{"id":195762,"date":"2021-09-27T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2021-09-27T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=195762"},"modified":"2021-09-25T09:59:17","modified_gmt":"2021-09-25T08:59:17","slug":"agroecology-is-the-solution-to-world-hunger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/09\/agroecology-is-the-solution-to-world-hunger\/","title":{"rendered":"Agroecology Is the Solution to World Hunger"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Millions of farmers are growing and sharing food in ways that enhance nutrition, biodiversity and quality of life.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Villagers in Bwabwa in northern Malawi share seeds, tips on cultivation, and the work of harvesting and carrying the produce home. Credit: Thoko Chikondi<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Sep 2021 – <\/em>Although it is the sharp edge of the battle to end hunger, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a reality TV cooking show. Under the low peak of Bwabwa Mountain in Malawi, in a village on a tributary of the Rukuru River, about 100 people gather around pots and stoves. Children crowd around a large mortar, snickering at their fathers\u2019, uncles\u2019 and neighbors\u2019 ham-fisted attempts to pound soybeans into soy milk. At another station, a village elder is being schooled by a man half his age in the virtues of sweet potato doughnuts. At yet another, a woman teaches a neighbor how he might turn sorghum into a nutritious porridge. Supervising it all, with the skill of a chef, the energy of a children\u2019s entertainer and the resolve of a sergeant, is community organizer Anita Chitaya. After helping one group with a millet sponge loaf, she moves to share a tip about how mashed soy and red beans can be turned into patties by the eager young hands of children who would typically never volunteer to eat beans.<\/p>\n

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There is an air of playful competition. Indeed, it is a competition. At the end of the afternoon the food is shared, and there are prizes for both the best-tasting food (the doughnuts win hands down) and the food most likely to be added to folks\u2019 everyday diets (the porridge triumphs because although everyone likes deep-fried food, doughnuts are a pain to cook, and the oil is very expensive).<\/p>\n

This is a Recipe Day in Bwabwa, a village of around 800 people in northern Malawi. These festivals are sociological experiments to reduce domestic inequality and are part of a multifaceted approach to ending hunger called agroecology. Academics describe it as a science, a practice and a social movement. Agroecology applies ecology and social science<\/a> to the creation and management of sustainable food systems and involves 10 or more interconnected principles, ranging from the maintenance of soil health and biodiversity to the increase of gender and intergenerational equity. More than eight million farmer groups<\/a> around the world are experimenting with it and finding that compared with conventional agriculture, agroecology is able to sequester<\/a> more carbon in the soil, use water more frugally<\/a>, reduce dependence on external inputs<\/a> by recycling nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus<\/a>, and promote, rather than ravage, biodiversity<\/a> in the soil and on farms. And on<\/a> every<\/a> continent<\/a>, research<\/a> shows<\/a> that farmers who adopt agroecology have greater food security, higher incomes, better health and lower levels of indebtedness.<\/p>\n

Chitaya told me that at the turn of the millennium, when Bwabwa\u2019s farmers were still practicing conventional agriculture, \u201cthere were times when we wouldn\u2019t be able to eat for days. My first child was malnourished.\u201d Now her oldest son, France, is a very healthy adolescent, helping teach other boys how to cook. The pediatric malnutrition clinic near Bwabwa has closed down for want of cases\u2014though in Malawi as a whole, more than a third of the children younger than five years are stunted by malnutrition. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, whose devastating economic effects have deepened malnutrition<\/a> across the world, agroecology continues to help Bwabwa evade hunger.<\/p>\n

Yet when policy makers attend a United Nations Food Systems Summit<\/a> in the fall of 2021, the solutions on the table for world hunger will exclude<\/a> agroecology. The summit\u2019s sponsors include the Gates Foundation, whose preferred solution is a set of technologies modeled on the Green Revolution<\/a>. Despite a great deal of evidence that the Gates\u2019 Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa has failed<\/a>, one of its leading acolytes from Rwanda will chair the U.N. Summit. Advocates for agroecology, such as the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which represents 200 million food producers and consumers, have too few resources to impact a process that increasingly silences their voices<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ending hunger requires much more than pulling more food from the ground; it involves grappling with entrenched hierarchies of power. Over the past decade food production has generally outstripped<\/a> demand\u2014there is more food per person than there ever was. But because of global and regional inequalities, exacerbated by the recent pandemic, levels of hunger are higher<\/a> now than in 2010. In other words, more food has accompanied more hunger. People are deprived of food not because it is scarce but because they lack the power<\/a> to access it.<\/p>\n

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Water for drinking and cooking comes from a community tube well in Bwabwa. But climate change is causing water levels in the region to drop, often necessitating long treks to carry water home. Credit: Thoko Chikondi<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/picture>The global food system was originally established under colonialism, when the agriculture and land-ownership patterns of much of the tropical world were reconfigured, and tens of millions of enslaved and bonded laborers were shipped around the world to provide Europeans with cane sugar and other tropical crops for which they had developed a taste. Far from ending with colonialism, however, this system of food extraction has grown only stronger<\/a> because of conditions attached to loans from<\/a> international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To pay its debts, Africa now exports everything from roses<\/a> to broth<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/picture>\n

Agroecology frees the world\u2019s poorest farmers from such structures of control and shifts the balance of power in the global food system to people like Chitaya, one of billions who reside at the very bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. Little wonder, then, that it is unpopular with conventional agricultural businesses, governments in the Global North and the organizers of the food systems summit. Its recognition that systemic problems require systemic solutions makes agroecology a threat.<\/p>\n

Hunger in Malawi<\/h2>\n

TO CONTINUE READING<\/a> Go to Original – scientificamerican.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Raj Patel is a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. His books include <\/em>Stuffed and Starved<\/a> and <\/em>The Value of Nothing<\/a>. Most recently, he co-directed with Zak Piper the award-winning documentary <\/em>The Ants & the Grasshopper.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Sep 2021 – “We know how to do better. Agroecology more than fits the bill\u2014not only because the crops grown are more diverse but because the social arrangements that surround them are more cognizant of power. Industrial agriculture\u2019s hidden costs are precisely the ones agroecology makes explicit.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":195765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[237,842,1641,2352,1124,984,1714,2204],"class_list":["post-195762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight","tag-africa","tag-agri-food","tag-agroecology","tag-big-food","tag-ecofeminism","tag-paradigm-change","tag-right-to-food","tag-world-food-programme-wfp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}