A new report from War on Want Profiting from Hunger, launched today, highlights how the industrialised global food system makes vast profits for a handful of corporations, while driving the climate crisis and pushing millions across the Global South into poverty.

More than a decade ago, War on Want published Food Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Global Food System, which illustrated how corporate capitalism is driving global hunger, through the control of agricultural production, large-scale global trade and the widespread sale of agricultural ‘inputs’ such as genetically modified seeds and chemical fertilisers. Since then, many of these problems have intensified due to the austerity measures introduced following the 2008 financial crisis, the climate emergency and the Covid pandemic which have all impacted global food production. As a result global hunger is once more on the rise.

The industrial model of food production, a legacy of colonialism, is among the primary drivers of the climate crisis, responsible for between  21% and 34% of global greenhouse emissions. It is also a major promoter of damaging false climate solutions.  

Multinational agribusinesses peddle the concept that only through technological fixes, the digitalisation of agriculture and the acquisition of land for carbon markets can climate targets be met. What is really being proposed,” argues the Report, “is the further concentration of land into the hands of a few; and the continued dispossession of peasants, Indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, and other food producers in the Global South.”

War on Want say that radical alternatives are urgently needed. Peasant communities around the world are leading this struggle to put power over food production and distribution back in the hands of people.

The fight for food sovereignty takes multiple forms:  

• Land Rights, agrarian reforms and the recognition of alternative forms of ownership, including claiming common and ancestral lands.
• Seed Sovereignty: challenging the patenting of seeds by corporations and establishing community seed banks to ensure the rights of peasant communities to use, save and exchange seeds.
• Workers’ Rights, where international solidarity actions have helped secure better rights and pay for farmworkers in the Global South working for international supply chains.
• Solidarity Economies: building alternative value and supply chains by developing localised markets, establishing cooperatives and community credit systems.
• Peasant Agroecology: challenging the agro-toxin monopolies and creating a production and agricultural model that respects the planet and the livelihoods of rural communities, peasants, and Indigenous populations.

The Report looks in detail at the corporate capture of global agriculture, the role of the financial sector in land-grabs and evictions and the impact on global health. But it also explores the resistance to these processes in case studies focusing on Sri Lanka, Kenya, Bangladesh and Morocco.

These are not faraway problems. In the EU, more than a third of horticultural crops  and almost half of its fruit, comes from labour-intensive farms in Italy and Spain that employ exploited seasonal and foreign workers, usually from the Global South, who are often undocumented, with few legal rights and little protection in the countries they work in.

Workers in horticulture and meat-processing in Britain also face high levels of exploitation and deregulation, particularly in England, since the abolition of the English Agricultural Wages Board in 2013. As a result, the exploitation of foreign workers has increased: farmworkers in England do not have statutory protection for their pay and conditions.

Across the UK, 99% of seasonal workers in horticulture come from outside the country. Recent research found foreign workers face abuse, exploitation, and debt, a situation which has grown worse since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Report concludes with a series of recommendations:

• Delivering on the promise of US$100 billion in annual, new, and additional climate finance, as a floor goal and not as a ceiling; and committing to new goals which reflect the reality that the cost of addressing the climate crisis in the Global South is far in excess of US$1 trillion annually.
• Agreeing on a global goal for adaptation that can support countries with their own plans for adaptation to the changing climate and ensuring that adequate financial and technological support is made available. 
• Reparations for climate damages, additional public finance in compensation to those already suffering the brunt of climate breakdown today.
• Recognising the existence of climate debt and that people in states that depend on oil and gas exports have their own special needs for a just transition.
• Investing in real solutions: this means rejecting carbon off-setting, saying no to carbon markets, and yes to non-market cooperative approaches based on hard and constantly lowering caps on emissions, in order to reach genuine zero.

This means anti-imperialism: a real commitment to the political sovereignty of Global South countries and an end to the Global North policies which seek or recolonise Southern states. “Only if states can choose their own policies can they fight for climate debt on the world stage,” concludes the Report.