“It's Everyone's Responsibility to Put Doubling Food Production on the FAO's Agenda," Argentine Congressman Cantero Gutierrez tells the LYM

May 15, 2008 (LPAC)--In a wide-ranging interview today with Argentine LYM leader Emiliano Andino, Cantero Gutierrez, chairman of the Agriculture Committee of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies, strongly supported the idea of making doubling world food production the central subject of discussion at the upcoming FAO meeting.

Responding to Andino's report of the LaRouche movement's mobilization to change the agenda of the upcoming FAO meeting in Rome, to demand doubling of world food production, Cantero described as a "global social immorality" the fact that children, pregnant women and others are starving to death, given the existing advances in science and technology. "Conditions exist in the world to produce enough food--quality food-- for everyone. So, I think it is everyone's responsibility to put this on the FAO's agenda, and I think it's excellent that the youth are really forcing this discussion."

Cantero underscored not only that his nation has the potential to produce high-quality food to feed between 500-600 million people, but that it also has the moral obligation to do so. With great optimism, he explained exactly how that could be done

Cantero has proposed a bill to create the National Agricultural Trade and Promotion Control Agency (ENPYCCAA), which would establish state control over all aspects of agricultural marketing. "Reestablishing the control of the state, and governments, over food security is crucial," he said, noting that "food security was what originally gave rise to the European Economic Community." The control of multinational financial interests, the legacy of the 1976 dictatorship, and the 1990s neoliberal reforms left the sector in disarray, "and pretty much in the hands of the free market." The ENPYCCAA would "prevent monopolistic practices, cartelization, and oligopolistic practices" of THE five large financial groups that now control most aspects of agricultural production and marketing. Such an agency, he explained, "would promote our food in the world...and also guarantee our own food security."

The Argentine legislator noted that some interests would relegate Argentina to the role of producing biofuels or animal feed for the advanced sector nations, he said. "But that would be no good, for Argentina or the world," he added.

Asked about what infrastructure projects might be required in Argentina, Cantero was emphatic that rather that using the term "public works," it were better to speak of "public investment" which has the human being at its center. "Some policies define public works, such that we'll have more pig, cow, soy, wheat or corn production; but we have to put the human being first--so he's producing and living a quality life. We should change the concept of public works to public investment. That is, those public works which really improve infrastructure, so there is no destruction of land or people."