Food politics

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Food politics

Answer 1

United States grain embargo against the Soviet Union

The United States grain embargo against the Soviet Union was enacted by Jimmy Carter in January 1980 in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It remained in effect until Ronald Reagan ended it in 1981 upon taking the office of president. American farmers felt the brunt of the sanctions, while the Soviet Union was not affected. During the presidential election campaign of 1980, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan promised to end the embargo, while the incumbent Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, was not willing to do so.

The Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was met by the United States with numerous economic sanctions including the grain embargo. In addition, the United States led a boycott of the 1980 Olympics which were hosted in Moscow.

The effect of the embargo on the Soviet Union was minimal as they were able to receive grain from other sources. These sources included most of South America such as Venezuela and Brazil. These crops were cheaper than the American grain as the labor cost was much cheaper. The Soviet Union still received grain from the United States with regard to the grain agreement in 1975 between the two countries. The agreement said that the United States was required to send 8 million tons of grain to the Soviets. The embargo was a blessing in disguise for the Soviets as they were able to see that they didn’t need the United States’ grain. Instead, they could cultivate their own in Ukraine and import the grain from South America. Even after the embargo was lifted the Soviets still relied on the grain from Ukraine and South America and reduced their interaction with the U.S.

The effects of the embargo on the United States were numerous. The embargo caused the price of grain to drop from $4.39 per bushel in January 1980 to $4 per bushel in 1981 resulting in farmers having to burn their crop to make some kind of profit from their harvest. Eventually grain ports across the country went out of business and never fully recovered even after the embargo was lifted. It also led to an agricultural credit crisis, with the United States, for the first time in its history, forced to buy grain from another country. Since the midwest was where the Soviet Union got most of its grain, stimulating the local economy, the embargo had a direct effect on the 1980 presidential election. Seeing Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, as one of their own, it was reasoned that most midwest people would have voted for him. However, anger at their business losses, and Reagan being the only candidate promising to end the embargo, helped the non-incumbent make a clean sweep of all midwest states. In several states farmers who were part of the farm strike movement circled their tractors around local state United States Department of Agriculture offices to protest the USDA enforcement of the embargo. With the Soviets receiving more grain from their second highest importer, Argentina, and the USSR not wishing to be affected by another grain embargo, the US was never able to sell the same amount of grain to the Soviets again. During the embargo the United States had to go to countries in East Asia, more specifically China and Japan, to find new customers for its grain. To this day most American grain exports go to East Asia.

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Answer 2

United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs

The United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was a select committee of the United States Senate between 1968 and 1977. It was sometimes referred to as the McGovern committee, after its only chairman, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.

The impetus for formation of the committee was a rising concern about hunger and malnutrition in the United States. It had been brought to public attention by the 1967 field trip of Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph S. Clark to see emaciated children in Cleveland, Mississippi, by the 1967 broadcast of the CBS News special Hunger in America, and by the 1968 publication of Citizens Crusade Against Poverty's report Hunger USA. The last of which showed that diseases such as kwashiorkor and marasmus – thought only to exist in underdeveloped countries – were present in America.

Existing Senate and House committees were uninterested in pursuing the issue, with House Agriculture Committee chairman William R. Poage saying "The basic problem is one of ignorance as to what constitutes a balanced diet, coupled with indifference by a great many persons who should and probably do not know," and Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Allen Ellender saying "I know that in my state we had a number of fishermen who were unable to catch fish. Do you expect the government, because they cannot catch fish, to feed them until the fish are there?" Political activist Robert B. Choate, Jr. first came up with the idea of forming a joint congressional committee to probe the hunger problem. McGovern, who had been involved in food-related issues throughout his congressional career and who had been Director of Food for Peace in the Kennedy administration during the early 1960s, thought that confining the committee to just the more liberal Senate would produce better chances for action. McGovern gathered 38 co-sponsors for the committee's creation, a resolution quickly passed the Senate, and McGovern was named the committee's chairman in July 1968. However, the Senate Rules Committee gave essentially no funding to it that year, so it was inactive; in February 1969, McGovern successfully battled the Rules Committee to restore the normally allocated funding and the select committee's operations began.

