead of depending on large scale agriculture.

“Large scale and export-based industrial agriculture is seen as a solution to hunger and poverty, but is in fact one of the causes of the current food crisis”, reads the statement. It also highlights that these type of agriculture “leads to land grabbing and the loss of biodiversity, along with other so called ’solutions’ such as food price speculation and the commercialization of food as a commodity.” “While the profits of the big agribusiness transnational companies continue to grow, more and more people are affected by hunger and poverty every day”, FoEI added.

Meanwhile, Bassey, who was present at the conference in Durban, said: “Small-scale farming by local communities, for example, is a much better solution to hunger than monoculture plantations and food-price speculation. Such market solutions, promoted by agribusiness, only increase hunger and poverty.” “At Friends of the Earth International we resist such policies to tackle hunger. They reinforce the country’s dependence on imported food, harm the environment and only benefit the people responsible for the crisis in the first place”, she added.

Reports available at:

http://www.foei.org/en/resources/publications/pdfs/2011/women-and-food-sovereignty/

http://www.foei.org/en/resources/publications/pdfs/2011/for-the-land-that-feeds-us/view

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