Two conferences this autumn tackled different ends of the problem, in splendid isolation from each other. The UN Committee on World Food Security held its annual meeting in Rome in mid-October, alarmed that the number of hungry people on the planet has suddenly climbed by 40 million in the past year – much of it due to the direct and indirect effects of climate change – and fearful that an unpredictable climate will cut global food production still more sharply in the decades ahead.

Meanwhile, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP23) met in Bonn and high on its agenda was the need to cut agriculture’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which experts say account for anywhere from one third to more than half of global warming. So, what for Rome delegates is a problem of food security is for Bonn delegates a problem of climate security.

The solution for both climate and food sovereignty is to dismantle the global industrial agri-food system (which we call the ‘industrial food chain’) and for governments to give more space to the already growing and resilient ‘peasant food web’ – the interlinked network of small-scale farmers, livestock-keepers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers, fishers and urban producers who, our research shows, already feed most of the world.

The solution for both climate and food sovereignty is to dismantle the global industrial agri-food system (which we call the ‘industrial food chain’)

In a report delivered to policymakers in both Rome and Bonn, Who Will Feed Us?, ETC Group (the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) provides original data about the importance of peasant food systems and the real economic, environmental and social cost of industrial agriculture.

The industrial food chain is using at least 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land and most of agriculture’s fossil fuel and freshwater resources to feed barely 30 per cent of the world’s population. Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.

Aside from burning vast quantities of fossil carbon, industry is also wasting money that could be directed to supporting equitable agroecological production while still lowering food prices for the world’s marginalized consumers.

The statistics are staggering. Consumers pay $7.5 trillion each year for industrially produced food. But between a third and half of this production is wasted along the way to the consumer or at the table: spoiled in the field or in transport, rejected from grocers because of blemishes, or left on the plate because of over-serving.

Conversely, households in OECD countries consume about a quarter more food than is needed – leading to obesity and related health problems.

The total food overproduced each year is worth $3.8 trillion – a combination of $2.49 trillion worth of food waste and $1.26 trillion of over-consumption (see footnote 191 of the report). Burgeoning waists worldwide also have both human and economic costs.

When the wider environmental damages – including contaminated soils and water, greenhouse gas emissions – are added to the health and social impacts, the harm done by the industrial food chain is almost $5 trillion (see footnote 193). For every dollar consumers spent in supermarkets, health and environmental damages cost two dollars more.

Added to the amount spent by consumers, this makes the real cost of industrial food $12.4 trillion annually.

Policymakers negotiating the future of food and climate may wonder if it is possible to make such a dramatic change in our food production. Peasants may feed 70 per cent of the world’s population now but can they adapt quickly enough to climate change to feed us in 2100? Which system, the industrial food chain or the peasant food web, has the track record, innovative capacity, speed and flexibility needed to get us through the unparalleled threat of an unpredictable climate?

The answer is clear. Take experience: over the last century, the industrial food chain has not introduced a single new crop or livestock species to production but has cut the genetic diversity of our crops by 75 per cent, reduced the number of species by about one third, and reduced the nutritional value of our crops by up to 40 per cent. The peasant web has introduced 2.1 million new plant varieties where industrial agriculture has only introduced 100,000 over the same time frame.

The industrial food chain works with only 137 crop species and five main livestock species. Stunningly, 45 per cent of the industry’s research and development targets just one crop: maize. By contrast, the peasant web is breeding and growing 7,000 different crop species and 34 livestock species – like the alpaca, ñandu, and guinea pig.

Peasants also have the track record of dealing with new conditions quickly and effectively. Recent history is replete with evidence that peasant producers – before there were telegraphs or telephones or railways – have adapted new food species (through selective breeding) to an extraordinary range of different climatic conditions within the span of only a few human generations.

This process of seed and knowledge sharing from farmer to farmer is how maize spread across most of the regions of Africa and how sweet potatoes were planted everywhere in Papua New Guinea from mangrove swamps to mountain tops – all in less than a century – and how immigrants brought seeds from Europe that were growing across the Western Hemisphere within a generation.

When we compare the track record of the industrial food chain to the peasant food web we must conclude that our century-long experience with the chain shows that it is just too expensive, and it can’t scale up. Meanwhile, with almost no support from governments, the peasant food web is already feeding 70 per cent of us (see page 12 of the report) – and could do much more, while producing drastically less greenhouse gas emissions than industrial methods.

To be clear, ‘peasant farming as usual’ is not an option. Climate change will mean our over 10,000 years of agriculture has to deal with growing conditions that the world hasn’t seen for three million years.

There is no reason to be sanguine about the problems ahead.

Peasants can scale up if the industrial chain gets off their backs. Governments must recognize peasants’ rights to their land and seeds and support fair, peasant-led rural development and trade policies. We need to cut waste and shift our financial resources to strengthening the peasant food web and both tackling climate change and ensuring food sovereignty.

The ETC Group’s publication, Who Will Feed Us? which compared peasant farming and industrial agriculture, can be downloaded in English and Spanish from their website (http://www.etcgroup.org/whowillfeedus). This article was first published in the New Internationalist.

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2011 marked a flashpoint for many small farmers and fair trade producers. Fair trade producers from Mexico and Colombia to Ghana and Indonesia experienced a record number of climate change influenced disasters, including landslides, severe floods and crop failure. According to Fairtrade International (FLO), fair trade farmers are experiencing up to 28% reductions in yield due to erratic weather patterns and droughts. Small farmers, already vulnerable from a lack of financing options, limited market access and/or volatile markets, among other factors, are now faced with lower yields, ?natural? disasters and higher costs to adapt to and mitigate climate change impacts.

