Meeting hijacked by corporate agenda that puts profits over development, critics charge
An employee affixes branding material to freshly harvested pineapples at the BA Farm in Indang, Cavite province, the Philippines on Thursday September 16 2021. Picture: BLOOMBERG/VEEJAY VILLAFRANCA
The kinds of policy contributions set to be presented by multinational and national representatives, including the AU and SA government, appear skewed — focusing on ideas such as cost-effectiveness and efficiency in production and distribution, and the roles of large firms, genetically modified crops and industrial mono-cropping in this, rather than issues of people’s livelihoods and the affordability of food.
The activist critique is that the meeting is failing to address a number of fundamental questions, including, who are and should be the beneficiaries of the food system? And, how may the inequalities in the system be resolved to ensure genuine universal benefits? The profits may largely be attributed to hikes in food prices, which have outstripped general inflation during the pandemic.For the poor, the effects of this have been damaging. The unemployed and those on lower incomes have been forced to spend an increasing proportion of their meagre budgets on food. In response, the Plaas study found, many of these households have cut the amount and quality of the food they are buying, with worrying nutritional implications.
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