11.12.2023
Whose Food, What Crisis?
w/ Jennifer Clapp & Thin Lei Win
We all need food to survive, and forty percent of the world’s population relies on agriculture for their livelihood. Yet control over food is concentrated in relatively few hands.
Turmoil in the world food economy in recent decades has highlighted a number of vulnerabilities and contradictions inherent in the way we currently organise this vital sector – extremes of both undernourishment and overnourishment affect a significant proportion of humanity; the centralization of finance and the corporatization of agriculture are having a dramatic impact on the quality and availability of the food we eat, and attempts to maximise production through the spread of industrial agriculture have resulted in serious ecological consequences. Is there a way out of the current food crisis?
On Monday 11 December we welcome economist Jennifer Clapp – one of the world’s leading authorities on food systems – for a lecture and conversation with investigative food journalist Thin Lei Win, agroecological farmer Klarien Klingen, and moderator Nuria Ribas Costa. We will explore how the rise of industrial agriculture, corporate control, inequitable trade rules, and the financialization of food have enabled powerful actors to gain fundamental influence over the world’s food economy; but also what we can do to make alternative food systems work.
This event is organised in collaboration with BlueCity and Lighthouse Reports.
Participants
-
Jennifer Clapp
Jennifer Clapp is a Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability, and Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. She has published widely on the global governance of problems at the intersection of economy, food security, and the natural environment. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and served on the UN Committee on World Food Security. Her recent books include Speculative Harvests: Financialization, Food, and Agriculture (2018), and Food, 3rd edition (2020).
-
Thin Lei Win
Thin Lei Win is an award-winning multimedia journalist and Lead Reporter for the Food Systems Newsroom of Lighthouse Reports. She also writes for various international news media including her own newsletter Thin Ink. She has nearly 13 years of experience as an international correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation covering topics such as climate change, food insecurity, and refugees and displacement. Thin has reported from many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. She founded Myanmar Now, an award-winning bilingual news agency, and co-founded The Kite Tales.
-
Klarien Klingen
Klarien Klingen is an agroecological farmer. Together with her companion she runs a one hectare Community Supported Agriculture farm in Ede (Netherlands), where 150 people harvest their own vegetables. Klarien holds a Msc degree from Wageningen University in Land Degradation and Development. With over ten years of agricultural experience, Klarien co-founded Toekomstboeren (in Dutch, “future farmers”); an association part of worldwide peasant movement La Via Campesina. Toekomstboeren is leading the Dutch movement for agroecology, working with other food producers’ organisations and social- and climate justice movements.
-
Nuria Ribas Costa
Nuria Ribas Costa is a Spanish Journalist and Jurist based between Rotterdam and Ibiza, her homeland. Formerly at OMA, she currently works as an independent researcher and policy analyst in the fields of urbanism and culture. She is part of urbanism agency Humankind, research group Vigla, the Center for Music Ecosystems and De Dépendance. She is interested in the relationships rural-urban, the politics of space and land and intersectionality in urbanism.