Anita Ramgutty Wong, PhD.
Fun Fact: Roman emperor Tiberius (14-37 AD) wanted to have his daily bite of cucumber, so he had his gardeners invent artificial methods, a sort of greenhouse system, to grow his favourite vegetable year-round for him. The cucumbers were planted in soil, which was placed in carts. These carts were taken out in the sun every morning and rolled into a warm room in the evening in order to keep them warm at night.
It is interesting that creativity and inventiveness have always somehow been part of humans’ food production systems and yet today the world is in a food crisis of “unprecedented proportions”, judging by what the World Food Programme has to say this year. The WFP goes on to say:
“We are at a critical crossroads. We need to rise to the challenge of meeting people’s immediate food needs, while at the same time supporting programmes that build long-term resilience. The alternative is hunger on a catastrophic scale.”
The World Economic Forum also bluntly warns the world that the global food security challenge is straightforward: by 2050, the world must feed nine billion people, and the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today; that approximately half of the planet’s land mass is already arid and with global warming, more of it will start turning into deserts; and that by 2025, there will likely be food only for half of the world’s people…
Mauritius, a net importer of food (meaning that – shame on us – we import most of the food that we consume) is not exactly in such dire straits as a number of countries currently facing the crisis of severe food shortages, malnutrition or starvation, yet we too label our current issue “food sovereignty” or “food self-sufficiency,” suggesting that we too may be facing a food crisis in the future. How soon, or how later? Already, with food prices hiking every few days, a visit to the supermarket is proving to be a stressful experience for many of our citizens.
Since some years now, I have been attending workshops and conferences on the interrelated issues of high pesticide use, the need to boost organic farming, the need to increase local production, agro-processing, and so on, and I must say that stakeholders, while certainly keen to defend their own interests, seem also very much aware of the threats both to their own activities and to the population as a whole, as to be collectively desperate and impatient to see the country out of the valley and into a better place of plentiful, healthy, nutritious food for all. Although food security touches on all aspects of the economy and society, I will not speak of fish, meat or food waste or gender issues, ageing demographics, or global warming, and instead, principally structure my commentary around the vegetable sector, aiming at something of a summary or synthesis of the ideas I have heard being discussed, and a few of my own.
Gearing up for the war on food insufficiency is a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional beast hardly the stuff for a full analysis through these few lines, but I rather think, simplistically some would say, that we might be getting hopelessly lost in mounting accumulations of (a) stakeholder consultations where parties go round in circles of analysis, repeatedly out to defend their own interests and (b) schemes and projects with poor synergistic effects, rather than going for a straightforward approach based on not only what we have learnt and know to do, but also with an openness to innovation, and on the fact that our problems are, relatively speaking, not yet of disastrous proportions and thus may be caught early. Let us consider the challenges.
To begin with, the orientation of the problem, which ought to potentially point to the solution: I cannot fathom why the EDB had to be the body to hold the Assises de l’Agriculture earlier this year. I don’t care much about foreign investors finding it attractive or not to enter the agribusiness sector or about the export potential of our agricultural products. Food is not a commodity, it is a human right, and we need to cut to the chase and address the fundamental problem, that is, how, if the foreseeable future holds up a picture of insufficient and/or inaccessible food imports, we may increase our local production through new methods and new paradigms.
What we simply want is, at all times, sufficient food to be available to meet the nutritional needs and food preferences for a healthy life for all our people, knowing that we are a sizable and growing population of citizens, residents and visitors at any given time.
