Building New Agrifood Systems: Struggles and Challenges

“Global markets, in which food has been reduced to yet another commodity for speculation, have demonstrated that they are incapable of solving urgent situations of hunger: far from it, they actually worsen them". This statement may seem self-evident, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we live in a context of global crisis that can be defined as perverse. Globalization, which emerged some decades ago, has exponentially exploded in the last 15 years. It has paved the way towards a world where there are officially 795 million hungry people, and, what is more, many more are not even accounted for, yet they are suffering from malnutrition-related problems on a scale never seen before. Against the backdrop of an energy-dependent society—with petroleum as our system’s cornerstone—we have surpassed peak oil and seem to have forgotten that planet Earth’s resources are finite.