By Geraldina Colotti on October 16, 2024.
The summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) opened in Rome, in the midst of the conflict that is spreading to the Middle East and which forces to confront the relationship between capitalist exploitation, imperialist wars and food security. One year after the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist regime, which shows no signs of abating, the figures from Palestine published by FAO indicate the inconsistency of “humanitarian” intervention without political action against colonial oppression.
In the Gaza Strip, where aid can hardly get through anymore, famine lurks. Everything has been destroyed. Satellite imagery indicates that heavy vehicle tracks, demolitions, shelling and other devastation have also severely affected Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure, with a total of 1,188 agricultural wells (52.5%) and 577.9 hectares of greenhouses (44.3%) damaged. As of September 1, 2024 – FAO states – 67.6% of Gaza’s arable land, or 10,183 hectares, has been damaged. Nearly 95% of the livestock (about 15,000) died and almost all the calves were slaughtered. Gaza’s farmers, fishermen and herders are risking their lives to continue food production. However, this is becoming increasingly difficult due to significant damage to infrastructure.
A framework in which, to be effective, even the proposal for a global alliance to fight poverty and hunger in the world, launched at the G20 by Brazilian President Lula da Silva (Brazil holds the rotating presidency of the organization), would require structural intervention: to eliminate the causes that lead one in 11 people to suffer from hunger, according to FAO.
Six years away from 2030, the deadline set by FAO for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2), the prospect of eradicating hunger and malnutrition globally is still far off. As for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Sofi 2024 report notes that, as of 2021, both indicators have declined. The level of hunger has dropped from 6.9% in 2021 to 6.2% in 2023, which means that 4.3 million people no longer suffer from hunger. However, significant sub-regional disparities persist, with South America registering 5.2% of its population affected, Mesoamerica 5.8%, and the Caribbean 17.2%, with a total of 41 million people still suffering from hunger in the region.
According to the report, the post-Covid-19 economic recovery, together with trade and social protection systems, has been vital in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. However, these advances have not been sufficient; hunger levels remain higher than before the pandemic, with evident inequalities between sub-regions.
In this sense, the gap emerges between those countries which, like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, despite decades of attacks and blockades on the primary needs of the popular classes, have continued to place the construction of a society of peace with social justice at the center; and those which have decided to bring down the “chainsaw” on basic rights, applying the structural adjustment plans imposed by the major international institutions.
In Nicaragua, family agriculture represents a very important sector that sustains the country’s economy and generates a direct impact on its food security. Under the Sandinista government, Nicaragua is today an example of food and nutritional security for the region thanks to good practices for the management of seeds and biological inputs, also promoted within the framework of the Fao “Mesoamerica without Hunger” program.
Nicaragua, like Cuba, participates in the FAO Mano de la Mano program, present in 15 countries of the region with the purpose of promoting rural activity, “with emphasis on more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable investment”. The Venezuelan delegation, coordinated by the head of the diplomatic mission, Ambassador Marilyn De Luca, will show the steps of an economic renaissance – the highest in the region – which is miraculous, considering the impact that unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States have had. Since 2014, they have caused the revenues of the country, which has the largest oil reserves in the world, to fall to historic lows.
With Chavez alive, Venezuela had reached the millennium goals in half the time, and that is why the FAO named the Food Prize after Hugo Chavez. But this, for imperialism, was evidently an unbearable slap in the face of the Bolivarian revolution, which had decided to allocate a large part of the income to social plans. And yet, today Venezuela – which depended on imports for between 80% and 85% of its foodstuffs – has managed to produce 94% of what it consumes.
And this is thanks to the fact that hundreds of small producers and farmers have dedicated themselves to producing for the country’s domestic consumption. And, as President Maduro said, for the first time in 100 years, the extraordinary industrial and productive growth witnessed by ECLAC, comes from the non-oil real economy, “it is a growth of the economy that produces food, goods, services, wealth and who pays taxes”.
A success that, unlike what happens in the capitalist countries of Europe, where the popular classes have no real power of decision, is due to a participatory and protagonist democracy; which is expressed in an assembly form and which invites to mobilization and the assumption of responsibilities in various spaces and forms of meeting, such as the national and international congresses, which have been held and will be held soon around the proposal of a new Antifascist International.
A proposal that, as it is in the spirit of the Bolivarian revolution, does not raise fences or “primogeniture”. On the contrary, it intends to unite, multiply and spread the contents of the territorial struggles and those of the necessary battle of ideas, articulated in the new International.