Feeding the world and cooling the planet

« The cascading series of events now known as the world food crisis started in Mexico as the ‘tortilla war’ in January 2007. It then flared up in Italy as the ‘spaghetti strike’ nine months later. Later it became an unstoppable avalanche … La Vía Campesina believes that this crisis is the result of decades of destructive policies: pressure from international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to decrease investment in small-scale food production through structural adjustment programs; increasing the power of transnational corporations; financial speculation; and more recently, governments’ support for the frantic escalation in the production of agro-fuels. »

So write Luis Hernández Navarro and Annette Aurélie Desmarais in their article, « Feeding the world and cooling the planet: La Vía Campesina’s Fifth International Conference, » which originally appeared in Briarpatch magazine. To read the whole article, click here. The Via is a partner of Grassroots International, and Grassroots helped to fund the Fifth International Conference of the Via Campesina in Maputo, Mozambique, and also participated in the conference itself. On a related note, do see the new book published by our ally Food First on Agrofuels in the Americas, in which our partner Rede Social’s Maria Luisa Mendonca has an important chapter.