Product Code Database
Food sovereignty is a food system in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution. This stands in contrast to the present corporate Agribusiness, in which corporations and market institutions control the global food system. Food sovereignty emphasizes local food economies, sustainable food availability, and centers culturally appropriate foods and practices. Changing climates and disrupted foodways disproportionately impact indigenous populations and their access to traditional food sources while contributing to higher rates of certain diseases; for this reason, food sovereignty centers indigenous peoples. These needs have been addressed in recent years by several international organizations, including the United Nations, with several countries adopting food sovereignty policies into law. (2026). 9789402411799, Springer. ISBN 9789402411799 (2026). 9783319957142, Springer International Publishing. ISBN 9783319957142 (2026). 9780199389414 ISBN 9780199389414 (2026). 9780190854584 ISBN 9780190854584 Critics of food sovereignty activism believe that the system is founded on inaccurate baseline assumptions, disregards the origins of the targeted problems, and is plagued by a lack of consensus for proposed solutions.
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers. Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability.
In April 2008 the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), an intergovernmental panel under the sponsorship of the United Nations and the World Bank, adopted the following definition: "Food sovereignty is defined as the right of peoples and sovereign states to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies."International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), Global Summary for Decision Makers Accessed online 23 September 2008
After Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, a new constitution was approved by the people of Venezuela which included the right to food as one of its basic civil rights. The government set up missions to deliver the various constitutional rights. Several missions related to food and farming were established by Chávez' government to provide equitable food access. Among these were the Misión Alimentación, Misión Vuelvan Caras, Misión Mercal and Mission Zamora. Later the Gran Misión AgroVenezuela was created to increase domestic agricultural production. Among the strategies used to increase food sovereignty for Venezuelans were land reform, agroecology, use of traditional crops and biological pest control and the establishment of subsidised food outlets such as Arepera Socialista, Café Venezuela and Cacao Venezuela. (2026). 9789402411799, Springer Netherlands. ISBN 9789402411799
In September 2008, Ecuador enshrined food sovereignty in its constitution. As of late 2008, a law is in the draft stages that is expected to expand upon this constitutional provision by banning genetically modified organisms, protecting many areas of the country from extraction of non-renewable resources, and to discourage monoculture. The law as drafted will also protect biodiversity as collective intellectual property and recognize the Rights of Nature.
Since then Mali, Bolivia, Nepal, Senegal and Egypt (2014 Constitution) have integrated food sovereignty into their national constitutions or laws.
Indigenous people's food sovereignty and food security are closely related to their geographical location. Traditional indigenous foodways in the United States are tied to the ancestral homelands of Native American populations, especially for those with strong subsistence traditions. For instance, it is taught among the Muckleshoot that "the land that provides the foods and medicines we need are a part of who we are."
The disruption of traditional foodways is described to be tied to the disruption of the connection between traditional Native land and their people, a change Rachel V. Vernon describes as being tied to "racism, colonialism, and the loss of autonomy and power." Pre-colonial lands were expansive and thriving with traditional foods. Because of disease and war, Native peoples in the early 20th century were directly impacted in their ability to acquire and prepare their food. In addition to this, relocation away from ancestral lands further limited traditional foodways. Many indigenous people in the United States now live in . Due to inadequate or inhibited access to food, indigenous peoples suffer disproportionately from food insecurity compared to the rest of the US population. At reservations, the "'highly processed, high sugar, high fat, and processed foods,'"
Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Because Native American nations are sovereign from the United States, they receive little help in rehabilitating traditional foodways. As defined by the National Congress of American Indians, tribal sovereignty ensures that any decisions about the tribes with regard to their property and citizens are made with their participation and consent. The United States federal government recognizes Native American tribes as separate governments, opposed to "special interest groups, individuals, or ... other type of non-governmental entity."
These balanced ecosystems were disrupted by European settler colonialism following Christopher Columbus reaching America in 1492. Upon European arrival, the Indigenous peoples of America were stripped of their supplies and even starved out as a tactic for colonial control over Native lands. Domestication were introduced into America by European settlers, bringing with them new diseases. Colonizers targeted food stores specifically and drastically changed Native American diets, their ability to acquire resources, and produce food.
New food systems put in place by American settlers, have over time forced a dependency upon processed and Mass production on Indian reservations and indigenous communities at large. Native tribes have been forced into a position of food insecurity and put in a place in society where there is no ability to afford other sources of healthy or food that is Organic farming. With a loss of food sovereignty, there was also a loss of land, as Indians were relocated and forcibly assimilated. Following Congress' passing of the Indian Appropriations Act in 1851, all Indigenous people were forced onto Indian reservations, losing the ability to cultivate the earth and rely on traditional means of living.
