Who feeds us? Who gets fed? Who decides? 

Norman Borlaug, the founding father of the Green Revolution, is credited with saving a billion lives by significantly increasing the production of staple crops through the development of high-yielding varieties and a massive increase in the use of fertilisers and pesticides. However, failing to address fundamental power imbalances, the Green Revolution excluded and exploited the farmers and communities it claimed to help, deepened gender- and class-based inequalities (both between and within states), and seriously degraded previously diverse agroecosystems. To make matters worse, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that globally, 2.3 billion people still experience dangerous levels of food insecurity. In Australia, a third of adults (36 per cent) could be categorised as food insecure in 2023. Clearly, capitalist agriculture isn’t feeding all of us, so why do we keep hearing that the answer to food insecurity lies in increased production?

The governance of Australian agriculture since the 1980s has been characterised by a shift to neoliberal policy settings, featuring privatisation, deregulation, and free trade. Seventy two percent of our total production is sold overseas, and 59 per cent of agricultural value is enjoyed by just 14 per cent of farms. Especially concerning, corporate food systems have led to massive increases in the production and importation of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), to the point where UPFs have become Australians’ main source of our dietary energy. The artificially cheap price of UPFs externalises every cost possible – the retail price does not reflect the real costs to our health, to cultural place-based agrifood systems UPFs displace, and to Nature. Not surprisingly, the burden of this is felt most on the margins of society, predominantly the elderly, people with disabilities, migrants, single parents, LGBTQIA+ people, and First Peoples, who experience comparatively alarming rates of food insecurity. Australians are left to rely on a mix of self help and charity, which are continuing to deny too many Australians the right to food. We are failing to meet the needs of priority populations. 

Food is a human right. 

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food asserts that all people have the right to have regular, permanent and free access, either directly or by means of financial purchases, to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to which the consumer belongs, and which ensures a physical and mental, individual and collective, fulfilling and dignified life free of fear. The Australian Government is violating our internationally recognised rights.

In response to hunger across the nation, corporations shamelessly promote themselves as saviours, and even go so far as to deflect blame onto citizens. Woolworths, Australia’s biggest supermarket chain (with a market share of 37 per cent), works for ‘A better tomorrow’, employing a variety of campaigns to disguise their deliberate capitalisation on lack of competition. In fact, their business model relies on leaving people hungry. Without excluding people and constraining supply, profit to shareholders would not grow. Where profits are based on volume of turnover, excess must be produced but not consumed. Yet, Woolworths claims to ‘Care for all Australians’, ‘providing 10 million meals’’ as a part of their Christmas appeal to OzHarvest.

The growth of food banks in wealthy countries is a salient marker of social policy failure (with respect to hunger) and failure of government to meet its right to food obligations.

– Oliver De Schutter, The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

The food bank industry provides a win-win waste stream for supermarkets and the state. Not only do supermarkets save costs associated with expensive landfill dumping, all donations are tax deductible at market price. They gain social licence by appearing to feed the hungry, legitimising themselves as not only necessary but playing a key role in reducing food insecurity. This system allows the state to pass the responsibility of hunger onto corporations and welfare charities without having to address wealth redistribution and social welfare policies. Yet supermarkets still ask us to ‘round up’ the total cost of our shopping bill to the nearest dollar, telling us we are helping Australians in need, when in fact we are merely subsidising corporate greed.

It is important not to underplay the importance of food banks to the lives of people who experience hunger, as they currently serve a critical role in feeding people. Food banks, however, are not the solution we need for food sovereignty; they are a false solution to deal with the inefficiencies of the corporate food chain. Food banks should be a short-term response to hunger and crises, not a long-term solution for ensuring everyone’s right to food.

Rather than being dominated by corporations, in agroecology, food is produced by peasants, smallholders, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, and urban farmers. Agroecology enhances diversity and resilience (both human and more-than human), care for Nature and its bounty, creates rural-urban links and place-based community, and contributes to improved nutrition. Agroecological agrifood systems, not industrial chains, are the path towards ensuring our right to food. 

The cultivation of this ‘real’ agroecology is the driving force behind AFSA’s Agroecology Roadshow, bringing communities together to collectively imagine and create alternatives to the industrial food system, by focusing on the transformation across the social, cultural, economic and environmental aspects of the food system

So what can you do? In the Updated People’s Food Plan (PFP), under the ‘Right to Food’ section we list a series of actions that individuals, communities, schools, and universities can do to act. Learn more about food sovereignty, agroecology, the right to food, and what you can do in AFSA’s Updated Peoples’ Food Plan here, and send us more ideas from your community to continue to build the knowledge and visibility of already existing diverse community economies!

In the face of corporations and the state violating our right to food, AFSA asserts along with the global food sovereignty movement – the largest social movement in the world – that we must choose an agroecological future built on food sovereignty. Join us along the Agroecology Roadshow as we collectively create an agroecological future!

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to be a part of the agroecological transformation.

By: Emmylou Reeve, Jade Sorenson, Katie Barnshaw, Ben Trethewey and Patrick Meaney