Food Crises, Food Regimes and Food Movements

Eric Holt Gimenez (2014)

Film Review

In this presentation Food First executive director Eric Holt Gimenez neatly explodes the common corporate PR myth that global hunger stems from inadequate food production.

According to Gimenez, global food production has been increasing by 11-12% annually for the last 40 years. Presently farmers produce sufficient food to feed 10 billion people, which is more than enough to the predicted 9 billion predicted (by current fertility trends) before global population levels off and decline

The real reason one billion people are currently “food insecure” (ie starving) is the corporatization of the global food system. Corporate food production stems directly from a post-World War II economy in which war industries geared towards the production of tanks and (fossil fuel based) explosives were retrofitted to produce tractors and other farm machinery and (fossil fuel based) fertilizers and insecticides.

The So-Called “Green Revolution”

By the 1960s the global North was saturated with these commodities and the Ford and Rockefeller families (and their pro-corporate foundations) shifted their focus to Third World farmers via the so-called “Green Revolution.”

Simultaneously World Bank and IMF policies forced indebted developing countries into structural adjustment programs that compelled them to produce export crops and purchase their food from the global North (which was overproducing).

Once third world farmers ceased to produce their own food, they became were exposed to the risk of starvation with every spike in global food prices.

With the advent of NAFTA, the WTO and similar free trade treaties in the 1990s, these structural adjustment polices were enshrined in international treaty law.

Coerced Immigration

An important secondary effect is what Gimeniz refers to as “coerced immigration.” When NAFTA came into effect in 1994, one million Mexican farmers went bankrupt due to their inability to compete with cheap agricultural surpluses the US dumped on the Mexican market. Gimeniz maintains most of them work in the US now.

The good news is that only 30% of global food production is industrialized. Seventy percent remains in the hands of Third World farmers, who are organizing to resist further food corporatization.