Cheap food and feeding the world sustainably

Feeding the world requires local, national and global solutions in view of the expected world population of 10 billion by 2050. Sustainability must characterize the socio-economic infrastructures as well the scientific and technical components. Today almost half the world population lives on two dollars a day or less and although poor, most are not hungry. WTO objectives for world trade include agriculture and food with the hope of supplying cheap food based on and generated by a capital intensive system. However, the current paradigm of producing ever cheaper food in the West is found to be increasingly unsustainable and, if introduced globally, will create a variety of instabilities. A policy of feeding the growing cities of the developing world with imported Western food would remove domestic markets from poor farmers and would also risk large-scale famine when global food trade breaks down. The only sustainable alternative is to empower poor farmers to help themselves to serve their own domestic markets thus modelling the Western strategy for agriculture which has moved from free trade to protection. The capitalist system must be designed to enhance quality of life by building up and not by destroying rural communities. To achieve this aim the Western concept of cheap food needs replacement by a new paradigm emphasizing quality of life. Global solutions for feeding the developing world require ethical behaviour by rich and powerful nations in addition to technical and economic inputs. Proposals are made to exclude agriculture and food from the WTO, to build-up agriculture and protect domestic food markets in developing countries, to continue but redirect government payments to Western farmers for sustaining natural resources and rural life, and to require consumers to pay the real cost of food.