to discuss the politics of food i'm joined by. in rome he is a senior economist at the food and agricultural organization of the united nations in burlington we go to vandana shiva she's an ecologist and author and in london across to rob lyons he's deputy editor at spike and another member of our cross talk team on the go all right folks cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want if i go to rome first the term crisis food crisis is bandied about a lot and is there a crisis in if there is a crisis what is the crisis and what is it mean for everyone not just poor people but the rich west what does that mean globally for everyone. oh i'm glad you're out you ask it in that manner because there's always a confusion about what christ is supposed to mean i for one believe that a food crisis we always had it in fact with a million people angry we must have crisis but when you bring up the issue of you

know richer people or countries which are better off we tend to think about those commodities they consume in order and centers and prices of which may or may not have gone up i think we are quite far from having a real crisis on our hand today ok and then if i go to you in burlington but for the billion people that don't have food or don't have enough food it's obviously a crisis for them. it's been a crisis for them and it's structurally designed into the industrial food system where it costs more to produce food than you what you earn from selling it which is why of the one billion people five hundred million producers of food in india we now have a quarter of india two hundred fifty million permanently hungry most of them are producers of food when agriculturist turned into a negative economy because agribusiness makes money selling costly inputs to

farmers and buying cheap commodities from them the hungry are the producers of food the second group of people who are now going hungry are the people whose incomes haven't risen while the prices of food have the two thousand eight. did not disappear in countries like india the price rises continued and the reason governments are not intervening in the price is because globalization trade liberalization free trade says the market should work on its own but when the market is about speculation when the market is about super profits and super greed what it will result in is deep hunger and permanent rethink about that rob and i want to go back to the structural problems of agriculture but if we did reflect upon what we just heard then the whole system is rigged against poor people and they'll just stay poor and they'll just stay hungry. well i think poverty

is the key to this i mean i think there's two things going on there's a food price crisis which is happens from time to time where prices rise very very steeply and then there's a chronic problem of people not having enough to eat and that is in the hundreds of millions of people. experience that mostly so i thought if you're in africa. so what we need to do i think. is what we have to accept that poverty is a real problem that people have the money and the resources they'll be able to buy the food that they need so so actually it becomes part of a bigger question why are so many people in the poor in the world still so pour ok . if i could go back to room why eight eight is really not a food crisis it's poor people don't have enough money to buy food right i mean if you turn around looking at it. i mean sure i mean the issue is really a structural issue here if we have to really decide whether we think that food is just any commodity or not because if used to be

a food cooked by let's agricultural commodities that are used for you know as a raw material for food because there again we return to journalism of what food is if they are just commodities like any other commodity and you take it from then on then you will see that for example for cereals for agriculture cause in general cedars in particular prices in real terms are the lowest level in one hundred years now what does that tell you compared to receive minerals go all the you know all of the commodities actually it's a sector that is not really performing per se so the low prices means what means that you don't bring investment to this sector means that farmers will not grow it is probably not enough reward they probably shift to something else or simply go to the cities so we have had this problem. for just so long now it is just saw that a little increasing price can really affect the livelihoods of so many people at the same time so here is the big question where we have to make it quite a big. decisive decisions about how to treat these commodities which is so

important for food security rob it sounds like you want to jump in there i mean fifty years ago we didn't have a situation like this ok where the price goes up a little bit and then it's really a global problem it could be one country has a problem and you can buy it from another country but you're looking at hundreds of millions billion people that are affected by a small change in price i mean that's a structural problem again and how did we get to that point. because we only on trade ok sorry i was going to go to rob i'm going to rob me ok ok asteroidal going to rob them of their bandana go ahead rob ok. you know the you know fifty years ago we didn't have the same kind of model that we have for agriculture and a slight increase in price as a just devastating effect on hundreds of millions of people you get in it's because it's a structural problem it's not the lack of food and that really technically it's not even the price it's just the structure. well i think

actually in some ways the problem is how little food actually gets traded on the world market i mean a very very small percentage actually gets tried it the vast majority of food that people consume especially in the developing world is actually produced in the domestic market and often locally as from ghana says very often by themselves so. when you have a situation like that the small changes in supply or for example. a bit of interest in commodities being traded can push up the price extraordinarily very very short time so actually what we need to do is develop the world market for these. short term to become a major problem but. my question is different. fifty years ago people grew food all over the world and now over the last forty years and now we have the

