'Food sovereignty is all about rights' - an interview with Andrea Ferrante, chair of the Italian association for organic farming

Dan Iles

Day 2 of the forum and I have had the opportunity to interview an Italian delegate, Andreas Ferrante, the chair of the Italian association for organic farming. In this lively interview (I wish his Italian accent, enthusiasm and smile could come through the words) he talks about how Italy was affected by the 2008 food crisis and the positive advances that Italy has made in its journey towards food sovereignty.

What does food sovereignty mean to you? 

For me, the first word I have in mind is the word ‘rights’. We have to go back to have our rights; choosing our food, choosing our landscape and choosing our policy. And this is what has to change, it is a cultural change. And in this forum; what is clear is that we need to change the cultural framework. And the cultural framework means that we have to go back to the rights before we go on exploring other issues. And this means giving people back the right to make the decisions and the right to be in the room when politicians are making the decision. So this is what food sovereignty means to me. 

In what ways do you see food being treated as a commodity instead of something with cultural and social value?

Well in Italy, I think this is the main problem now because I think we are treating food as a commodity and the financialisation of agriculture is the major example of that. It means that we are only a commodity and so we are treated like oil or like gold and they are building new financial hedge funds and so on and this means we have lost totally the idea of what food is. Whereas, food is our culture, food is our organisation of society it is our cultural heritage and it is now exactly opposite to that.  And if we stick to all the policies on food and agriculture that are based on the fact that food is a commodity, we will lose always.  And this is why we should take agriculture away from WTO.

Did the 2008 food crisis affect Italy?

It affected us in the way that rural food prices climbed very high. In the short term it was seen by the farmer as a good thing, but it was a tragedy for everybody because at the same time the price of fertiliser and pesticides sky rocketed. Of course for a organic farmer this is not important but for a regular farmer it was important and meant that they didn’t earn so much. And the price for the consumer was immediately very, very high, and then when we went back to the usual price, the price of the fertilisers was still very high, so at the end we all lose from that. There were really no good news for the farmer and consequently no good news for the consumer. Also; it was somebody else that had decided what the price was; when the prices went up and when they went down and this is another way of how food is less in the hands of the people. 

Can you give me some examples of local initiatives in Italy where people are enacting food sovereignty? 

I think that in that sense we are much more advanced than we believe. I think there are more real activities of food sovereignty now running than ever before. We just made a programme with the educational development programme with other farmers’ organisations and NGOs. Together we published a booklet on the food sovereignty experience because food sovereignty you cannot explain, you have to live food sovereignty; it is not a statement it is how you live. 

So there are so many experiences; for example one of the experiences we have is a common market place for farmers; direct selling that gives the producer direct contact with the consumer, in fact they are no longer a consumer because they are asking about the production and so they become part of the process. 

And another thing is the consumer group; we have a more advanced form of consumer group. Because it is not just the consumers in the group there are farmers there also. We have joined the farmers and the consumers together and they can decide together what to do.  

We have also started to grow vegetables in places which were previously abandoned…not because it was impossible but because the farming system, the industrial farming system, just left behind the vegetables from the local market because they thought that the local market wasn’t important any more. So we could only have vegetables grown very far from us. This is incredible because there was a loss of biodiversity in Italy. There used to be vegetables all over Italy from North to South, we had an incredible biodiversity and we just lost it because we thought that vegetables needed only be produced in just 2 or 3 regions in the south. This doesn’t make sense.

So all these new and alternative models of distribution are really seeds of food sovereignty…no, more than seeds they already have shoots.

In Italy we have 1 million meals per day made with organic products and these organic products are almost all Italian. And this is a real change because this local money is making local development for organic farmers which makes a real difference.

How do you see the future after Nyeleni 2011?

Well I think that at the end of this forum we will have a major achievement. Food sovereignty is not just for the South of the world, it is a European concept also, and this is so important. People try to say that this is not a European issue, but, it is. We have tried to show that it is objective and from now it is a matter of alliance. This is extraordinarily important. This forum celebrates a very strong alliance in Europe as well as the other constituencies like NGOs, consumers and workers. This is the main objective we have and we need to work on this. 

Andrea Ferrante is the chair of the Italian association for organic farming and a member of the organisation committee for the European coordination of Via Campesina. His website, in Italian, is www.aiab.it