Secondly, what we eat: “food” is, nutritionally speaking, what the body absorbs and makes the most of. Even if there were no wars or no nationalistic tendencies in other parts of the world which limit our ability to import food, we would still have to reflect on whether the right food was reaching household level. Is good food accessible to all, quantity and quality wise? Are people in a position to adopt healthy diets or do they resort to cheap and food-like items out of ingrained habit, ignorance, or financial hardship, and why so? When “ration” rice is unavailable, can everyone afford basmati? When highly processed, unhealthy options are cheaper, what do people end up buying? What are our beliefs about the source of food, and about our own participation in its production? What goes on in the minds of consumers who experience the dramatically rising price of food items yet add these to their supermarket trolleys anyway? Why and when did dairy become an essential component of our diet? Is meat consumption sustainable and even necessary? Are we mindful of the role of fruits and vegetables in our diets and do we consume them in the right quantities and using the right preparations? The challenge is of enormous proportions, with implications for education and awareness about food quality, food variety and preparation, to income and expenditure decisions, to long-term food system structures (how does food reach everyone) and policy orientations (what “quality” of population do we want/what are our deepest beliefs about health, longevity, lifestyle, quantity vs. quality, agency of our lives, etc.?).
Thirdly, who ought to be producing what we need or want to eat? As a net food importer, we have to take note of the harsh reality that the producers of our staple foods are predominantly external to us: we love our rice, flour, milk, butter and cheese, oil, cereals and pulses, and even potatoes and onions, they are fixtures we feel we cannot do without. Sadly, not only have we drifted into dependency on the producers of these items but we have hopelessly failed to notice that they were headed for trouble themselves.
Intensive, mass production of dairy and meat, in turn heavily dependent on mass-produced maize, wheat, soybean, and chemical inputs, and on water, are all under threat from global warming, water scarcity, aridification of land, skyrocketing fertiliser prices and political instability. Countries producing rice are finding that their own populations must now have priority. Low prices of grains and pulses are a thing of the past; cooking oil is almost a luxury these days, and to make matters worse it is a key ingredient in many processed foods. To top it all, sprawling housing projects are in direct competition with the need to expand land under agricultural cultivation, here as well as elsewhere, leading to a general decrease in food production. Our local production, for its part, suffers endemically from low levels of economic viability due to the small size of agricultural land under cultivation. The same logic prevents the agro-processing sector from making progress.
The cultivation of organic crops is also something of a mirage, with operators few and far between, hardly meeting local community needs. Small planters are reluctant to give up traditional methods and their source of livelihood. Open-field farming is under immediate and continued threat from dry spells as well as floods. The hydroponics-based sector is growing too slowly.
It seems to me that there are many local producers and processors doing a great job across a number of product lines, including in agro-processing, and we are gratified to have fruit and veg, eggs, snacks, pickles and tea but this simply cannot meet the levels of demand of the population. Technological investments are also simply not at sufficient levels to counter the problems of labour shortages, theft, and inefficient water management. In short, efforts to bring about local food sufficiency and sustainable agriculture have yet to demonstrate their efficacy.
Fourthly: Water. In one of my previous papers, I drew attention to the very real, very close threat that awaits us in a few years: that of being water-stressed. The way we produce our food causes problems for the water cycle, considering the fact that agriculture alone consumes 70% of all freshwater withdrawals for such uses as irrigation, rearing livestock, and food processing. As well, increasing environmental disasters such as floods, droughts and hurricanes impact negatively on our capacity to ensure the amount and quality of food produced. On the other hand, rivers and oceans are being polluted by fertilisers and other chemicals from food production, not to mention the damage to the water ecosystem by over-fishing in oceans.
Last but not least, as the saying goes, are attitudes and business models of the food production and processing sectors. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, in his compelling analysis of food systems around the world, says that the international economic system does not “work”, and that this demands a transformation of our economic philosophy. “If countries devoted more resources to increasing local production but also on trade based on solidarity, not on profit, the situation would change,” declares the Rapporteur.
In my next article, I would like to take you on a journey of possibilities to operate such a change. I believe we could address our problems head-on and leap-frog the world’s mistakes and learn from others’ lessons, and land on our feet, food-sovereign, still very much part of the wider world but once again demonstrating our uncanny ability as a nation to beat the odds by relying on our own unique capabilities.
