Food sovereignty

On Saturday, an interesting sight greeted tourists emerging from Blackfriars station. Outside the imposing offices of corporate giant Unilever, 50 campaigners, growers and community activists from the expanding UK food sovereignty movement had built a pop-up community garden.

The action, one of five held around the UK, was timed to coincide with ‘hunger summit’ being held at Unilever as part of a series of events being hosted by the UK government as part of the G8. We were there to challenge the G8’s approach to global agriculture, known as the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”, which is seeing aid money support big business, and developing countries forced to implement policies which will exacerbate rather than reduce hunger. Our demand was for a shift away from this corporate-led approach to one that...

Food is a major tenet of Greekness. It's the centre from which Greek family life emanates. Most Athenians I know will have a huge tin can of olive oil and packages of fresh produce from their family's 'original' village in their apartment's kitchen. The connection to the land, even in a dusty, congested city like Athens, is palpable. I've heard stories as extreme as people flying pre-prepped tupperware to children studying abroad. Suffice to say, food is really as vital a part of daily life as your Mediterranean clichés might lead you to suspect. So when austerity bites, it hurts low- or no-income families but it also affects a big part of Greek life.

Food is getting more expensive. Global food prices are up around 10 per cent as of this time last year. With food prices "close to historical peaks" (World Bank), and Greek unemployment at its own historical peak, the poor either eat badly or nor at all. Although there is a plethora of what we might call 'crisis porn' out there - emotional, passionate opinion pieces about how much the Greek people are suffering - this blog isn't supposed to be one of them. Greece isn't a waste...

On 10 February, WDM helped organise the first regional food sovereignty meeting in the south west. Food sovereignty advocates that the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the centre of decisions on food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations that they believe have come to dominate the global food system. 

This was the first big meeting since the national gathering at OrganicLea on the outskirts of London last July, and it aimed to strengthen regional networks of the food sovereignty movement and make national planning more accessible to people outside of London.

The meeting attracted over 40 people from across the South West, which is testament to the vibrant community food networks alive in the region. There was a lot of energy to coordinate actions, public education materials and events in the South West, including a festival in the summer of 2014 (either in the South West or nationally). There was also an idea to start working on a regional food charter.

It was also agreed to plan an action for 17 April to tie in with the...

The UK government is yet again undermining grassroots poverty alleviation by channelling UK aid towards huge agribusiness. The Hunger Games, a report recently published by War on Want, criticises the Department for International Development (DfID) for working with the ‘who’s who’ of agrochemical and GM seed companies including Monsanto, Unilever and Syngenta.

In coalition with these companies, DfID is funding dodgy agricultural initiatives such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). This initiative in particular seeks to “trigger a uniquely African green revolution” by promoting networks of GM seed and agrochemical providers to small farmers.

The companies working beneath this banner, posing under a guise of African development, are seeking to extend their reach over emerging markets in countries like Malawi. Monsanto, a company that originally made its money from making chemical weapons but has now switched to agrochemicals, has openly declared its intention to control all of Malawi’s 30,000 tonne seed market. This transition, if it was allowed to happen, would decimate traditional seed markets, and lock local farmers further into a dependency on foreign inputs....

This week, ahead of World Food Day, the International Food Policy Research Institute and Concern Worldwide launched the 2012 Global Hunger Index (GHI). The index is there to categorise countries in relation to the number of undernourished people that live within them in an attempt to make their governments more accountable, guide international agencies to the key areas of the world and to track the trends of world hunger over time.

The countries that trail at the bottom of this report are Burundi, Eritrea and Haiti, whilst another 45 have a situation which is either serious or alarming. The index highlights the scale of what is still to be done in terms of world hunger as well as underlining Concern’s key policy directions that the developing world need to consider to work towards what they call ‘sustainable food security’. The report largely blames the prevalence of severe and extreme hunger on a mixture of poor policies, food price volatility, energy and water availability, land grabbing, biofuel production, increased urbanisation and a changing climate. 

The...

Yesterday I joined farmers, food producers, beekeepers, foodies and campaigners from right across Europe, along with a couple of fellow WDM group members, on the final day of the Good Food March in Brussels. It was a cold sunny day as hundreds of people, some of whom had been part of delegations traveling to Brussels on bikes and tractors from different corners or Europe over the preceding weeks, gathered in the city centre. We then headed off, a tractor leading the way, to deliver a photo petition to representatives from the European Commission, the Committee of the Regions and the European Parliament.

