Future of food

Had been watching a BBC feature called Future of food, basically much about the future of food production and consumption and the trend seen across the world and how much the third world countries have been “feeding” the developed countries.

Hungry kya?

Few interesting facts presented in that documentary were, like 70% of the food items imported by Britain comes from the countries where there has been a history of famine, starvation deaths and food riots, this includes countries like India, Pakistan, African countries and South American countries. In one of the episodes the narrator travels to India speaking with various farmers about the problems they face, the responses were like the water shortage, excessive dependency on fertilizers, threat from genetically modified crops, rampant urbanization etc. The documentary was basically for British audience, while it talked about the troubles in various countries it also put forth a warning on how bleak the future of food is going to be.

Genetically modified vegeteroids

A mass movement against the BT Brinjal proved to be a landmark one. But that has just gone for hiding all prepared to come back with more “pleasing” rules and regulations. Now that the nexus between Indian government and corporate have been exposed, it leaves us to wonder why government was so desperate to get the GM food items introduced into the Indian market. It was about a couple of months back I watched yet another documentary called “The World according to Monsanto” It was a stunning documentary on the chemical turned bio-chemical turned Biotech firm that is posing to hold the world at ransom. It was interesting to find that the infamous “Agent Orange”, a mass defoliant used by US in the Vietnam war was a Monsanto product. This indicates the long living marriage between this company with the US government and her ambitions.

The World according to Monsanto

'The World according to Monsanto’ presented various case studies of the seed market invasion done by the Monsanto, like how they file lawsuit against the farmers onto whose farms the GM seeds accidentally fell from the adjacent farm due to wind – the lawsuits were on illegal usage of a company product without consent! Similarly how the BT corn has managed to degrade the local corn of Mexico forcing the farmers to buy the BT corn seeds from the company. The BT Cotton debacle has already showed its fangs when it sent numerous Indian(Vidarbha) farmers suicidal over the seed dependency and crop’s vulnerability to ball worm attacks. These were the few known calamities that the company couldn’t suppressed under their political or media blanket. Recent comments from some leftists, that the people’s apprehensions on BT seeds are superstitious, was slightly shocking considering the fact that they were up front in the protest against BT Brinjal.

Threat to Sustenance

Vandana Shiva, an imminent environmentalist, has started a program called Navdhanya to conserve the natural seed and to create a seed repository to fight against the seed privatization. The developed countries, who currently have to survive by importing food from third world countries for cheap, are already scared on how long they can continue importing food. In case a food riot breaks out any moment in any of these countries(which looks quite possible), that could threaten their sustenance as well. The powerful nations have, hence, let the private parties loose, to graze through the meadows of third world countries and innovate any mechanism to retain the control over the food. Once they control the food, they control the economy of that country, and when they get to control economy they bargain over a nation’s sustainability and social fabric.

Sustainable farming has to win at any cost.