How does global agriculture and trade policy affect the environment, global hunger, and poverty?
We had all the hype about how industrial agriculture was going to end hunger, how GMOs were going to end hunger, and look what’s happened: there are a billion hungry people, almost half a million of those are in the United States. Hunger is increasing, poverty is increasing, and all of the industrialization hasn’t done one single thing to end hunger, and we’ve been destroying the environment. So the solution actually turned out to be very, very damaging-far more damaging than the problems that we had before industrial agriculture was proposed as the solution to hunger and the environment. Look at the deforestation for biofuels in Brazil, the destruction of traditional agriculture in Indonesia in favor of palm plantations for biofuels. Shoving people off the land and forcing them to the cities where there are no livelihoods is not the solution. Or forcing them to become slaves as is happening all over the world. We like to think that we’re in the 21st century, and slavery is something o
