by Matthew Tyler Funk

Created on: October 13, 2010

The global food crisis has created opportunities all over the world for people to begin farming who never would have had the opportunities to do so before. In the summer of 2008, food riots erupted worldwide as the price of wheat spiked, at a time when global oil prices were out of control and were continuing to push the price of basic food staples up.

As a result of these riots, all over the world large tracts of land were redistributed in order to partially correct the growing imbalance between rich and poor. All over the world, people who never would have had access to land before are beginning to farm. Many of these new farmers are women, and women around the world are leading movements of farmers who want to go back to basics and abandon the industrial model. As the food crisis grows, so does the global interest in these alternatives farming practices and women all over the world are empowering themselves and their communities by developing and making these alternative farming practices available.

One woman from India, Vandana Shiva, is leading a global revolution against the multinational industrial agriculture corporations like Monsanto, which colonizes third world countries by offering small farmers debt at the same time as guaranteed revenue in exchange for farming the way Monsanto wants them to farm - then the supposedly guaranteed revenue which is now needed for the farmer to make payments on his loan is threatened by Monsanto, which says that the farmer must buy this equipment and these petrochemicals, or else they will pull the contract. Millions of farmers in India have committed suicides by drinking pesticides they can no longer afford to buy, and which they may have never really wanted to start using in the first place.

Vandana Shiva is leading the resistance of the common people in India against the greed of these multinational corporations, and has spoken in front of the UN and is regularly seen in other global forums campaigning for safer and far more logical agricultural policies. Other women are leading the global movements toward permaculture and other sustainable farming methods by doing the work and letting the results speak for themselves.

The so called "conventional" food systems are all owned and run by profit-driven corporations. These corporations control the food production system so tightly that their control over food production led directly to the global food crisis which began in earnest in the summer of 2008 and has yet to fully resolve itself. The global food crisis resulted in the decentralization of power out of the hands of these inhuman corporations and back into the hands of the general population.

Like all other people all over the world, women benefited from the decentralization of power away from the industrial food production systems which had caused the global food crisis in the first place. Everyone benefits from the decentralization of power. Everyone benefits by having opportunities to feed themselves.

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