Unfortunately, the approach of Wageningen (Backlash as Dutch go from famine to feast, 5 March) is the one that dominates world thinking and policy about food production.
That approach permeates the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – the UN agency set up after the war to prevent famine recurring in the postwar period. That policy was destroyed by the cold war.
The west instead supported the World Food Programme, which buys surplus food from rich countries – a policy badly applied to the extent that it destroys the markets of the producers in the south. It dominates the thinking of the different research agencies set up in the wake of Norman Borlaug’s success with the green revolution in India – the CGIAR group. It is distorting the AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa). It is behind the drive of the Davos forum that is pushing for a World Food Summit in 2021 that will adopt the same approach. All these efforts are led by the large chemical companies that want to dominate the markets for seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. The developing world – Africa and India in particular – is their unconquered territory. This policy is leading to greater famines in the poorest parts of the world. The British NGOs and the Department for International Development have enough knowledge not to buy into this totally insidious approach.
Currently the FAO estimates that some 820 million people do not have enough to eat – in sub-Saharan Africa it is one in five of the entire population of the continent. We should all push for each country to achieve food security and self-sufficiency for local people, to ensure that as few people as possible go hungry across the world. British aid was – until recently – considered one of the best in the world. It will not happen in the post-Brexit climate. Pity about those millions of deaths by starvation.
Benny Dembitzer
Director, Grassroots Africa
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