Food Justice
The global financial debacle has drowned out coverage of the rise in food prices. There are billion-dollar bailouts for banks while the poor go hungry. A billion people around the world face food insecurity. The crisis has arisen from a mix of speculation and deregulation, promotion of inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, the diversion of crops to biofuel production, and trade policies that have pushed farmers to grow monoculture cash crops primarily soy and corn for export rather than for in-country consumption as food. The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute says, “Food justice is everyone having enough to eat; healthy food for our children; food that doesn’t contain harmful things that we don’t know about; freedom to grow our own food; ability to buy food directly from farmers; fair wages for those who grow, cook and work with food.”
Speaker
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva is an internationally renowned voice for sustainable development and social justice. She’s a physicist, scholar and social activist. She is a founder of Navdanya and Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She said, “I started Navdanya, nine seeds, as a political act so that farmers would have free seeds in their hands. Using that free seed, they would be able to resist the kind of control system that corporations were trying to establish in India. Through those seeds, they can establish sustainable organic agriculture again.” She is the recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. She is the author of many books, including Water Wars, Earth Democracy, Soil Not Oil, Oneness vs the 1%, and Terra Viva.
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