Food Security Summit: Send a Message

Later this month at the behest of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), governmental representatives from around the world will convene for a third world food summit in Rome.

While the FAO has prepared an official declaration to launch the summit, a group of civil society organizations have prepared their own draft document: Policies & Actions to Eradicate Hunger and Malnutrition.  These alternative proposals are based not on the lobbying of mega food corporations, but rather on the experiences of small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, women, youth, social movements, and others from all over the world.

Their understandings and advocacy arise in the context of an emerging food sovereignty movement that recognizes an essential human right to adequate clean food – food grown in a way that does not poison our environment.

You can read their letter, and also sign a supportive petition in at the Eradicate Hunger website.

Here are some of their key ideas. “We strongly believe that the actions to eradicate hunger and malnutrition must be based on a vision of a world where:

•  food sovereignty is implemented by communities, peoples, states and international institutions;

•  all peoples, societies and states determine their own food systems and have policies that ensure availability of sufficient, good quality, affordable, healthy food;

•  there is recognition and respect for women’s rights and their crucial contribution to food provision;

•  terrestrial and aquatic environments and biodiversity are conserved and rehabilitated based on ecologically sustainable management of land, soils, water, seas, seeds, and livestock;

•  the diversity of traditional knowledge, food, language and culture, are all valued and respected.

“I listen, and when I do all is well.”

When the Rail Runner Express pulled into the Santa Fe train depot on Friday morning, June 26, Yvonne Scott stepped off. We began a conversation about the land and a prodigious web of related matters.

Yvonne Scott

Yvonne is an environmental enhancer, a land and garden restoration specialist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a woman possessed of a discerning eye and deep experience. After driving away from the train depot, we spent the day together touring gardens in the city and the county, and she shared insights concerning the call of the land.

“My process of being with the energy of a garden is not very mysterious or exciting. Since I was a child, I could communicate with the various members of the backyard or garden or whatever. This is something I’d like to share with others so they can understand that all life forms communicate and are willing to do so with us on one condition: that we listen, not talk. We’ve been doing the ‘talking’ for thousands of years and look where we are. The green realms have our best interests are their core and see themselves in us.

“I recently had the experience of a cucumber plant being eaten to its stem by bugs. When I began to dig it up, it communicated to me to leave it alone and pay more attention with water. Well, the leaves were full of holes, the stem was nearly broken in two, but I gently replanted, mounded new soil around the base of the stem and watered carefully for over a week. Yesterday two new leaves appeared at the base. There is hardly enough green leaf for photosynthesis, yet this plant wants to live and live where I planted it in spite of the risks that bugs could get it again although it tells me that won’t happen.

“I don’t do woo-woo things or fancy rituals or complicated mixtures of this and that. I listen and when I do all is well. It’s the learning to listen that is key and something I’d like to help others to practice more. That’s what I wanted to share with you.”

Yvonne Scott of Environmental Enhancers and Outrageous Gardens, is based in Albuquerque, NM environmentalenhancers@gmail.com

Food Shortages and the Fate of Our Civilization

The May 2009 edition of Scientific American has published a notable article by Lester R. Brown entitled “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization.” The founder of both the Worldwatch Institute (1974) and the Earth Policy Institute (2001), Brown has authored or co-authored 50 books; his most recent is Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

His words represent an eloquent and informed call of the land – a call to take action now.

“For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions,” Brown writes. “The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.

Lester Brown

“I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.

“Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends unwelcome support to my conclusions…No country is immune to the effects of tightening food supplies, not even the U.S.A.”

Brown’s full Scientific American article is available online, and is well worth reading.