Food in chains – how an industrialised system is killing people and the planet

With South Africa in a hunger crisis, despite being a food-secure country on a national level, Maverick Citizen’s food justice webinar asked: Are we eating our way into climate chaos? The answer from the panellists and delegates was a resounding “yes”. 

The webinar heard expert advice from Venessa Black, the advocacy research and policy coordinator at BioWatch, and Mervyn Abrahams of the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group on possible alternative solutions to the current food system. 

https://youtu.be/KHY9SeTOPWI

Black laid out how this system became industrialised, with attendant harms:

“Food is at the heart of our society, it’s what we need to sustain ourselves, but it’s also something that connects people socially, culturally and in myriad ways. Before the industrialised food system, our connection to food was embedded in where we are and the environment that we are living in, but what has happened is from the late 1800s, along with other industrialisation processes, food became industrialised. 

“Because we need it every day it was an opportune commodity, to make money off, and in the early part of the 19th-century post the wars, there were also developing companies that were developing chemical products and these were looking for new markets.”

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In the industries that aimed for efficiency and mass production, more pesticides and chemicals were used, and each step of the value chain became more expensive and contributed to food waste among retailers (12 tonnes around the world), greenhouse gas emissions, and killing soil with harmful chemicals. 

“So, the distance between the producer and the consumer has become larger and larger,” Black said

Industrialised production uses synthetic chemicals that affect the workers who use them. These pesticides are extremely toxic, causing a range of health problems along with runoff that kills life in rivers and then flows into the oceans.

The impact on biodiversity and entire ecological systems is huge, she said, citing a large study in 2019 that found 25% of plants and animals are at risk of extinction, as well as 40% of insects which are “the cornerstone of the food web going up. Equally extreme harm to people… there are a lot of controversies around things like GM crops and their health benefits.”

Black’s work focuses on strengthening civil society, and voices advocating agro-ecology for food and seed sovereignty, biodiversity, and social justice.

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