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Prior to starting a conversation with your audience, you may want to read Oxfam's report, Growing a Better Future. The report clearly outlines how the food system is broken and points to solutions. Growing a Better Future is the result of three years of research and provides background for Oxfam's GROW campaign.
Here are some of the key points in the report:
- The global food system leaves the billions of us who consume food lacking sufficient power and knowledge about what we buy and eat. It leaves the majority of small food producers disempowered and unable to fulfil their productive potential.
- The failure of the system flows from failures of government—failures to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest—which mean that companies, interest groups, and elites are able to plunder resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food.
- The report describes a new age of growing crisis: food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns, and global contagion.
- Growing a Better Future shows how the food system is at once a driver of this fragility and highly vulnerable to it, and why in the twenty-first century it leaves 925 million people hungry.
- The report presents new research forecasting price rises for staple grains in the range of 120–180 percent within the next two decades, as resource pressures mount and climate change takes hold.
- Growing a Better Future supports a new campaign with a simple message: another future is possible, and we can build it together. Over the coming years, decisive action around the world could enable hundreds of millions more people to feed their families and prevent catastrophic climate change from destroying their (and our) futures.
- Networks of citizens, consumers, producers, communities, social movements, and civil society organizations will demand change—shifting political and business incentives through the decisions they take and the choices they make.
If you're posting to Twitter, you can use this shortened url to directly link to the PDF version of Growing a Better Future: http://oxf.am/4Gh. Oxfam Canada's main GROW site page is at oxfam.ca/grow
Some sample tweets:
- Food Price Pressure - Check out Oxfam's interactive map http://oxf.am/4Pw #GROW
- Lula of Brazil believes food is a fundamental right. Watch the video http://goo.gl/u7ZqE #GROW
- 2/3 of Canadians are worried about rising food prices. http://oxf.am/45y #GROW
- What do you think affects food supply? See results from Oxfam’s global poll. http://goo.gl/O8hdQ #GROW
- "My favourite food comes from the sea." See what else Gael Garcia Bernal has to say about food. http://goo.gl/rs1XU #GROW
Useful resources on oxfam.ca/grow
to help you keep the conversation going:
- Our Issues page
- Our Growing a Better Future report, based on three years of research
- Why Oxfam is putting women at the centre of this campaign
- Our informative infographics and videos.

