The dark side of global food systems

One of the key sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations is to create a hunger-free world by 2030. With just five years left, deep concerns remain about meeting this target.

Rising food prices and climate change have made it increasingly challenging to combat persistent hunger and malnutrition. The widespread adoption of global food systems has worsened the agricultural crisis—depleting soil fertility, polluting water sources and increasing carbon emissions.

The global food system promotes monoculture cropping, regardless of ecological suitability. It is capital- and resource-intensive, requiring high external inputs and reliable irrigation. Farmers become heavily dependent on corporates that sell seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides as a package. Corn (maize), soyabeans, high-yielding varieties of rice, wheat, cotton, and sugarcane are the basis of this system.

The shift to global food crops has drastically reduced genetic diversity. Today, just 17 crops provide 86 per cent of the world’s energy needs. This narrowing of genetic diversity weakens crop resilience, making them more vulnerable to pests and diseases. This leads to increased pesticide use.

Industrial-scale food production is a major cause of habitat loss and accounts for 70 per cent of global freshwater consumption for irrigation. It is also responsible for one-fourth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The global food system has several perverse effects. Overproduction saturates markets, driving down prices. While this benefits agribusinesses—ensuring a steady supply of cheap raw material for processed foods—farmers struggle to recover costs.

Soyabean cultivation is a classic example. Kamesh Patidar, a soyabean farmer from the Mandsaur region in Madhya Pradesh, ploughed the standing soya crop after realising that he could not even secure the minimum support price of Rs 4,892 per quintal. Instead, he received just Rs 3,500 per quintal.

Global food crops are grown over vast areas, resulting in oversupply and lower prices. Meanwhile, the corporates that process soya reap huge profits by buying cheap and selling the processed soya products—
such as soya feed or soya oil—at a premium.

In most cases, farmers cultivating global food crops have no choice but to sell their produce to large corporates that control the retail chain.

Over the past five decades, India has lost about 22 million hectares of farmland that once supported diverse local food crops, now replaced by global food crops.

In contrast, local food systems rely on a diversity of crops suited to specific ecological conditions. These crops are mostly consumed locally and need little or no processing but have a high nutritional value. Millets and coarse grains such as bajra, jowar, desi varieties of wheat, rice, and oil seeds are part of local food systems that still survive in India’s hinterlands.

According to the State of Rural and Agrarian India Report 2020, the shift to global crops has distorted the cropping patterns, promoting irrigated crops in dry areas. This has also led to negative health impacts by reducing food diversity and replacing food plates with white rice, wheat and sugar that are full of empty calories.

In India, large areas of farmland that once produced diverse pulses or coarse millets are replaced by soya and cotton. This has negative consequences for farmers as they change the land use from diverse food and fodder crops to cash crops that push them into a debt trap.

The tragic deaths of 2,50,000 farmers in India over the past two decades are closely linked to this shift from local to global crops. Lured by the illusion of profits, many end up in financial distress.

The myth that the global food system feeds humanity must be challenged. In reality, 70 per cent of the world is fed by small farmers based on local food systems using just 30 per cent of the world’s resources. In contrast, global food systems feed 30 per cent of people while using 70% of resources.

With rising food prices and climate change, finding a path to overcome persistent hunger and malnutrition is critical. The solution lies in adopting local food systems, which have the adaptability to evolve with diverse ecological systems.

The adoption of the global food system has exposed unprecedented threats to food security as the private corporate profit motive has captured control over our food systems instead of public interest.

The need of the hour is conserving local food systems based on diversity that enhances the soil fertility, conserves water and provides food and nutritional security.

(The writer is a farmer and Uttara Kannada-based
environmentalist)