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Food sovereignty is the right of the nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce the staple foods for its people, respecting their nutritional and cultural requirements. This is because it is governments’ prime responsibility to provide food security to its inhabitants on sustainable basis that everyone has lasting access to good quality and sufficient food without adversely affecting access to other essential needs nor the future food systems. Food sovereignty also fosters the economic, political and cultural sovereignty of the peoples. It is, thus, fundamental to nation’s sovereignty. Nations, even in horrific conditions, can survive if they have some degree of control over food production and distribution, otherwise a constantly food imploring country can never be the sovereign. Discussions on food sovereignty began to appear during World Food Summit held in Rome in 1996 and onwards. Five years after the World Food Summit, seven years after the agricultural agreements of the GATT (now WTO) Uruguay Round, and following two decades of the application of neoliberal policies by a large part of governments, the promises and commitments made to satisfy the food and nutritional needs of all are far from being fulfilled. On the contrary, the reality is that the economic, agricultural and trade policies imposed by the World Bank, IMF and WTO, promoted by the transnational corporations, have widened the gap between the wealthy and poor countries and accentuated the unequal distribution of earnings within countries. They have worsened the conditions of food production and access to healthy and sufficient nutrition for the majority of the world’s peoples, even in the so-called developed countries. As a consequence, the most basic human right of all, the right to food and nutritional well-being enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is not guaranteed to the majority of the world’s peoples.
In the era of commercial globalization and trade liberalization, it is now widely being argued that multilateral means towards food sovereignty are not feasible. The way we are moving from smaller, national economies, to larger, regional or global economies, this poses the gravest threat to the food security and livelihoods of ordinary people in every country. Surprisingly, under the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, market is going to ensure food security despite the fact that market itself runs on the concept of insecurity due to its supply and demand rule. Moreover, though, proponents of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the WTO promise that free trade means cheaper foods and food security, but unfortunately, the reality of trade liberalization is quite the opposite. This is because the international trade has been based on comparative advantage which means a nation can enhance its efficiency in resource use, by producing and exporting commodities in which it is relatively efficient, and importing commodities in which it is relatively not so. In the area of food and agriculture, this search for comparative advantage is often at the cost of local food security and farmers’ survival. The economic base of poor farmers in poor regions could be destroyed if grains which they are producing locally are imported from other countries. That will undermine local investment in agriculture and deprive rural people of their livelihood and will create the conditions for food dependency.
The other dilemma with trade liberalization policies is that it emphasis cash crops for exports. It poses diverse problems. Firstly, this means good agriculture land becomes diverted from food crops to large-scale monocultures of cash crops. That is what happening in Pakistan. Cash crops eliminated so many traditional crops as well as livestock (due to intense farm mechanization). For example, replacement of local varieties due to hybrid maize, high yielding varieties of wheat & rice; and expansion of cotton, tobacco & sugarcane, etc. etc. Cash cropping has resulted into massive use of agrochemicals (fertilizers, insecticides, weedicides, etc.) and has depleted natural resources such as water and soil. These chemical inputs are not only costly for poor farmers but the use of chemicals poison humans and the environment. Besides, the traditional use of uncultivated food plants has been vanished due to monocropping, viewing unplanted plants as weeds and extensive use of agrochemicals. Secondly, due to export oriented approach, food storage and distribution have become problematic for the poor states due to less dumping capacities and faulty governing systems. Now there is a debate that people are dieing of hunger not due to food shortages but due to poor food distribution and export oriented agricultural policies. It is believed that the food consumed by the rats and other pests in godowns every year is sometimes greater than the food actually needed by the deprived communities and it seems that this approach has actually benefited rats and other pests at the cost of deprived peoples. Food is stored basically to control nations’ food distribution and then export the surplus food to earn foreign exchange. However, in Pakistan, due to prevailing trade trend, the government, sometimes, export good quality local produce to earn foreign exchange and then, at other point of time, import inferior quality food to fulfill local requirements. Practically, this approach has resulted into inequitable food distribution, tremendous increase in food prices and restricted access to good quality and sufficient food. As always, the real beneficiaries are the centralized government, elite class including feudal lords, middleman and companies. They constitute may be only one percent of the society. Besides all this, thirdly, the food resulting due to export oriented policies is mostly of nutritionally poor quality due to use of high yielding crop varieties and ever more agrochemicals. Moreover, it has encouraged Transnational companies (TNCs) to do their immoral business. Now, the way these companies are creating room for genetically modified (GM) food all over the world, it seems that besides quality issue, peoples will be forced to eat culturally unaccepted food. This will perhaps be the beginning of supremacy of TNCs and end of sovereignty of the states.
Under the WTO agreement on Trade related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) the signatory countries are bound to give patenting rights (in the form of patents or under the sui generous system) on plant varieties, micro-organisms and biological processes. This means, for example, the plant breeders can acquire patent rights on crop varieties they produce in their laboratories and the farmers, instead of saving and growing own seed, will have to purchase seed on patentee’s price every season. The defaulter will then be punished by the law. In a country like Pakistan, it will pose two serious problems. Firstly the “free access and exchange of seed,” the very foundation of biodiversity and farmers’ livelihoods, is threatened under this agreement. Farmers’ has the tradition to store and exchange seed and that is how small and medium farmers survive. With the introduction of patent rights, farmers will not be able to do so and may become dependent on patent holders. Secondly, it can be visualized that TNCs will only be the patent holders and will control all our natural resources including food. TNC’s control over food will then lead to threaten country’s food sovereignty and food security of its majority population. TNCs will develop remote-control GM seed technologies, such as terminator and traitor seeds, and food will then be used as a political weapon to further their vested interests.
Some suggestions
1. policies made through wider consultations and really in the national interest without adversely affecting basic rights of the masses.
2.
researched and improved technologies supporting our traditional and
sustainable food production systems.
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