UN: Only Small Farmers and Agroecology Can Feed the World
Original article by Nafeez Ahmed in The Ecologist here . Excerpt: Modern industrial agricultural methods can no longer feed the world, due to the impacts of overlapping environmental and ecological crises linked to land, water and resource availability. The stark warning comes from the new United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Prof Hilal Elver, In her first public speech since being appointed in June "Food policies which do not address the root causes of world hunger would be bound to fail" , she told a packed audience in Amsterdam. One billion people globally are hungry, she declared, before calling on governments to support a transition to "agricultural democracy" which would empower rural small farmers. Agriculture needs a new direction: agroecology “The 2009 global food crisis signalled the need for a turning point in the global food system” , she said at the event hosted by the Transnational Institute (TNI), a leading in...