Overview
Food sovereignty is the right of communities to access healthy and culturally appropriate food and to have control over agricultural and food production systems. More than just access to food, it means being able to choose our food and to participate in producing it.
Food Sovereignty puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.
— From the Declaration of Nyéléni
More and more communities today have little or no say over how their food is produced. With the rise of multinational agribusiness corporations, farmers are locked in a race to the bottom, competing to sell their products to middlemen at ever lower prices, while consumers continue to face rising food prices. Additionally, with more than 50 percent of the world’s population now living in cities, growing and gathering food is no longer part of daily life for most people. Many people around the world depend on aid for their food, which is often of poor nutritional quality and culturally inappropriate.
The concept of food sovereignty concerns communities’ rights to have autonomy and control over their food consumption, production, and distribution. But there are barriers to accessing food, like cost and availability, and the ability of people to produce food, which relies on having land and knowledge. The food sovereignty movement first gained popular attention in the mid-1990s through the efforts of La Via Campesina, an international network of farmers formed to defend peasant agricultural practices and to address the insecurity that farmers experience globally. The movement gained greater momentum in 2007, when the International Forum for Food Sovereignty was held in Mali. There, the Declaration of Nyéléni establishing a definition of food sovereignty was written and signed by representatives from over 80 countries. From the beginning, the concept was political. Then and now, it challenges widespread trade and agricultural policies, as well as the powerful interests that benefit from them.
There are many examples of initiatives that show us what food sovereignty looks like. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, for instance, are based on a mutual commitment between producers and consumers to share the risks and rewards of agriculture. The CSA concept exists around the world under many different names and arrangements, shaped by the unique needs of the local farmers and consumers.
In Japan, the CSA model first emerged as the teikei system. Teikei, which means “cooperation,” is a system in which community members contract a farmer to grow for them for a season. The payment given to the farmer is not based on the crop yield, but rather reflects what the farmer needs for the season. For instance, a group of 100 community members had each member pay 1 percent of their annual income in exchange for 1 percent of what the farmer was able to produce that season. Teikei members also contribute the labor to the farm, including doing intensive tasks such as weeding, harvesting, and delivering produce to members’ homes.
As the concept has grown and spread around the world, CSA programs have drifted away from their original ideal of food sovereignty and toward consumer demands, with farmers often offering customized share sizes and making consumer participation in growing, harvesting, and distribution optional.
Another powerful initiative that supports food sovereignty are the cooperatives of small-scale farmers who band together to pool marketing, administration, and logistical labor and costs. At their best, these cooperatives enable farmers to reduce their costs and challenge large corporations head-on, while retaining local ownership, culture, and values.Yet these cooperatives, like CSAs, run the risk of compromising with the market and losing their community focus in pursuit of large-scale production.
At the national level, the battle for food sovereignty has brought together organizations and individuals to lobby governments to adopt holistic food policies. Food Secure Canada was formed as a coalition of local initiatives in 2001 under the banner of food security. In 2009, the coalition’s framework shifted to food sovereignty, which led to a national campaign to lobby the government for more inclusive food policies.
Food sovereignty must be grounded in local practice, but effective organizing and collaboration between grassroots organizations has led to the formation of international organizations such as the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC). The IPC has successfully introduced reforms and brought food sovereignty principles to the table of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The IPC has changed how food security is discussed at the international level, bringing stakeholders to the table, such as peasant farmers, who were previously excluded in these policy meetings.
In the face of frequent temptations to compromise with the status quo, the principles of food sovereignty provide an essential North Star for the farmers producing our food, the communities striving to nourish their families, and everyone in between.
