The story appears on

Page A7

July 19, 2019

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Opinion

The fork is mightier than the wall

The word “migration” conjures up images of war, natural disasters, and severe economic distress.

All are important reasons why people seek refuge far from home. But the single most powerful driver of migration may well be food — or, rather, the lack of it.

As of 2017, some 821 million people worldwide — about one in every nine — faced chronic food deprivation.

While some progress has been made to reduce extreme hunger, the overall number of chronically hungry people continues to rise.

The link with migration is clear. When people in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America cannot feed themselves and their families, they often leave home, according to a study by the United Nations World Food Programme.

If initial food shortages were not enough to motivate a person to migrate, the accompanying social unrest and conflict often are, not least because they further strain food supplies.

As the WFP reports, food insecurity is “a significant determinant of the incidence and intensity of armed conflict.”

According to the Observatory on Food and Migration, many migrants are single men, who leave their female relatives behind to run their depleted farms.

In North Africa, women now account for 43 percent of all farmers, according to the World Bank — up from about 30 percent in 1980. These women operate at a significant disadvantage.

For example, the World Bank reports that, in Latin America, “when women take on primary responsibility for the family farm, they face certain gender-specific difficulties, including difficulties hiring and supervising labor and acquiring technical knowledge about farming.”

Those migrants who make it to Europe or the United States often form the backbone of their new countries’ agricultural sectors.

Migrant workers are exploited

According to a study by the MacroGeo think tank and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, more than half of all farm workers in southern Italy are migrants, and more than three million migrants work on American farms.

The US government estimates that about half of all farm workers are undocumented immigrants.

Many of these workers live in conditions resembling slavery, toiling in harsh conditions for very low wages.

In Southern Italy, for example, migrant farm workers often have been recruited through the so-called caporalato system, in which some gangs — led by “caporali” — organize groups of migrant laborers, provide them with food and housing, and transport them (for exorbitant fees) from their homes to the fields.

The laborers’ workdays can last 16 hours and they face appalling living conditions. In one reported case, 800 workers were found living with only five showers. Because the caporali’s fee is deducted from workers’ wages, farmers embrace this system, as it enables them to avoid payroll taxes.

And those farmers — not just in Italy, but across Europe and in the US (where undocumented agricultural workers are similarly exploited) — often already benefit from generous subsidies, which encourage them to produce too much food.

The surplus food may be exported at such low prices that farmers and food producers in developing countries cannot compete. Or it may be wasted.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, one-third of all food produced globally is either lost or discarded, in what amounts to a gross misuse of the resources — from labor to water — used to produce it.

The worst offenders are the most technologically advanced countries.

In contrast, less developed countries show some surprising successes.

A challenge as complex as migration cannot be addressed simply through stricter immigration laws, let alone a border wall.

Instead, policymakers must tackle migration’s underlying causes — beginning with a broken global food system.

Danielle Nierenberg is President of Food Tank: The Think Tank for Food and a member of the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation’s advisory board.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2019.

www.project-syndicate.org




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend