The global food system works only for the few – for most of us it is broken. It leaves the billions who consume food lacking sufficient power and knowledge about what they buy and eat, and the majority of small food producers dis-empowered and unable to fulfil their productive potential. The failure of the system flows from failures of government – failures to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest – which mean that companies, interest groups, and elites are able to plunder resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food.
Growing a Better Future describes a new age of growing crisis: food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns, and global contagion. It shows how the food system is at once a driver of this fragility and highly vulnerable to it, and why in the twenty-first century it leaves 925 million people hungry.
Growing a Better Future supports a new campaign with a simple message: another future is possible and we can build it together. Over the coming years, decisive action around the world could enable hundreds of millions more people to feed their families and prevent catastrophic climate change from destroying their (and our) futures.
In this new enhanced edition, Oxfam adds video, papers and research which develop and update the main themes of the report: land, and the growing scandal surrounding the new wave of investments (‘land grabs’); how climate change is related to food security and the East African food crisis; and how people living in poverty around the world have coped with food price crises. There are also extended case studies from Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, India, Malawi, and Nepal, and an extended and updated bibliography and resources list.
Much more information is available at www.oxfam.org/grow – the website for Oxfam’s GROW campaign. For access to over 3,000 advocacy, research, and programme learning publications across all Oxfam’s areas of work visit www.oxfam.org.uk/policyandpractice.