same people do serious and we have the major ones but don't produce enough i mean that's the biggest structural change that's remarkable at going and then most important point is fifteen years ago all the world's food economies were forced to be integrated just so the cargoes of the world could have global access to markets and use four hundred billion dollars subsidies to dump on the poor what happens is the dumping leads to a lowering of prices which actually leads to a decline in incomes and our calculations for india show that globalization of the food system has lost a twenty five billion dollars of evaporation of farm incomes but here in india that's where poverty is being created is being created by globalization of agriculture and one signal in one country to disintegration can affect prices

everywhere either in terms of the lowering of prices which kills. the farmers or rising food prices for the retail end which hurts the poor who have to buy. food is an item that should not be treated first as a commodity because if it is a commodity then the corporations will rule over that commodity they will speculate they will fix prices secondly as a commodity the corporations can harvest higher subsidies. putting us green to biofuel that's where it will go it's thirty percent this year it's going to become forty percent next year with an increase of two fifteen percent in blending of oil with biofuels the cattle thieves industry is consuming large amounts of grain that cattle don't want to eat their stomachs were designed to grass their herbivores and they're being punished by feeding grain and the poor are being deprived of grain but the worst is we used to eat eight thousand five hundred

species of plants commodity trading had as reduce this to a basket of eight i say bring back biodiversity bring back women's knowledge to the food system and bring back food serenity and the food crisis and hunger will disappear tomorrow that's what we do through. india after hours have doubled and tripled their food output and increase their incomes five to ten times you have to work with biodiversity not against the ecological processes the real poverty and hunger is rising from the way we produce food by working against the systems that give us food the saw in the biodiversity the water and even the air in room if i you know we just heard it shouldn't be helpmates into a commodity food but it always will be a commodity because it's a very lucrative business right now i mean that that's that's the crux of the whole thing here is that a lot of people speculators will go in there completely legal they'll go in there

and make a killing and we shall with the increase. corn ok and a lot of people blame speculators maybe there is one element of it there but what we just heard is is really true i mean traditionally the traditional way of feeding the planet is has just been dissolved through all of these structural changes of the last forty years do we need to go back or do we have to find a new future but we certainly don't need to go back and i don't there are many things that i can agree with but i think we need to look at the history a little bit i don't believe that the kind of i mean we have now is terrible for sure but we've had families in the past and we have families because we couldn't produce enough we don't have the right seats let's look at i mean india before revolution how was it so there is i mean there are lessons to be learned from the fast still and never lasted thirty two. yes. i lost them in nearly as bad and that was because of trade not because of lack of production yes but you know better than i do that for example in india today there is for the last ten years or three years

there has been even a decline in prick up with consumption of cereals because people tend to eat more value added food in china there has been a tango not drop so we would consult. yeah that's true and these are my is that is thinks i'm sorry it's not that you're growing less actually you're growing a lot and china is growing a lot and you put these countries together you are one of the biggest producers of grain i mean what you are so i can take your point is i'm going to have to chime in after a short break we'll continue our discussion on food security stay with r.t. . wealthy british style it's time to rise.

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but before let's see what russians think about this issue. the price of food around the world is rising in russia high temperatures drought and massive wildfires this summer threaten the tardis as a result russia lost a third of its grain crops and over twenty percent of the potato harvest the drought has also had an impact on inflation according to the russian public opinion research center citizens are divided on inflation's impact forty eight percent believe it is moderate and even tepid and another four to seven percent say it is hot this practice the government is assuring russians that prices will flatten out by the end of the year. ok i did you do in going to a different direction we use the terms food security mentioned

a lot in food sovereignty and sometimes and i'd like to talk about both rob if i can go to you in london i mean what is food security because are we speaking about globally or we do looking at it each individual country or it depends on how you want to apply the term. yeah i think i think there are different. definitions of that and i think most people would look at a national level so there's a debate in the u.k. here about how do we grow north of our own food and if there were a problem in the world market or if there was some kind of international crisis would we be able to feed ourselves we had that problem during the second world war so there's that there's that problem for that reason a lot of people argue that we should have more local production of food. as well as the environmental benefits are supposed to attach to that we would have security without food sovereignty i think that's actually overstated i think that actually we're better off trading with we know that different countries are going to be more