A tour of these venerable (though dull-sounding) European institutions on a Wednesday morning may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the vibrant mix of people passionate about good food and farming made up for that. The purpose of the march was to highlight our demands for a more sustainable food and farming system that could be delivered through the current...

Earlier today I saw ‘Best Before’, a new short documentary film which explores and explains the impact of rising food prices on the local economy and community. The film uses several London-based case studies to fully illustrate just how unsustainable our food system is.

Over the past 20 years food prices in the UK have risen by 26%, far greater than inflation. Surely this is good news for the food producers who really need the money, right? Wrong. Whilst market prices have increased, the returns for producers in the global south have diminished. UK supermarket giants satisfy shareholders’ demands for constant growth by squeezing the price that food producers receive.

Furthermore, deregulation of trade in the 1980s, pursued actively by Thatcher and Reagan, meant supermarkets, and thus UK consumers, became increasingly reliant on imported food, which now makes up 42% of our market. As a consequence, we are now more dependent on the use of unsustainable resources, especially oil, to produce, package and transport food. The finite...

Arriving in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the first thing you notice is the extensive swathes of mountainside covered with poorly built, crowded, ad-hoc homes – known locally as the barrios. Caracas’ shanty-town barrios were built in response to the influx of migrants from the countryside during the twentieth century. As Venezuela struck oil in the 1920s, it became easier and cheaper to use oil money to import foodstuffs and so many small farmers lost their livelihoods and poured into the capital in search of work. Years of agricultural neglect followed leaving Venezuela dangerously reliant on multinationals for their food supply and distribution.

Over the last 12 years, the socialist government of Hugo Chavez has been attempting to rebuild Venezuela’s agricultural sector and has included the radical concept of food sovereignty into the country's new constitution. Food sovereignty is a concept that originates in the global south and presents a positive alternative to our broken global food system which is dominated by the multinational food companies who grow food in a way that is unsustainable, leads to hunger and damages the environment. Food sovereignty is...

Participants arrive at the camp built specially for the Food Sovereignty Forum in 2007, in Selingue, Mali (Photo: Donkeycart)

Food sovereignty is about the right of peoples to define their own food systems. 

Advocates of food sovereignty puts the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the centre of decisions on food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations that they believe have come to dominate the global food system. This movement is advocated by a number of farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, women, rural youth and environmental organizations.

The 6 pillars of food sovereignty:

1. Focuses on food for people: The right to food which is healthy and culturally appropriate is the basic legal demand underpinning food sovereignty. Guaranteeing it requires policies which support diversified food production in each region and country. Food is not simply another commodity to be traded or speculated on for profit.
2. Values food providers: Many smallholder farmers suffer violence, marginalisation and...

Today activists in South Africa are mobilising around the Durban summit to challenge industrial agriculture, which is at the heart of both the food and climate crises. They have called an international day of action for food sovereignty to cool down the earth.

“Industrial agriculture and production is responsible for global warming, hunger, land dispossession, massive displacements of farmers, rural workers and indigenous communities across the continent.”
They point out that Africa and other countries of the global south will be hit hardest by climate change, not least through its impacts on agriculture, which provides livelihoods for so many. A radical overhaul is needed. In South Africa, for example, only 5 per cent of agricultural land has been transferred to black people in 17 years of democracy, and millions in rural and urban areas suffer from food and nutritional insecurity. Women tend to get the worst deal.

An alliance that includes the quarter-billion movement of small-scale producers, La Via Campesina and a number of African groups is today protesting false solutions promoted by the powerful inside the climate summit. This is grassroots resistance to land grabs. It’s also about halting a new green revolution that would put control over resources in...

Dan Iles, WDM's south-west mobiliser, interviews Christina Schiavoni of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance.

On day four of the European forum on food sovereignty, I met Christina from the US. I was very interested to find out about what sort of actions are happening over in the US as well the aftermath of the Wall Street Reform Act passed recently to limit financial speculation on food. In this interview she talks about the urban and rural movements for food sovereignty across the US, including dairy producers, supermarket workers and anti-food speculation protests.

What does food sovereignty mean to you?

To me it means the right of people to define their own agricultural policies, rather than those policies being defined by the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF, or multinational corporations.

Can you give me some examples of local initiatives that are involved with enacting food sovereignty in the US?

These are local manifestations of food sovereignty, because I really think that...