Coalition for Plant-Based Solutions to Feed All

Coalition for Plant-Based Solutions to Feed All

Our call statement to countries and peoples for plant-based solutions and for the abolition of the unsustainable forms of animal production

How to feed the world, is also a matter of food and consumption patterns, now and even more in the future, with the increasing world population and more and more natural constraints. Which food patterns should and could be strengthened and which ones should be reduced if we want to ensure for every member of the human race the right to sufficient food as soon as possible? How could the agricultural and food sovereignty of peoples, communities and countries be respected? How can we protect the climate, the ecosystems, and other living beings? It is well known that the unsustainable forms of animal production are part of the hunger and climate problem and should be phased out, while a number of plant-based solutions to world hunger could successfully be adopted. It is well known, but the policies seem not to follow. Therefore, we, the members of the Coalition for Plant-Based Solutions to Feed All, a group of small non-profit organizations from various countries active in plant-based agricultural projects, in nutrition and social and climate justice,


Starting from the present situation in which:

Over 1 billion people (1), mostly from the global South, are cronically undernourished and many more experience some form of malnutrition in micro-nutrients, while another billion are overfed and prone do degenerative food-borne diseases;


Being aware that:

• The over-consumption of animal-based foods in affluent nations and among the middle classes in the impoverished and emerging countries is one of the causes of hunger and food crisis as well as of environmental emergencies.  It is well known the competition for scarse resources between feed, food, fuel and non-food production. In the global context animal food requires much more resources (land, water, energy…) per output than plant-based foods, thus the monocultural production of animal feed and the intensive production of animal-based food for humans, are wasting the limited natural resource base such as fertile land (the world's supply of arable land per person has been declining steadily, down to 0.25 hectares per person), water, energy, biodiversity, and are contributing to their depletion (2) (3) (4);

 

• livestock accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities; at the same time, climate change will adversely affect food security in many ways (5) (6);

 

• the animal production chains are highly water-intensive as well as energy-intensive;

 

• feed production and livestock along with bio-fuel production are also among the main causes of forest destruction (7); overgrazing contributes to an increase in desertification in already stressed areas;

 

• the globalization of industrial animal agriculture, with the corporate relocation to the South of intensive farming and the export from the South of monoculture crops to feed animals in the North is damaging food security and sovereignty in a number of countries especially. It harms the access to land by small farm units, contributing to land grabbing, and also results in a virtual flow of water from arid areas to wetter countries; at the same time the export subsidies in Northern countries is harming local production and sovereignty in the South;

 

• the intensive farming methods used for the majority of the 60 billions of farm animals are putting human health at huge risk by causing transmissible diseases (8) and by causing pollution affecting many local communities (9); degenerative diseases are linked to the consumption of cheap meat from factory farming; also the working conditions for operatives in the meat chain are often unacceptable;

 

• factory farming is responsible for extensive animal suffering (10);

 

• intensive and growing aquaculture requires massive inputs of feed, energy and biocides, while also generating large amounts of manure (11); and while on the coastal areas, it contributes in many conditions to the salinization of drinking water, destroying coastal areas and mangrove swamps (12);

 

• overfishing desertifies the seas: more than three quarters of ocean fish stocks are over fished.

Looking at the forecasts:

• showing a sharp increase in animal production and consumption, by which hunger and malnutrition will be exacerbated rather than relieved. The demand will grow faster than production in many impoverished countries increasing their trade deficit;

 

• showing that due to the climate change impact and water shortages, it looks difficult to double the global food production to cope with both population increase and new food patterns (13), and while the area of land suitable for various staple crops will be reduced especially in Sub-Saharan countries (14).

Therefore, also taking into account:

• the continuing century-old social, ecological and climate debt of the North towards the South;

 

• the international community's repeated commitments to solve the hunger and malnutrition, water and climate crisis;

 

• examples set by communities and people whose food habits have improved health standards;

We call upon the FAO, the United Nations, the governments in both the North and the South, farmers, scientists and civil societies to:

• commit to end hunger before 2020, and focus on the only way to ensure the right to food for all, also in the future: household nutrition and health, by favouring, financing and supporting the production and the access to plant food solutions that are agro-ecological, community-based, cheap, highly nutritious (15) (16), in order to fight world hunger and malnutrition as well as improving farmers livelihoods. There would be no need to double the world food production. There would be more land left to ecosystems. There would be less water stress. The climate burden would be less;

 

• strongly favour and support the South-South exchange and cooperation in that matter;

 

• on the demand side, promote a world convergence towards diversified but environmentally-friendly and healthy dietary patterns, reversing the trend, through health policies and educational campaigns at all levels in both the North (that has to move really down on the food chain) and the South (17);

 

• support and strengthen the role, independence and voice of women producer and small-scale farmers, promoting local markets, and a living rural context (18); link nutrition and food sovereignty;

 

• cancel subsidies to factory farming, intensive fishing and aquaculture, and zero-grazing systems; adopt a full-price policy and move towards the abolition of the unsustainable forms of animal production; increase regulation on the globalized industrial animal agriculture;

 

• put an end to the feed-food-forest-fuel competition linked to unsustainable patterns in world food and transport and move towards the climate justice i.e. equal per capita emissions worldwide, also in food patterns.

Notes    

1. Fao/Wfp, The State of World Food Insecurity 2009, Rome, October 2009

 

2. World Watch Institute, State of the World 2008 (chap. 5: "Meat and seafood: the global diet's most costly ingredients"; and documents from Nutrition Ecology International Center: www.nutritionecology.org

 

3. Profetas, Sustainable Protein Production and Consumption: Pigs or Peas?

 

4. Special issue "Alimentation en péril", Ecologie politique, June 2009

 

5. FAO, Livestock's Long Shadow, dec. 2006

 

6. Rajendra Pachauri, The Impact of meat production and consumption in climate change, lecture

 

7. Greenpeace, Slaughtering the Amazon, 2009; and documents from the Mst-Movimento Sem terra, Brazil

 

8. Studies by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (Us)

 

9. Grain, A food system that kills, April 2009

 

10. Reports and documents by Compassion in World Farming,
    www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/
    cm_docs/2008/i/impact_of_livestock_farming.pdf

  

11. Greenpeace, Challenging the Aquaculture Industry on Sustainability

 

12. See the struggles of Lafti (Land for Tillers Freedom), South India

 

13. Fao, World Agriculture towards 2015-2030, 2009

 

14. Source: Bioversity International; and the document How to feed the world in 2050, Fao, 2009

 

15. Antenna, Pourquoi la spiruline?
    www.antenna.ch/documents/pourquoi_spiruline.pdf

 

16. www.moringanews.org

 

17. European Platform for Food Sovereignty, European food declaration, 2008

 

18. Grain, Small farmers can cool the world (Seedling October 2009 issue)

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