This past Thursday, the World Food Prize, given in honor of those who fight global hunger and foster sustainable agriculture, was awarded to Monsanto. This company and others like it claim that their practices and the goal of these practices – to produce more food – will ultimately end world hunger. However, Monsanto’s policies – which include resource grabbing, creating genetically modified (GMO) seeds and lobbying for questionable free trade agreements – do more harm than good.

Monsanto and other agribusinesses regularly expand into developing countries where their seeds create cycles of dependency for farmers, many of whom are women, while failing to alleviate the burden of hunger or poverty in these countries.

According to the United Nations’ recent Trade and Environment Review for 2013, “the world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development from a ‘green revolution’ to an ‘ecological intensification’ approach.”

In other words, the world needs sustainability, which can’t be obtained through Monsanto seeds that limit or eliminate plant diversity. Rather it is smaller farms, using organic farming practices and diverse crops, that will improve soil health and sustain communities. And there are many such farms doing just that.

The Food Sovereignty Prize, like the World Food Prize, is also granted to companies that fight hunger and promote sustainability. Unlike the World Food Prize, however, the Food Sovereignty Prize this year went to groups that fight against GMO foods, free trade agreements and resource grabs made or supported by agribusinesses. Their winners included Haiti’s Group of 4 and South America’s Dessalines Brigade.

Group 4, in particular, has led the movement against agribusiness likes Monsanto. Representing over a quarter million rural farmers, Group 4 was formed in 2007 to provide a place for Haitian farmers to mobilize and to voice concerns. After the earthquake in 2010, Monsanto offered the country over $4 million worth of seeds. Group 4 made it a priority to stop those seeds from reaching fruition.

It was also Group 4, alongside Via Campesina, the global peasant movement, that coined the term “food sovereignty.” Adding to the spectrum of security and sustainability, food sovereignty is the idea that people have a “right to define their own food and agricultural systems.”  Rather than working under corporations or policies that displace farmers into foreign countries or force mass production of certain crops, food sovereignty is about prioritizing the farmer, the distributor and the consumer.

– The Borgen Project

Sources: Alternet, Huffington Post
Photo: DailyMail UK