The Simple Formula for Food Security

This basic and incredibly simple model was based on farmers doing two things:

Growing Food

Saving their seed for next years crops

It is this dual action of FOOD PRODUCTION and SEED SAVING that has allowed civilisations to develop and flourish and thus providing the inbuilt mechanism for FOOD SECURITY.

Seed saving was the FOUNDATION of food security – without it, communities would not have food the following year. It’s that simple.

As the global food system has become increasingly corporatised and industrialised during the 20th and 21st centuries, farmers (for the most part) have stopped saving their own seeds. Farmers have increasingly becoming the MIDDLE MEN AND WOMEN in the agricultural sector – squeezed between the giant agribusiness and food retailing corporations.

The global corporate giants are now ever increasingly dictating to farmers what they want them to grow – which in turn is essentially dictating to us what we eat. This is rapidly becoming the most profound shift in agriculture the world has seen. Previously it was the farmers who grew the varieties of food that they believed were best for us.

We are effectively delegating the multi-national corporations the authority to feed us the types of foods that they think are best for us. This presents a problem – issues such as health, sustainability, animal welfare and environmental concerns are no longer the primary focus. As with any business, profitability is the most important issue.

I personally believe that this is a very dangerous situation for the world to fall into – to become trapped in regards to our own personnel, community health and well being and food security.

The foundation of food security as the world has known it over millennia (the saving of traditional self-replicating, locally adapted seeds by farmers who lived in their local communities) is rapidly being replaced by the corporate agri-business giants who are promoting their own seed varieties and foods. An ever-increasing number of these new varieties are either commercial hybrids, genetically modified (GM) or patented, meaning the farmers are now no longer able to (or allowed to) save these seeds.

Farmers have become extremely skilled and efficient at becoming food producers in the modern era, which is a great credit to them and we all owe them an immense amount of gratitude for the hard work they do each day in producing our daily food. However, they are now increasingly no longer involved for the most part in FOOD SECURITY – just FOOD PRODUCTION.

This essentially means that the world currently only has a food production model – not a food security model as we have known it since farming started in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago.

I cannot over emphasize the extreme danger of this truth enough. Without the saving of traditional, self-replicating seeds and those seeds in turn being readily available to local communities to continually grow year in and year out – we have NO FOOD SECURITY.