Greetings –
This discussion is on “Making agriculture work for nutrition: Prioritizing country-level action, research and support.” It is guided by positions taken by various international development institutions. Thus we have recognition of the national and global levels, but there is little articulation of the role of the local level in this framework. The local level is supposed to benefit from national and global action, but whether it has any role beyond that is not so clear. Sometimes it seems that the local level is simply expected to wait for instructions and benefits from above.
The concept of food sovereignty can be understood as referring to the localization of control in communities, based on increasing local self-reliance. In this perspective, the center of decision-making should be local. The higher levels should facilitate and support local decision makers in doing what they want to do, based in their own understandings of their interests. Under the principle of subsidiarity, the higher levels should serve the lower levels, and not the reverse.
There is room for debate about the wisdom of that food sovereignty approach. It could introduce what many would regard as inefficiencies in the system. However, the more critical questions are about who benefits, and who is harmed. Viewed globally, food is abundant, yet there are around a billion people who are food insecure, hungry. That certainly is a type of inefficiency.
We are asked, “What are the main approaches we collectively see as most important? What are some practical recommendations that can more effectively promote, support, and guarantee the integration of nutrition into agriculture and food security investments? What research is needed?”
People at ground level might ask how to establish stronger links between nutrition and agriculture, but they are not going to ask about it in terms of investments or research. Investments and research are likely to be under someone else’s control, and serve interests that are not the interests of the people at the ground. Why should the question be framed in terms of research and investments from above?
Maybe the linkage between nutrition and agriculture is something that should be built at ground level, not at the national and global levels.
Thinking about how these issues might look at ground level should lead us to reflect on how nutrition and agriculture got separated. After all, in pre-modern times, before the dominance of markets and before wealth accumulation became so important to so many, agriculture was undertaken to produce food, not wealth.
The separation can be illustrated by the shift from taro to rice production in Hawai'i in the 1860s. Taro and other foods were produced to meet people’s needs. One can eat just so much taro. Then settlers came along, and decided to produce rice for profit. Rice exports, mainly to California, reached more than 13 million tons in 1887. Long before that level was reached, the rapid displacement of taro by rice led the local newspaper to ask, “where is our taro to come from?” The disconnect between farming for food and farming for money became clear. The people whose taro supply was threatened were not the people who profited from rice exports.
If we are interested in restoring the linkage between agriculture and food, national and global agencies certainly should have a role, but maybe the main action should be at the local level, in the communities. The reconnection might come not from market forces but from the fact that people care about each other’s well being. If the purpose of communities’ food systems was to ensure that all their people were well nourished, we would have a world without hunger. There are now many people working to envision what constitutes a healthy food system, beginning at the local level.
If that makes sense, then the main role of agencies at national and global levels should be to do what they can to strengthen local communities, and ensure that people in those communities have the capacity and the motivation to take care of one another. This might look like a step backward toward pre-modern times, but maybe it is the right way to get beyond our flawed present to better post-modern times.
Aloha, George Kent
Prof. George Kent