Climate change is impacting specific crops in very specific ways. A recent report by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) detailed how a significant percentage of Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two biggest cocoa producing countries, will be too hot for cocoa by 2030. Compounded by erratic and unpredictable weather patterns, flooding and new pests, cocoa and cocoa producers have a very bleak future. Sadly, this pattern is replicated in other crops like coffee. Coffee producing regions are experiencing a dangerous combination of lower rainfall and higher temperatures, which some speculate will render production unsustainable in lowland countries and regions by 2050. While coffee plants may be able to adapt to higher altitudes in search of cooler temperatures, small farmers are tied to their land, both historically and financially. The United States Agency for International Development?s (USAID) work with the Global Climate Change Initiative recently published a study that analyzed a number of intersections of climate change, poverty and agriculture. Key to the study is an index of ?country vulnerability? with many of the countries with significant fair trade presences ranked as ?extremely? vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change.

Size matters: small farmers are key to combating climate change

Global trends in farming point towards an increasingly large-scale and industrialized approach to farming. The last century has seen a significant transformation of the global food system away from locally-based, family-scaled farms towards large industrial farms. Gone are the days of family-scaled farmers providing food and fiber to their local communities. The global food system is now largely dominated by multinational corporations, exploitative conditions for farmers and farmworkers and chemical dependent agriculture.

Large-scale, industrial agriculture is a primary contributor to climate change. According to author and farmer Will Allen, the ?combination manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers, fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping, electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating, and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide account for approximately 30% of the United States? carbon footprint.? The US-styled energy intensive approach to agriculture, not only adopted by many industrialized countries but also exported to underdeveloped countries, ironically contributes to food insecurity or the ability of a given country or community to feed itself.

Impoverished countries and communities have long experienced varying degrees of food insecurity. As renowned NGO, Food First, has detailed, the underlying causes of hunger are largely attributable to poverty, inequality and failed institutions, not scarcity, overpopulation or a lack of technological fixes. The last five years– collapsing financial markets, the global push agriculture fuels (biofuels, like ethanol) and the expansion of speculation of the food market?have been the near ?perfect storm? for small farmers. With close to 1 billion victims of malnourishment in 2011, it is clear that the industrial agriculture model is a failure.

However, there is hope. Despite the strong global tide towards industrial agriculture, small farmers, who not only form the backbone of the global food supply, are central players in safeguarding biodiversity, fostering environmental stewardship and innovating sustainable agricultural practices. According to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, small farmers hold the key to doubling food production while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty. Similarly, Via Campesina, the global movement of millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, has demonstrated that small farmers can address the global food crisis in a far more equitable and sustainable way than agribusiness and large-scale farming.

Fair Trade: An Antidote?

Fair trade is a social movement and market model that aims to empower small-scale farmers and consumers in underdeveloped countries to create an alternative trading system that supports equitable exchange, sustainable development and long-term trading relationships. Fair trade supports fair prices and wages for producers, safe working conditions, investment in community development projects and the elimination of child labor, workplace discrimination and exploitation.

What is unique about the fair trade system is its ability to channel financial resources and technical support for small producers. A key benefit of the system includes a social premium that farmers use for use in their local communities and farms. Though the fair trade social premiums can be used for virtually any project that benefits the local community, fair trade producers are increasingly using the fair trade premium for environmentally focused projects. For example, Coocafe, a coffee co-operative in Costa Rica, used its fair trade premium to greatly reduce the amount of water wasted on washing the beans allowing for other farmers to plant trees around their crop as shade, which is good for the quality of their crop and for the environment. In India, tea workers have invested some of their fair trade premium to replace traditional wood-burning heating with a solar-panels.

Fair trade standards can also positively contribute to improving energy efficiency on the farm and throughout the supply chain. Fair trade standards encourages fair trade producers and traders to implement measures to improve water conservation, energy efficiency, eco-system management and waste management.

With a strong majority of fair trade producers also either certified organic or practicing organic and agroecological methods, fair trade producers can both significantly improve yields and mitigate the negative impacts of climate change. A landmark study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that organic and agroecological farming practices increased productivity on 12.6 millions farms, with an average crop increase of 79%, while at the same time improving the supply of critical environmental services. According to Food First Executive Eric Holt-Gim?nez, following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, a large-scale study on 180 communities of smallholder farms in Nicaragua demonstrated ?that farming plots cropped with simple agroecological methods (including rock bunds or dikes, green manure, crop rotation and the incorporation of stubble, ditches, terraces, barriers, mulch, legumes, trees, plowing parallel to the slope, noburn, live fences, and zero-tillage) had, on average, 40 per cent more topsoil, higher field moisture, less erosion and lower economic losses than control plots on conventional farms. On average, agroecological plots lost 18% less arable land to landslides than conventional farms and had 69% less erosion compared to conventional farms.?

When it comes to reversing climate change, organic agriculture can, in fact, play an important role. According to the Rodale Institute, organic farming practices can not only sequester 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per acre per year, , but organic agriculture can also can boost yields significantly. According to the 2008 edition of Waste Management & Research, simple composting not only increases crop yield and replaces dangerous and greenhouse gas emitting synthetic fertilizers, but also sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Many fair trade organizations have also invested in regional and local composting operations as an effective method to increase soil fertility, boost yield and sequester carbon.

Fair trade alone cannot address climate change, nor the daunting challenges confronting farmers on a daily basis. The planet will need a concerted effort to address the root causes of climate change with a comprehensive approach to energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Small farmers in the fair trade system can, however, improve farmers? likelihood of mitigating climate change?s negative impacts, showcase local innovations for reversing climate change, and provide one opportunity for Northern consumers to support farmers in a concrete way.

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