Food sovereignty
The international peasant group La Via Campesina issued the Food Sovereignty Declaration during the 1996 UN Food Summit held in Rome. This historical document was introduced to counter “the concept of Food Security” – inadequate to address the worsening global hunger and poverty – and the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the main cause of such problems. Thus, the Food Sovereignty movement is Internationalist in character, and provides a framework for understanding and transforming international governance around food and agriculture.
It establishes Food as a basic human right and Food Sovereignty as :
- a Future without hunger
- the need of agrarian reform which gives landless and farming people — especially women — ownership and control of the land they work and returns territories to Indigenous peoples.
- Protecting natural resources
- Reorganizing the food trade. National agricultural policies must priorize production for domestic consumption and food self-sufficiency.
- Ending the Globalization of Hunger, induced by the role of multilateral institutions and speculative capital.
- Social peace, as a pre-requisite
- Based on democratic control by peasants and small farmers and other actors: participation, deliberation and decision-making
Food Sovereignty is a process that adapts to the people and places where it is put in practice. It must be tackled at different scales but based on solidarity and building a fairer world from the bottom up.
Main networks working on this issue
i.net/about-us/ URGENCI network] brings together Local Solidarity Partnerships between Producers and Consumers (LSPC) actors worldwide, all kinds of Community Supported Agriculture initiatives, as a solution to the problems associated with global intensive agricultural production and distribution. Urgenci is a member of RIPESS Intercontinental and RIPESS Europe.
Links
With socioeco.org
Matching Socioeco.org thematic keyword
With Ripess NL articles or position papers
- Food sovereignty – so needed, so far away, Ruta Śpiewak, July 2022
- For a food system based on agroecology and food sovereignty, REAS, Red de Redes, February 2022
- New network and journal issue on food sovereignty in Hungary, November 2021
With pedagogical tools in socioeco.org
- Syllabus: Solidarity Economy Movements, Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE) Erasmus+ Project, 2016
- Booklet : Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE), Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE) Erasmus+ Project, 2020
- Info Pack Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE), Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE) Erasmus+ Project, 2020
- Postcards Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE), Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE) Erasmus+ Project, 2021
- Poster Building Up Social and Solidarity Economy (BUSSE), 2021
- Food Sovereignty NOW! An in-depth guide, 2018