By: John E. Peck
Many people in the U.S., even activists who work closely on food/farm issues, are often unfamiliar with the concept of food sovereignty. Food security is a much more common term to describe work combating world hunger. Unfortunately, food security has also become a “Trojan Horse” for creeping corporatization of the global food system. As a watered down technical issue of how best to get food to those who need it, food security conveniently avoids the deeper political debate about why hunger exists at all in a world that has plenty of food – just not for the impoverished, landless, and powerless.
Outside this country, one seldom hears the term food security unless one comes across western trained technocrats, academic researchers, and disaster relief managers. Local people in agrarian societies are much more likely to have conversations about food sovereignty. That is because they still believe food is a basic human right, not just another market commodity, and they treat peasant farmers with respect and dignity, rather than dismissing them as backward and anachronistic.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the world’s hungry actually dwell in rural areas once known for their agricultural expertise. This reversal of human history has not been an inevitable consequence of the “Green Revolution” – rather it is due to deliberate policies that have violently transformed local food/farm economies. To paraphrase the corporate “free trade” apologist, Michael Friedman, one can’t have McDonalds without McDonnell Douglas. Within this neo-liberal brand of food security, only those who are willing to buy into the game and pay the going price can escape hunger.
One thus finds powerful institutions (World Bank, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation) compelling peasant farmers to abandon native subsistence crops (millet, taro, quinoa) in favor of export driven monocultures (coffee, cotton, cocoa), while at the same time forcing communities in the South to privatize their common property resources (land, biodiversity, water), and convincing consumers everywhere to enjoy dangerous value-added imports (biotech corn, antibiotic beef, processed junkfood) - all in the name of competitive advantage and economic efficiency.
Food sovereignty, on the other hand, valorizes common sense principles of community autonomy, cultural integrity, and environmental stewardship – ie. people determining for themselves just what seeds they plant, what animals they raise, what type of farming occurs, and what they will ultimately eat for dinner. In fact, some would argue that genuine food security is impossible without first achieving food sovereignty. As early as 1996 Via Campesina set forth seven principles of food sovereignty (see related item in this section) and these prompted much discussion at the Jan. 2001 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil leading to a Sept. 2001 World Forum on Food Sovereignty held in Cuba.
Adopting internationally recognized principles of food sovereignty would have sweeping implications in a political setting such as the U.S., which is probably why they have been so fiercely resisted by corporate agribusiness and their political supporters. For instance, preemptive legislation that takes away local control over the regulation of largescale livestock confinement operations (aka factory farms) grossly undermines food sovereignty, as does White House refusal to implement mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) that would allow consumers to actually know where their food comes from. Similarly, the corporate patenting of lifeforms, expropriation of indigenous knowledge (aka biopiracy), and extortion of contaminated farmers for alleged theft of proprietary biotechnologies are all clearcut violations of food sovereignty. On the other hand, food security has little to say about any of these issues.
For years, Family Farm Defenders has sought to spread and popularize the concept of food sovereignty in hopes of bringing U.S. food/farm activists into a closer solidarity relationship with their counterparts abroad. FFD has recently been joined in this effort by the National Family Farm Coalition which formally adopted food sovereignty as one of its campaigns and is now working to educate its own member groups, as well as the general public. This year two European researchers Michael Windfuhr and Jennie Jonsen also published an excellent summary, titled “Food Sovereignty: Towards Democracy in Local Food Systems.” This 50+ pg report is available for free online at: http://www.ukabc.org/foodsovereignty_itdg_fian_online.pdf.
Those who do not have access to the internet can also obtain a copy of this report by contacting the Family Farm Defenders office (please include $3.00 to cover printing and postage). We are also glad to provide other supplementary food sovereignty materials upon request.
