Food Crisis in the Americas

In early March, Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, said there had been a “severe mistake in the diagnosis of last year’s food crisis.” Referring to the explosion of prices for basic grains in the global market that began in 2007, Schutter explained that development aid and reform proposals were misdirected at boosting exports. The real problem, he emphasized, was not low supplies but the vulnerability of the world’s near 1 billion hungry people to price volatility. In place of stimulating exports, he recommended strengthening the production of domestic small farmers through access to land and resources, labor rights enforcement for landless farmers, and government programs to insulate peasants from price swings. These recommendations, though unspecific, resonate with many of those discussed in this Report, which aims to step back and reconsider the 2007–08 food crisis within its long-term context. We pay particular attention to the corporate monopoly on food production, which has been practically institutionalized over decades of neoliberal policies at every level.

May/June
2009
Volume: 
42
Number: 
3

Taking Note

Pablo Morales
If the Venezuelan right remains committed to electoral politics, it must confront a new reality after a decade under Chávez: Thousands of nonprivileged Venezuelans, enfranchised and energized, now constitute a voting bloc too significant to ignore.

Open Forum

Marc Becker
Five of Latin America’s presidents skipped this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, instead making appearances at the World Social Forum in Belém, Brazil. Signaling a deepening disengagement from neoliberal institutions, the presence of Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), and Evo Morales (Bolivia) generated excitement among social forum participants, but also tension.

Updates

Steve Ellner
The councils put into practice the “participatory democracy” embodied in the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution drafted by Chávez’s followers. Some of their activities also reflect Chávez’s discourse, which minimizes the importance of “experts” or “technocrats” and stresses the will of the people and their capacity to solve all problems, even highly technical ones.
Yarimar Bonilla
Although labor strikes are common in the French Antilles, the wide impact, mass support, and broad agenda of the LKP strike was unique in Guadeloupe’s history. For many, this episode marks the beginning of a new chapter of political and social activism in the French Antilles.

Report

Annette Aurélie Desmarais
Deborah Poole and Benjamín Alonso Rascón
In the following excerpts from a conversation in December, Ramírez Leyva, a Mixtec restaurant owner in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, calls for a profound rethinking of the market-based models of profit and trade that lie at the heart of capitalist understandings of food policy.
Peter Rosset
The sudden crisis of high food prices in 2008 was the latest manifestation of a long-standing rural crisis that stems from the corporate takeover of agriculture. As we enter a new era of increasingly volatile commodity prices, food sovereignty offers the only comprehensive solution.
Gerardo Otero and Gabriela Pechlaner
While biotechnology industry boosters would have us believe that more transgenic crops are what we need to solve the food crisis, the evidence of how they have affected food consumption in North America offers little to be hopeful for.
Evan Abramson (photographs and text)
In this photo essay, small-scale farmers in the Paraguayan departments of Alto Paraná and San Pedro face off over land with industrial soy. Large-scale Paraguayan landowners have, with government collusion, displaced thousands of families in the last decade for their sprawling soy plantations.
Annette Aurélie Desmarais and Luis Hernández Navarro
More than 500 delegates attended the fifth conference of La Vía Campesina, the transnational peasant movement, in October. High on the agenda was analyzing the food crisis, as well as codifying a statement on women’s participation in the movement and denouncing sexist violence.

Reviews

NACLA
The Conquest on Trial, by Carlos A. Jáuregui; Cannibal Democracy, by Zita Nunes; and Twenty Theses on Politics, by Enrique Dussel.
Irene Ortiz
Bajo Juárez is a film that opens broader lines of questioning: Who are the people ultimately responsible for the murders? What lies behind the “femicides” and violence against women in Mexico? How will this violence end? Can a measure of justice ever be provided to the victims and their families?
Hobart Spalding
Most works on the Cuban Revolution concentrate on larger political issues, breakthrough moments, and endless political debates, but this book strikes a more personal, day-to-day note without ever neglecting the political. It reminds us of the ties between the political and the personal, which are often overlooked in writings about famous personages.

MALA

Dan Beeton
Bolivia’s history, both recent and distant, is, of course, unique, complex, and worthy of careful analysis. When it pays attention to Bolivian politics, however, the U.S. press sometimes offers coverage that treats the current government of Bolivia as a threat, and one that perhaps lacks appropriate popular support. One can only hope other U.S. media outlets will be more even-handed in their future treatment of Bolivia.