Comments on the CSM submission to the e-consultation on the HLPE Report on Food Systems & Nutrition
I am happy to see that the CSM submission embodies three crucial aspects of what is needed to alleviate world’s hunger in a holistic manner. These are, the necessity of paying due attention to the variations in one’s food needs with respect to one’s whole life-span, the importance of food culture, and the inequity inherent in the commercialisation of food supply. Moreover, it is heartening to see that it regards eating something more than mere intake of chemicals derived from some animal, flowering plant, fancy algae or a fungus (Truffles exempted). It is high-time that we stopped thinking about eating as akin to putting petrol, engine oil and water to some engine, and what affects its performance as a thing that can be fixed by some learned bio-mechanic. Call it ‘medicalisation’, if you will.
I cannot agree more on that reductive research has indeed blinded us to what we gain by eating as civilised beings by drowning us in data rather than serving to enhance the taste, smell, colour, texture, temperature, etc., experienced when we eat, not to mention the pleasures of companionship one may recall from family meals even when they are far from being cordon bleu cuisine.
I applaud the explicit emphasis on the integrity and impartiality of the panel, which in my experience, has never received this degree of attention. Its importance needs no further justification.
However, I think two points could have been given a greater priority, viz., the qualitative and the quantitative balance of our environment, without which no yielder system (see my previous comments on this forum on 27th January) could exist.
My point of departure is simple, viz., humans are as much a part of our environment as fleas, whales or giant redwoods. The possibility of their continued existence depends on the possibility of their procuring certain resources and the existence of certain physical conditions like appropriate temperature, levels of radiation, etc.
Those resources may be of biological origin, or mineral like water, Oxygen, etc. But their availability or accessibility is finite.
In addition to the purely physical mechanisms like heat dissipation by convection, rainfall, etc., biological evolution has introduced means to recycle those resources and to buffer the extremes of those physical conditions, which enables life to continue on earth.
The first part of that means seems to have been evolved to curtail resource depletion due to the proliferation of photosynthesising life forms by introducing death due to degeneration brought about by asexual reproduction. This led to the need to evolve life forms that could subsist on the dead, viz. saprophytism.
Gradually, predation in its inclusive sense seems to have emerged to supplement the activity of the saprophytes in recycling the necessary mineral resources, and to enhance the felicity of the local physical conditions or climate. After this emergence of the herbivores, imbalance between their birth and death rates set the scene for the emergence of carnivores, and then omnivores.
So, it is reasonable to suggest that the possibility of our continued existence depends on the possibility of adequately recycling the biological and mineral resources on which existence of all life depends, and the appropriate distribution of life on earth required to enhance the salubrity of the climate.
Leaving aside the adverse natural phenomena, recycling of resources and climate buffering depends on the qualitative and the quantitative equilibrium among the living species. Its qualitative dimension involves bio-diversity, while its quantitative counterpart reflects the population of each species including man.
Therefore, I find it difficult to envision any approach to our current problem succeeding, unless we are willing to give the highest priority to halting human population growth and to strict environmental protection, and its regeneration. I think a Huxlean ‘Brave New World’ is as appealing as a ‘nuclear winter’, for both entail formication of mankind, i.e., turning man into a programmed living object like an ant.
I agree that it is vital to view people’s ability to procure food as something that should never be governed only by commercial considerations. However, I am a little uncertain about the possibility of achieving some worthwhile results by declaring that everyone has a right to an adequate amount of appropriate food.
Perhaps, it may be politically possible to get most nations to sign such a declaration, but although signing of signatures could be an impressive sight, it could hardly quench the fire gnawing at millions of hungry bellies, unless one has the means of proclaiming that right.
The need to satisfy hunger is urgent and uncontroversial. So, I am firmly convinced that the only way to make right to food manifest itself in some tangible form, is to expand small farming as submitted, halt commercial industrialisation of food supply, and most importantly, replace the multi-national monoliths of food by cooperatives.
Of course, all this will remain mere words if the post-2015 agenda is aimed at traditional ‘development’, which is the cause of present misery in many areas of life. Perhaps, it is still not too late to integrate the post 2015 agenda into a logically cohesive whole that would benefit most of the deprived among us even though such a move may ruffle a few political feathers, and tug at many a bunch of expert whiskers.
Cheers!
Lal Manavado.
Lal ManavadoLal Manavado