Tonight (October 19, 2017), the World Food Prize will be ceremoniously bestowed on yet another cheerleader for degenerative agriculture.
This year’s award goes to Dr. Akinwumi Ayodeji Adesina of Nigeria, president of the African Development Bank, and a proud supporter of Big Ag and Biotech. In his words, Adesina says he works to “help farmers rise to the top of the value chain by industrializing agriculture.”
In the lead-up to World Food Day (October 16) and tonight’s ceremony, I’ve received, from an enthusiastic marketing person who mistakenly thinks I’d be interested in attending tonight’s events, a series of emails all with the subject line “How Iowa is feeding the world.”
The email invitations contain glowing praise for industrial, degenerative agriculture—the type that kills healthy soil life, has ruined Iowa’s water and produces pesticide-contaminated food. In one email, she wrote:
But in Iowa, solving global hunger is business as usual, from being the #1 producer of pork, soy beans and eggs, to the cutting-edge bioscience research being conducted at the state’s universities, to groundbreaking technological innovations applied in the farms and fields – Iowa has a long legacy of feeding the world.
Iowa is indeed home to many good farmers. Farmers who work with nature, not against it. Farmers who—without benefit of the huge taxpayer-funded subsidies granted to their GMO monoculture counterparts—steward their lands, and grow nutrient-rich, uncontaminated food.
But those aren’t the farmers who are ever awarded a $250,000 World Food Prize. Because those farmers aren’t generating big profits for corporations like Monsanto.
No, the farmers and “thinkers, scientists and advocates of global food security” who are gathered in Des Moines this week aren’t so interested in organic or regenerative agriculture. And, as one new report after another reveal, the only thing they’re feeding the world is a slick PR campaign, founded in lies.
The truth about who’s really feeding the world (spoiler alert: it’s not industrial ag) was published this week by the nonprofit ETC Group in its latest edition of “Who will Feed us?”
Read ‘World Food Prize: Feeding the World a Slick Campaign of Lies’