Eric Holt-Giménez: How will the dominant industrial food system solve the problem of hunger?

Public lecture: Food movements, agroecology, and the future of food and farming. Today, a billion people live in hunger. Peak oil and environmental degradation threaten the food security of billions more, particularly with half the world's population living in urban environments where they are dependent on industrially produced and imported food. A transition is urgently needed, but how? What alternative policies can enable communities to realise their own food security in the face of environmental challenges, while also improving livelihoods, building resilience, and conserving ecosystems? Many food-related movements have already emerged around the world, but what ongoing challenges do they face?

Miguel Altieri gave this talk at the University of Amersterdam in the Netherlands, on Tuesday 13 December 2011. The event brought together three prominent radical thinkers each with a long background of experience in activism and academic research on transdisplinary but interconnected themes such as conservation, agro-ecology and sustainable farming, political economy and the social sciences:

Tony Weis, (Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Western Ontario and author of The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming), who addressed the economic and environmental problems of the dominant chemical-industrial food system; Miguel Altieri (Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture), who looked at the alternatives offered by ecological, small scale, local and urban farming; and Eric Holt-Giménez (Executive Director of Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy, and author of Food Movements Unite!: Strategies to transform our food systems) discussed the emergence of food movements from a global perspective, as well as the divisions between North and South, urban and rural.

This event was co-organised by the Transnational Institute (TNI), the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), and the Real World Economics Group at the University of Amsterdam.

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Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• natural farming
• organic farming
• sustainable farming
• sustainable agriculture
• industrial farming
• chemical agriculture
• pesticides
• fossil fuels
• monoculture
• agribusiness
• biotechnology
• hunger
• food security
• food sovereignty
• land policy
• rural development
• international development
• alternative development
• land reform
• peak oil
• sustainability
• genetic engineering
• GMOs
• biofuels
• agrofuels
• vegetarianism
• campesina e campesina
• via campesina