Global Food Struggle Played Out In Auckland - Oxfam

The global food struggle was played out dramatically in central Auckland today, as a profit-hungry commodities trader gambled with the life of a struggling small-scale farmer from our Pacific neighbourhood, to mark the launch of Oxfam’s new global GROW campaign.

Under a giant commodities exchange board – the symbol of imbalanced global wealth – a futures trader drove up prices of basic foods out of the reach of the world’s poor, as a small-scale farmer from Tonga planted her seeds, desperately trying to produce enough to feed her family.

Oxfam’s GROW campaign seeks to highlight the broken global food system and environmental crises that are now reversing decades of progress against hunger.

Nearly one billion people are chronically hungry – that’s one in seven. But people aren’t hungry because of a global food shortage – they’re hungry because of injustice.

In its new report, “Growing a Better Future: Food justice in a resource-constrained world”

Oxfam catalogues the symptoms (see pdf) of today’s broken food system: growing hunger, flat-lining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water, and rising food prices. It warns we have entered a new age of crisis where depletion of the earth’s natural resources and increasingly severe climate change impacts will create millions more hungry people.

GROW is a campaign for everyone who eats food and the billions of men and women who grow it, to share solutions for a more hopeful future in which everyone has enough to eat, always.

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