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Food, Faith and Power
Ruth Valerio
www.ruthvalerio.net
@ruthvalerio
The Issues
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Ownership of food in hands of a few multinationals
Diet and health
Animal welfare
High energy and resource use
Use of pesticides, chemicals and impact on health
Climate change
Dietary changes amongst Chinese and Indian expanding
middle-class
Speculation in commodity futures
Agrofuels
GMOs
IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes
Food waste
Land grabs
The role of smallholder farmers
• There are around 525 million farms worldwide – 85% are 2
hectares or less
• Smallholder farmers produce over 70% of the world’s food
• Half of the world’s hungry are farmers
• Most small farmers buy more food than they sell, so don’t
gain from high food prices
• on average, small farms in developing countries generate 4060 per cent of total rural income, including both farm and
non-farm activities.
• Some 30 million smallholders produce most of the world’s
coffee and cocoa
The role of women
• 60 – 80% of food in most developing countries
is grown and/or processed by women
• Women are the main producers of the world’s
staple crops (rice, wheat and maize)
• Staple crops provide 90% of the food
consumed by the rural poor in Africa
• Women own 2% of the world’s land
The challenge of climate change
• Scientists virtually unanimously predicting a 4 degree warmer
world by the end of the Century without serious policy change
(World Bank report, Turn down the heat)
• 2012 drought in the United States impacted about 80 percent
of agricultural land, making it the most severe drought since
the 1950
• There is a rapidly rising risk of crop yield reductions as the
world warms
• Impact of sea level rise on important low-lying delta areas (eg.
Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam)
Corporate Power
• Seven companies control 85% of tea production through their
factories and estates.
• Smallholder tea growers are likely to receive less than 3% of
the retail value of tea, and often less than 1%
• Five companies (Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, Noboa and Fyffes)
control around 75% of world banana trade.
• Of banana retail price, only 1-3% returns to the workers on
large plantations and just 5-10% goes to small-scale
producers.
• The ABCD group (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus): 75-90%
of global grain trade.
Our food trends
• Over 60% of women and men in the UK are overweight or
obese
• On average, we eat way below the recommended five
portions of fruit and veg a day
• People of all incomes are eating ever greater quantities of
junk, fast and processed food: sales of ready-meals are
expected to grow by 35% between 2012 and 2016
• We throw away more food than packaging in the UK every
year
• We eat more than our recommended daily allowances of
protein, saturated fat, salt and sugar.
• Around 500,000 people in the UK are reliant on food aid
Theological reflections
• Food is good - Gen. 1:26-31
• Food is gift – Ex. 16: 11-18
• Food brings us into one body – 1 Cor. 11:20-34
Virtuous eating
Humility
Frugality
Generosity
Justice
Hope and patience
Love
‘There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics,
involves our freedom. We still (sometimes)
remember that we cannot be free if our minds and
voices are controlled by someone else. But we have
neglected to understand that we cannot be free if
our food and its sources are controlled by someone
else. The condition of the passive consumer of food
is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat
responsibly is to live free’
(Wendell Berry)
Ruth Valerio
www.ruthvalerio.net
@ruthvalerio