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It’s a great paradox: as food production has increased, so too has the amount of hunger in the world.
This is not because of a rapidly increasing population – there is actually enough food to adequately feed everyone – but there is an extraordinary amount of wastage, coupled with price manipulation on a global scale.
These points were raised by Jacklyn Cock when she addressed trade union students at Wits University’s Global Labour University programme. Cock, emeritus professor in the university’s sociology department, detailed how up to a third of South Africa’s estimated 31 million tons of food available every year is wasted.
For obvious reasons, highly perishable foodstuff, such as fruit and vegetables, has the highest wastage rate. Along the supply chain, from harvest to retail, more than half of the production is lost. At the same time, nearly half the country’s population is “food insecure”, and regularly suffers from hunger and malnutrition.
Cock describes this as a form of “slow violence”, resulting in one in every four South African children younger than six showing signs of stunted growth because of malnutrition.
“That means we are producing a stunted generation, both physically and mentally,” she says.
The problem, however, is global. And Cock has highlighted how food availability, shortages and price hikes have been factors in revolutions and social instability from France in 1789 to Russia in 1917, and the Arab Spring in 2011. In 2008, there were social protests in 30 different countries triggered by increases in food prices.
However, these were caused not by shortages, but by market speculation and the drive to turn food crops into ethanol fuel, something I have referred to as feeding cars rather than people. At a basic level, food price rises, often coupled with increases in transport costs – a situation South Africa now faces – lead to instability as trade unions demand higher pay to cover the increased cost of living.
But it is a growing awareness that global corporations play major roles in determining food prices and the manner in which crops can be used that underlies much of the disquiet among environmentalists, human rights campaigners and trade unions. This has resulted in demands for change; for some alternative to a system that is clearly not working in the interests of the bulk of humanity.
It is also, agrees Cock, a system that is not only unjust, but is unsustainable because modern agriculture is heavily dependent on water and on nonrenewable fossil fuels. With climate change, water shortages will increase, as will the cost of energy.
Cock also raises the issue of declining food safety as cheaper, more highly processed – and more profitable – foods reach the market. Hundreds of chemical additives, as well as salt, fat and sweeteners, go into such foods.
Extra salt can be hidden in items like bread, which can also contain a third of a teaspoon of sugar per slice.
“Then there is the question of genetically modified organisms that give big corporations unprecedented control over the food chain, and where the long-term health risk is unknown,” says Cock.
Something new is clearly needed, Cock told the trade union students. She quoted radical playwright Bertolt Brecht: “We cannot afford to sit in a burning house, while the flames lick the rafters and singe our brows, and question whether a new house is possible. We must abandon the old structure and seek to build a new one.”
This will require the political will to encourage a system of food sovereignty that could be based on small and medium-sized producers along the lines of La Via Campesina, founded in 1993 by farmers and now the largest grass roots movement in the world.
Most people would also surely not disagree with Cock when she says we should strive to create a situation “in which the needs of people rather than corporations are at the centre of the food system”