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Answer 3

Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition

Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition

The Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition was adopted on 16 November 1974, by governments who attended the 1974 World Food Conference that was convened under General Assembly resolution 3180 (XXVIII) of 17 December 1973. It was later endorsed by General Assembly resolution 3348 (XXIX), of 17 December 1974. This Declaration combined discussions of the international human right to adequate food and nutrition with an acknowledgement of the various economic and political issues that can affect the production and distribution of food related products. Within this Declaration, it is recognised that it is the common purpose of all nations to work together towards eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Further, the Declaration explains how the welfare of much of the world’s population depends on their ability to adequately produce and distribute food. In doing so, it emphasises the need for the international community to develop a more adequate system to ensure that the right to food for all persons is recognised. The opening paragraph of the Declaration, which remains to be the most recited paragraph of the Declaration today, reads:

“Every man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop fully and maintain their physical and mental faculties.”

The Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition affirmed that it is a fundamental human right to be free from hunger and malnutrition, so that one can develop both their mental and physical faculties fully. This Declaration arose out of ever-growing concerns regarding worldwide famine, and in doing so, stressed that every country that is in a position to be able to assist developing nations to gain access to more, better quality food, has the responsibility to ensure that this right to food is realized.

The prevalence of hunger and malnutrition is an issue that has long been of international concern. Although it has been accepted that obtaining exact statistics regarding world hunger is difficult, it is believed that in the early 1960s, there were approximately 900 million undernourished individuals worldwide. The majority of these individuals were located in developing nations in the regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is believed that today, one in every nine individuals do not have adequate access to food. Hunger and malnutrition have now been identified as the cause of more deaths worldwide than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Today it is estimated that there are approximately 1.02 billion people across the world living in conditions of extreme hunger, 1 billion of whom live in developing countries. Hunger and malnutrition have been of growing concern throughout the international community, despite a number of intervention attempts from the likes of States and non-government organisations. The right to food, for example, was asserted in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR), and was again recognised in 1966 through Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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Answer 4

Ural-Siberian method

The Ural-Siberian method was an extraordinary approach launched in the Soviet Union for the collection of grain from the countryside. It was introduced in Urals and Siberia, hence the name. The Ural-Siberian method was a return to the drastic policies that had characterized War Communism in the period prior to Lenin’s New Economic Policy.

Criticized by the Right Opposition for being a restoration of extraordinary measures, it was nevertheless approved and eventually received legislative support in June 1929.

During 1928/1929 various suggestions were put forth to increase the efficiency of grain procurement.

The initial version of the Ural-Siberian method was first suggested by Ural obkom of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), basing on the actual practice used there in 1928. The Bolshevik Politburo approved the suggestion on March 20, 1929 and recommended to use in eastern regions of the Soviet Union. Siberian raikom significantly contributed to this approach (particularly, it suggested pyatikratka, see below), and therefore at the April 1928 Plenum of Central Committee and Central Control Committee of the CPSU, Joseph Stalin dubbed this method as "Ural-Siberian".

The approach resembled that of Kombeds (Poor Peasants Committees) of 1918-1919s. The village assemblies endorsed the grain procurement plans for their villages and set up the commissions which assigned individual quotas according to the "class approach": it was supposed that kulaks (rich peasants) would be forced to deliver their surplus grain. Kulaks who failed to meet their quotas were fined the amount up to five times the quota, the fine colloquially known as pyatikratka ("five-timer"). Further refusal resulted in up to one year of forced labor camps, and in the case of group resistance, up to two years of confinement with confiscation of property and subsequent internal exile. This practice anticipated the policy of "dekulakization".

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Answer 5

US Food Sovereignty Alliance

The United States Food Sovereignty Alliance is a group of food producers and labor, environmental, faith-based, social justice and anti-hunger advocacy organizations, including the Applied Research Center, Family Farm Defenders, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the National Family Farm Coalition. The USFA advocates food sovereignty, which is the right to sufficient and culturally appropriate food to all people and communities, and aims to reestablish better relations between food producers and consumers, placing the needs of local farmers, fishers, indigenous peoples and landless workers most impacted by global hunger, poverty, and unbalanced food distribution above agribusiness and larger corporations. The USFA is organized into four Alliance Teams: Land & Resource Grabs, Immigrant Rights & Trade, Defense of Mother Earth, and Racism & Leadership.

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance is a member of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, and the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch Consortium, which includes “Brot für die Welt” (Bread for the world), FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), and Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO), among others. The Alliance awards the Food Sovereignty Prize annually.

The USFSA's mission, according to their founding document, is as follows:

"The US Food Sovereignty Alliance works to end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system. We believe all people have the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food, produced in an ecologically sound manner. As a US-based alliance of food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental, faith-based, and food producer groups, we uphold the right to food as a basic human right and work to connect our local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty."

