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The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Nation
Posted: November 8th, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/163403/food-movement-its-po...
As food growers, sellers and eaters, were moving in two directions at once. The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong global harvests. Power over soil, seeds and food sales is ever more tightly held, and farmland in the global South is being snatched away from indigenous people by speculators set to profit on climbing food prices. Just four companies control at least three-quarters of international grain trade. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years. Hunger has grown 43 percent in five years in the United States. More hungry people live in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Hunger is caused by an economic system that is driven by the rule: highest return to existing wealth. Because of this system, economic inequality is worsening in most of the world. There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning farming with natures genius. Many call it simply the global food movement. In the United States its building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and worldwide it has been gaining energy and breadth for at least four decades. It is at heart revolutionary, with some of the worlds poorest people in the lead, from Florida farmworkers to Indian villagers. It has the potential to transform not just the way we eat but the way we understand our world, including ourselves. And that vast power is just beginning to erupt.
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