efficient at producing different kinds of foods or even non-food crops and using those normal through crops to gain foreign exchange and therefore to be able to buy the food that they need so britain. in the food price crisis in two thousand and eight didn't really have a problem prices went up a bit it was uncomfortable for some people but actually in terms of the food being on the shelves in the supermarkets we didn't have a problem because we were able to trade very and if i go to you and in burlington this is still work for everyone here because we have we have private enterprise private companies by the way they call it land grabbing right now if they can secure food for their own people let's say you know i'm just making this up here is someone in britain is buying something in kenya ok kenya has some problems with feeding its own people and well but that land that's been purchased is producing agriculture for someplace else in the world we could technically have

a situation where a country is starving but its production is being exported and the indigenous people can eat at will told the land that they can eat it we can get into a situation like that quickly that's why i ask about food security and. in that. way in that kind of situation when i said india's been using less i was talking about the fact that our prime flood thailand are being grabbed for. urban expansion for factories for superhighways across the country we have protests of farmers against land grab saying we're supposed to produce food for our people trade liberalization and the so-called free trade which isn't free trade it basically means food goes into the hands of agribusiness like cargill and russia in the one nine hundred seventy three soviet union one hundred seventy five was an example which showed to the world that food production was now determined by the trading power of these giant corporations when the trade sanctions were broken by cargill

and american retailers ending up in soviet union. i think the fact that we now have an integrated food system is creating more instability in the food. prices as well as in food access it is allowing this massive land grab which in effect is robbing food from the poor and the third is just as the the russian import just showed we have to factor in climate change when rob talks about oh let's anyone buy from anywhere where india was told stop producing your food by the world bank and we were told we should buy from australia and the u.s. with the u.s. grain is going for cars and animals and australia has had extended drought you cannot. give up your food sovereignity food serenity is the right and freedom to be able to determine the ability to produce your food and in other times of climate change to produce that food with climate insurance and the only way you

can have climate insurance is ensuring that your soils have large amounts of organic matter that means doing organic farming it's both a mitigation as well as a deputation strategy but for our part of the world it also means the tariff of incomes from farmers goes down most of the money that is being made by the corporation. is being made at the cost of small farmers. in india monsanto super profits in genitally engineered cotton have come from the small farmers who grow cotton and today they are in such deep debt for paying royalties to months until they're committing suicide two hundred thousand so sides is one step beyond ok ok so we need just a knowledge the agrarian crisis that has been created by a trade driven not by freedom of people but by freedom of corporations ok if i go back to rome can we have food security and free trade at the same time because

again we have fewer countries that are growing food or enough food for their own security and let's say for example the united states in a real example this year russia in the united states don't have the yields that everyone expected and that's again causing the volatility in price but you know could we ever get to the world to a world where everyone can have food secured for them where it's a political or it's it's not driven exclusively by market forces again deep make sure it's just not treated as a commodity which you know i'm kind of changing gears from the first part of the program but you know there's a lot of countries in world that certainly just can't produce food because they believe in trade because trade will to alleviate that problem. yes well you see the issue of food security has to be seen he has few dimensions as you know if he has some you know quite a good definition for it one of the dimensions you discussed but the question of access to food is really an important dimension which we haven't discussed now if you take again the latest figure from

a pharaoh nine hundred twenty five million people hungry while this is happening at the time when actually there is food for everybody why they can't have that food they don't even have a penny i mean it's not even question of the prices we're talking about today these high prices certainly at sort of problem but it's not going to really change the situation of those one hundred twenty five million but even if you have to prices they won't be able to afford it so we do have a income issue here that we have to address the second point i want to make is that we should not mistake food security beat food self-sufficiency. as it was mention of the beginning i mean countries may want to have self-sufficiency policies and in many countries it works and it's the best thing to do in many countries it can cost a lot of money and at the end of the day maybe at the expense of other things now i know there will be people who will be arguing against that in cases where there is some potential to at least do the basic food self-sufficiency but that the issue is that i think i don't agree to take trade as something negative trait can be