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance was officially founded in 2009. The Alliance supports the concept of food sovereignty under the definition provided by La Vía Campesina (LVC), which originally proposed the idea at the 1996 World Food Summit. A group of activists and supporters came together to form the Working Group on the Food Crisis in 2008, a previous version of the Alliance, to address issues such as increasing food prices, global hunger, unequal food distribution and food insecurity. Part of this group were representatives from the National Family Farm Coalition, and members of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. After a meeting in Washington, DC in 2009, the Alliance was established to mobilize and educate US and international activists on the food crisis. The Alliance met at the United States Social Forum in 2010, and has been meeting annually ever since.

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Answer 6

Weston A. Price Foundation

Weston A. Price Foundation

The Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF), co-founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon (Morell) and nutritionist Mary G. Enig (PhD), is a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to "restoring nutrient-dense foods to the American diet through education, research and activism."

The foundation has been criticized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its advocacy of drinking raw milk and by Joel Fuhrman, MD for its advocacy of the health benefits of animal-based fats.

Price was a dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, whose 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, describes the fieldwork he did in the 1920s and 1930s among various world cultures, with the original goal of recording and studying the dental health and development of pre-industrial populations including tribal Africans and Pacific islanders, Inuit, North and South American natives, and Australian aborigines. The book contains numerous photographs of the people he studied, and includes comparison photographs of the teeth and facial structure of people who lived on their traditional diet and people who had adopted or grown up on industrialized food. In certain instances it was possible for Price to examine and photograph traditional and industrialized eaters from the same family.

The WAPF has seven board members and numerous honorary board members, most of whom have medical or nutritional qualifications. In 2010, its membership numbered 13,000 and was growing at an annual rate of 10%, according to The Washington Post.

The main sources of support for the Weston A. Price Foundation are the dues and contributions of its members. The Foundation does not receive funding from the government or the food processing and agribusiness industries. It does accept sponsorships, exhibitors and advertising from small companies by invitation, whose products are in line with WAPF principles. Current sponsors can be seen at the main page of the Foundation's website. The sponsors include grass-fed meat and wild fish producers, as well as health product companies.

The WAPF states it is dedicated to "restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet... [and] supporting particular movements that contribute to this objective including accurate nutrition instruction, biodynamic and organic farming, pasture-feeding of livestock, community-supported agriculture, honest and informative labelling, prepared parenting and nurturing therapies. Specific goals include establishment of universal access to certified raw milk and a ban on the use of soy in infant formulas. The organization actively lobbies in Washington DC on issues such as government USDA dietary guidelines definition and composition of school lunch programs."

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Answer 7

World Food Day

World Food Day 2009

Observed by All UN Member States Date World Food Day

World Food Day is celebrated every year around the world on 16 October in honor of the date of the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1945. The day is celebrated widely by many other organisations concerned with food security, including the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The World Food Day theme for 2014 was Family Farming: “Feeding the world, caring for the earth”; in 2015 it was "Social Protection and Agriculture: Breaking the Cycle of Rural Poverty"; in 2016 it is Climate Change: "Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too", which echoes the theme of 2008, and of 2002 and 1989 before that..

World Food Day (WFD) was established by FAO's Member Countries at the Organization's 20th General Conference in November 1979. The Hungarian Delegation, led by the former Hungarian Minister of Agriculture and Food Dr. Pál Romány, played an active role at the 20th Session of the FAO Conference and suggested the idea of celebrating the WFD worldwide. It has since been observed every year in more than 150 countries, raising awareness of the issues behind poverty and hunger.

Since 1981, World Food Day has adopted a different theme each year in order to highlight areas needed for action and provide a common focus.

Most of the themes revolve around agriculture because only investment in agriculture – together with support for education and health – will turn this situation around. The bulk of that investment will have to come from the private sector, with public investment playing a crucial role, especially in view of its facilitating and stimulating effect on private investment.

In spite of the importance of agriculture as the driving force in the economies of many developing countries, this vital sector is frequently starved of investment. In particular, foreign aid to agriculture has shown marked declines over the past 20 years.

In over 150 countries, events mark World Food Day. Examples of events across the world held in recent years are listed.

World Food Day is celebrated in honour of the date of the founding of the FAO of the United Nations in 1945. It is also now considered as Food Engineers’ Day.

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