Comments on the HLPE draft report on Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock
From
The Food Sovereignty Alliance, India
http://foodsovereigntyalliance.wordpress.com
The HLPE Report is an affront to social movements: indigenous peoples , pastoralist and peasant farming every step of the way. Whilst an extended critical narrative will follow here are our quick key concerns:
1) Food Sovereignty: its appropriation and mis-appropriation
It is absolutely shocking how the report has misused the concept of Food Sovereignty. Whilst it quotes the first few sentences of Via campesinas original declaration “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems “ (pg 20 box), it fails to understand that the core of Food sovereignty challenges the entire framework of Corporate Agriculture, Food Systems, Corporate control over resources, and that Food Sovereignty is about people taking back control:
It puts those who produce, distribute and consume the food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interest and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers. Food sovereignty priorities local and national economies and markets and empowers peasants and family farmer-drive agriculture, artisan fishing, pastoralist-led grazing and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all people and the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, water, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations.
Via Campesina
As far as peoples movements go, there is no confusion about what Food Sovereignty means, and the supposed “debates” which is what the document wishes the reader to believe (pg 20 , box on Food Sovereignty).
As peoples movements we are clear that Food Sovereignty is the only framework possible, to revision and strategise a future of how communities will meet their food needs now, for future generations and ensuring that we protect and defend the rights of mother earth. Within this, the role of livestock finds a place. The entire conceptual framework of this document is a far cry from Food Sovereignty, and hence we reject the existing entire conceptual framework itself.
2) The premise of the entire HLPE report, is no different from the premise of the Global Livestock Dialogue and their central argument of demand “ There is a massive growth in demand for animal protein (milk and meat) globally, with the majority of this demand coming from the low-income and emerging economies (such as India and China). This demand, they argued is largely driven by increasing urbanization, increasing incomes and increasing populations . (essentially repeated ad-nauseam throughout he HLPE document)
and we re-iterate the critiqes already made by FSA in our document ‘Dialoguing on the Future of Livestock”: available at the blogsite http://lvcsouthasia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dialoguing-on-future-of-live…
The big lie of demand: the projected demands of animal protein in the global south, that form the basis of the argument of an urgent need to augment production of milk and meat industrially, need to be questioned. The big lie is best illustrated by India where the past twenty years of neo-liberal economic reforms has unleashed “Growth” , that has triggered massive and rising inequality within the country. A nearly “300 million” strong rich and wealthy India is consuming more and more meat and milk, with a large part of rest of India being permanently under-nourished; where the consumption of milk and meat is minimal. The current consumption levels of the rich Indian cannot be used as a parameter/ thumb rule to project national demands. Nor can one use the completely unhealthy and medically inadvisable meat and milk consumption patterns of the global north to project future demands. Infact today there is a crying need for a reduction in consumption by the global rich and wealthy (including in India) of these meat and dairy products from both a health and environmental stand point. Similarly peasant, pastoralist, indigenous and working class India, have the right to enjoy milk and meat (including beef) consumption according to their cultural and traditional customs and norms. In India, the existing milk produced in the country is infact more than sufficient to meet the national milk average per-capita intake. The issue is not of production, but of access and distribution.
Further the issues of urbanization are spoken of as some evolutionary inevitable, conveniently forgetting that governments of the world are using their power to engineer and finance this massive shift from rural to urban and thus forcing urbanisaion.
3) However what is worse is that they have gone a step further to suggest that the current nutritional – particular protein deficiencies of the world, particularly of people residing in the chronically nutritionally deficient regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, parts of South-east Asia, and parts of Latin America- can only be addressed by increasing supply and availability of animal protein i.e Meat
It is downright colonial arrogance to suggest that 2 billion people whose diets are primarily derived of crops (lines 36-37, pg 8) , are deficient in essential nutrients , which must now be derived from livestock protein. It smacks of cultural insensitivity and disrespect, and speaks poorly of a UN initiative.
4)The question of availability / shortages of food and growing protein deficiency: Whilst recognizing that there is a problem of over nutrition and obesity in the global North and amongst the elite of the Global South, there are absolutely no political recommendations on the fundamental structural questions of distribution, which are embedded and has its roots in the current Trans-National Corporate controlled Global Food Systems. There is no shortage of Food , (as is reluctantly referenced here and there in the report), but there is a major question of who controls food production today, distribution and access to Food.
