Our global food crisis

Watch (in Italian) RAI Report

A few days ago Marco Revelli [Professor of Science of Politics at the University of eastern Piedmont] wondered how it was possible that the alarm launched by FAO in Rome on global food crisis in the closing days of the Italian election campaign was not taken into account by politicians. Right now, in thirty countries of the southern world, beginning with Egypt and Haiti, the population is in turmoil.

But during the weekend election in Italy one early evening a RAI Report dedicated to food was broadcast: importing a kilo of asparagus from Peru which is air-freighted to get to our flat, we were told, means leaving in the air six kilos of CO2; meanwhile we pay eight euros per kilo for grated carrots contained in a [plastic] tank, while those who produce it earn a few cents. But that price does not include even paying the cost that nature pays with the pollution of air, land and water.

Reports also gave some alternatives: Solidarity Purchasing Groups [and from that day hundreds of people have begun to question the promoters SPG], the "kilometer zero" food and restaurants, organic farming. Perhaps the model of industrialization of agriculture [and therefore the use of pesticides, the import of products not in season on the other side of the world, the removal of land to be allocated to agrofuels] all to the advantage of the multinationals' agrobusiness has arrived at the endpoint. Certainly, this food crisis and the interest of thousands of people wanting to consume good, healthy and equitable food, say that we can’t carry on like this.

Bruno Picozzi (in translation)