something extremely positive look at today russia or crane as i kist on these will be the countries which in the in the future are going to be the breadbasket for increased population that we're going to have that is where the increase is going to come no single country except a few may be able to to have the natural resources and the let's say to god gifts to be able to produce enough for their own people so having said that i do not want to undermine the importance of let's say inequality which exists i do not want to ignore the very important fact raise about concentration of most of these food is coming from is distribution mechanism but if there are problems with the. system we have to address that i do not believe that trade is one of them ok rob you were nodding your head at one point we were talking about trade and i did some research on your writing on this and you do believe in trade we're going to want you don't want to be called a free market fanatic out ok but a lot of people say that problems that we have now are because of the western

conceptions of free trade in dealing with the south and they say that's where the problems come from it's the type of trade it's the type of relationship not really the marketing that in of itself. well there is an unbalanced relationship in this is one area where i think more work can be to both the united states and particularly europe have very unbalanced trade policies first of all by allowing. restrictions or tariffs on food coming in from developing countries which could be very beneficial to the development of those countries but also by subsidizing their farmers directly and indirectly in their production which creates an imbalance situation if we have genuinely free trade i think that it will be much more possible for the developing countries to use agriculture as a means of pushing for a broader social development through those countries that's a really disagreement from donna about iraq achieved towards things like

industrialization and the building of roads and things like this and urbanization these are very very important things and the history of the last two hundred years indicates in country after country where those things have taken place where fewer people have been farmers and therefore actually been less profitable in many ways because instead of worrying about how much food they themselves produce they can worry about their income and. are able to buy the things that they need so actually that broader social development is really really key to ending this i think a real tragedy that hundreds of millions of people go hungry going backwards. but it's not because we have what i was there's no pressure is actually the wrong way round banana go ahead you had a last word by the way go ahead yeah i was saying is i mean we're all still going it's as if the problem is that their farm that's not the problem the problem is that the farmers aren't being allowed to make an adequate living because they're being made to spend too much on costs of production and then they're getting too

little for what they produce so if these reduce the cost of production which means you know get rid of monsanto's dmoz we'll have solved the problem the problem of this we have solved it in argentina we have solved it in the cotton belts of india we have sold it in the amazon. in brazil and i think we would even have saw of all the small solve the problem in the united states so far as i'm not the problem they are the solution the industrial deal that you can reduce the number of small samas replace them by energy say slaves in mid-flight two percent of the greenhouse gases to a totally non-sustainable system going to happen the pray tell you it will do this is it turned into a very good discussion i'm going to have to jump in here many thanks to my guest today in rome burlington and in london and thanks to my viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember crossfire. dear

mom i'm sorry that i had to do this i've been in so much pain in the past year that i can't take it anymore the stomach and chest pains have been getting worse and no doctor has been able to help me please know that i'll finally be at peace with no more pain i wish i could have had a life with elizabeth always pictured her being my wife and mother to my kids i love you all see you all in heaven when your time comes i'm going to meet jesus christ. thousands of u.s. troops in iraq received one of these drugs a drug called lariam and it may have prevented many soldiers from getting sick the question tonight is whether or not soldiers were adequately warned about it's rare

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gassing live twenty four hours a day from our studios in central moscow this is our team certainly glad to have you with us let's get right to the headlines russia and nato join forces in to destroy heroin and opium lands in afghanistan wiping out two hundred fifty million dollars worth of narcotics the operation came as a result of increased pressure from moscow to block the flood of heroin entering russia after months of planning the radii in the mountains and near the border with pakistan took less than four hours. reports say georgia has rounded up twenty people allegedly working for

a russian spy network tbilisi is yet to confirm or deny it works for diplomatic ties between russia and georgia were severed in two thousand and eight following the war in south of. the european union agrees to a new. bailout system with major players for weaker states still wonders plan includes. the euro and. it also gives the. member states. coming up next we follow up quest for the truth undertaken by the parents of a u.s. soldier whose death was blamed on drug abuse but turned out to be caused by medicine prescribe by his superiors.