India’s experience is telling in this regard: from mid 1960s onwards to early 1990s, the green revolution attempted to enhance productivity and yields in crops through what is often referred to as high response agriculture. The state began to push a technology and approach to farming that laid the base for farmers losing control of their seeds, knowledge systems and diverse food farming, and wherein began the process of animal power being replaced by mechanized machinery. Upto the 1990s we were self sufficient in pulses, oilseeds, and livestock still continued to play an extremely important multifunctional role in agriculture and peoples livelihoods and directly and/ or indirectly playing a vial role in providing nutrition for people. Pulses have always been the primary source of protein for a vast majority of Indians. With neo-liberal capitalist economic reforms forced upon the people of India, in the early 1990s, by IMF and World Bank and Govt of India signing into WTO, Govt of India cut back hugely their budgets / public support for agriculture: we were forced through the various international agreements to cut back hugely on input subsidies, Minmum Support Prices, public procurement of food crops, and changed its policies so as to make it unviable for farmers to grow diverse food crops, including pulses, and switch to commercial cash crops (flowers, sugarcane, animal feed maize, soya, sugarcane, paddy, cotton). All of this has resulted in a situation today where there is massive decline in pulse cultivation in India, and an acute shortage of pulses in India, and we are importing pulses in massive quantities. We have reduced our import duties on pulses to “0”. This will further drive farmers out of pulse cultivation. The average Indian is consuming less pulses today than they did at independence. Similar is the story with cooking oil. Where we were self-sufficient in nutritious and diverse oil production upto 1990s, today we are importing the most unhealthy and worst form of oil –palmoil, and 60% of it is imported.
Animals role in such mixed cereal-pulses- oilseed-vegetable- fruit systems , have been
i) Providers of draught / work power
ii) Providers of milk and milk products
iii) Providers of manure
iv) Providers of meat
v) Providers of future generations
vi) Transporation
The White Revolution of the mid-1970s to mid 1990s (again heavily financed by a nexus of global and national policies), attempted to replace this robust system of animals in multifunctional role, to only produce milk. Make Milk producing machines. Once again driven and financed heavily by the state. The 1990s to date have largely witnessed policies and finances that have further alienated livestock from agriculture, and pushing farmers to speicalise and intensify production- the core tenets of “Livestock Revolution”: get rid of animals and primarily grow crops, or reduce crop production and specialize in animals.
Today the once robust mixed animal-crop farming system, has been replaced by monocultures. Global policies, International finance, and trade agreements to date have ensured that farmers have been pushed from rich, biodiverse, food farming systems, to monocropped commodity farming, and that farmers who are themselves consumers of food, along with others – say 70-80% of Indians are today “protein” deficient.
So massive global powers – the nexus between politicians across countries, TNCs, global financial sectors, IMF and World Bank, have shaped a scenario 25 years down the road from 1990, where farmers have been pushed away from these robust agro-ecological systems of farming- with livestock’s role therein.
It is the reason today of farmers suicides, massive departure of youth from farming, growing undernutrition, malnutrition and chronic nutrition amongst rural and urban poor, and farming families. Instead of correcting this, the HLPE takes these developments as if they happened on their own, with absolutely no role of global politics in having made this happen.
5)The questions of meeting protein deficiencies most efficiently through meat:
The second major proposition of the report, is to “meat” this nutritional deficiency. The entire argument of the report is to reorganize livestock to become merely providers of protein, completely ignoring the larger role livestock has played in agro-ecological food farming systems.
We strongly condemn this myopic vision of protein, which reduces nutrition to “meat”. Flowing from this argument ofcourse, is the oft repeated business as usual arguments:
“ To meet the protein needs with meat, we need more animals, more productivity, and more grain, fodder, to feed the animals. “
At this point we can only re-iterate what we have already written:
a) The protein needs can be met in diverse ways, including meat and milk. In India the huge protein deficiencies we witness today amongst an overwhelming number of citizens, has been directly attributed to declining cultivation and availability of staple pulses (dals), which have always been our primary source of protein. Culturally daily consumption of milk/ milk products/ meat, varies from community to community and there is no standard monoculture consumption practice. The FAO (and now HLPE) projections assume a monoculture food consumption menu, as do also today the right wing Hindutava Brigade who are dead set in forcing Indian’s to stop consuming goat, sheep, cattle, and buffalo meat according to customary cultural practice.
6)The Final completely contentious proposition is that all this increased demand of meat protein can be best met, by different “production systems” co-existing with one another, and each one improving themselves to become more efficient: economically, ecologically, resource use, productivity.
Today the monster of global capital and corporate agriculture including livestock is fully supported by rulers of the world, and has impacted and cannibalized upon all other systems of peoples livestock rearing:
Be it pastoralism, indigenous peoples livestock rearing, or small peasant mixed-crop-livestock food farming systems.
There is the march of global industrial corporate system of production (referred to as Intensive livestock farming) , distribution and consumption on the one hand, and its aggressive monopoly of the entire value chain from production to the plate.
Rapidly laws and changed and trade agreements signed up which is facilitating the transfer of control of to the corporations:
Land, water, air, genetic material, disease and health care, labour, knowledge , markets and at the end consumers
Today the small holder is completely impacted by the TNC: either because their land and resources have been snatched away, or their genetic material has been insidiously replaced by “high producing” genetic material pushed aggressively by the corporations via state development programs in to small farmers farming systems (eg Holstein Friesans and Jersey becoming the primary breed of milk production globally). Or another instance: Today govts have encouraged the growth of industrial poultry production, and in turn created a demand for animal feed, in turn forcing small farmers to cultivate monocrop maize as animal feed on their fields.
In the meat markets of the world:
2 massive corporations control broiler poultry genetics globally (Hendrix Genetics, Grimaund)
2 massive corporations control layer poultry genetics globally (Erich Wesjohann, Hendrix Genetics)
similar the story of pig
Hence the insidious arguments of “intensification” imply and we have seen happen, is that small farmers get contracted in by local integrators, and their labour, land, resources of the small farmer is used to rear the genetics supplied by the corporations. The genetics is not controlled by the farmer at all. The farmers loses their independenc and control and has to produce for this larger global corporate controlled market. Farmers becomes a provider of labour.
When the former predates on the latter, where is the question of co-existance?
A clear example of the destruction of small farmers , as a result of sustainable intensification and vertical integration into the industrial markets, is evident in the recent crises of Milk, not only in India but globally (please see our brief of this at our blog site- https://foodsovereigntyalliance.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/milkcrisesdialogue_preparatorynote.pdf. Our extended report will be made public shortly.
7)The propositions on need to intensify, vertically integrate, and that intensive systems are less GHG producing than small farmers and extensive systems, have already been challenged in our paper “ Dialoguing on Livestock”- (see attached the paper)
When the cause of all the mess in the world of agriculture livelihoods, production, coupled with nutritional deficiencies , is global capitalist industrial corporate agriculture, then there is no way that we can continue with this framework like “business as usual” .
Finally our counter proposal:
I) Begin with a Food Sovereignty framework and reposition livestock’s role therein to meet food demands of 2050, using agro-ecological practices.
II) There is no question of co-existance of a corporate industrial system along with peasant , pastoralist, indigenous peoples food farming systems and peoples markets. How will the world look and meet its needs without corporations, and with decentralized, localized, people controlled culturally appropriate and just systems of food farming based on agro-ecological principles.
Submitted by the Coordinating Council of The Food Sovereignty Alliance, India
1. Mr Sidham Shambu, Telangana Adivasi Aikya Vedika
2. Mr Kunjam Pandu Dora, Andhra Pradesh Adivasi Aikya Vedika
3. Ms Murugamma, Dalita Mahila Sangham
4. Ms Susheela, Dalita Mahila Sangham
5. Mr Chiguri Yelliah, Deccani Gorrela Mekala Pempakadharula Sangham
6. Mr Adinarayana, Sri Gopi Rythu Sangham
7. Dr Radha Gopalana
8. Dr Sagari R Ramdas
November 2015.
Food Sovereignty Alliance