/ref> Some activists also argue for food sovereignty as a means of healing historical trauma and as a means of decolonizing their communities. In the United States the Indigenous Food Systems Network and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance work towards education and policy-making concerned with food and farming security. Another group focused on requiring food and energy sovereignty is the White Earth Anishnaabeg from Minnesota, who focus on a variety of foods, planting and harvesting them using traditional methods, a form of decolonization. Such groups meet to establish policies for food sovereignty and to develop their local food economies at summits such as the Diné Bich'iiya' Summit in Tsaile, Arizona, which focused on Navajo traditional foods.
Indigenous food sovereignty activists also often advocate for seed sovereignty, and more generally for plant breeders' rights. Seed saving is important to indigenous communities in the United States because it provides those communities with a stable food source and holds cultural importance.
Government projects supporting indigenous food systems are new attempts to uplift indigenous communities and are in amateur stages of development. Other countries adopted Indigenous food programs years before the U.S., including Canada. The Canadian Food Guide (CFG) was created in January 2019 as a means to include multicultural diets, instead of basing food standards on one or few cultures — the guide includes Indigenous diets and involved Indigenous populations in consultation.
In 2021, the United States' Department of Agriculture launched the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative. This initiative is designed to "promote traditional food ways" as, similar to Canada, USDA programs have not historically encompassed Indigenous food pathways and diets. The USDA has partnered with organizations already serving Indigenous tribes: The Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, Linda Black Elk & Lisa Iron Cloud, InterTribal Buffalo Council, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, Intertribal Agriculture Council, and the University of Arkansas - Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative.
Non-governmental projects, such as the "Good Life" project in Ecuador, are spearheaded by independent organizations and Indigenous community members. The "Good Life" suggests that there are alternative methods of action through Indigenous community development that do not involve governmental funding or state provisioning. In Ecuador, the Indigenous community has developed the "Good Life" project which drifts away from Capitalism and western understandings of what a community needs, and rather focuses on cultivating community success through harmony with the people, nature, and defending their land — essentially working directly within an Indigenous community to reclaim food sovereignty.
Organizations in the United States have adopted similar models to Ecuador's "Good Life" project. In California, the UC Berkeley organization, CARES (the Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability) works with the PPN (Pinoleville Pomo Nation) in Ukiah, California, to support their tribal sovereignty. This Indigenous community has been working with CARES over the years to design sustainable housing and energy that reflect its culture.
Narragansett people exercised their own food sovereignty initiative by reappropriating landscapes, seascapes, estuaries, spaces, and built places from a Rhode Island "Farm",
Previous debts to "Farmers", especially for gunpowder during hunting sojourns and for compensating "seasoned slaves" assistants in fishing canoe transportation, had resulted in a mid-eighteenth-century emphasis on horticulture and agriculture, with limited animal husbandry, including horses. Historian Daniel Mandell argues that, compared to Eastern Woodland Algonquian communities in similar circumstances, "the Narragansetts had even less: in 1810, the tribe told congregational Coe that they had no oxen to plow their fields or haul manure and held only about four cows; he had already noted that families on the reserve generally farmed only about an acre."
The expansion of the Narragansett tribal project garnered media coverage and incited scholars to reevaluate a diminished focus on, or complete absence of, such "Farms", their proprietors, their multipurpose Pacers, seaport carriers, land banks, and Narragansett foodways in extant studies on Eastern Woodland Algonquian communities and oral history.
In fall 2003, Peter Rosset argues in Food First's Backgrounder that "food sovereignty goes beyond the concept of food security... Food means that... everyone must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day, ... but says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced." Food sovereignty includes support for smallholders and for collectively owned farms, fisheries, etc., rather than industrializing these sectors in a minimally regulated global economy. In another publication, Food First describes "food sovereignty" as "a platform for rural revitalization at a global level based on equitable distribution of farmland and water, farmer control over Seed saving, and productive small-scale farms supplying consumers with healthy, locally grown food."
Food security, emphasises access to adequate nutrition for all, which may be provided by food from one's own country or from global imports. In the name of efficiency and enhanced productivity, it has therefore served to promote what has been termed the "corporate food regime": large-scale, industrialised corporate farming based on specialized production, Land reform and trade liberalisation. Critics of the food security movement claim that its inattention to the political economy of the corporate food regime blinds it to the adverse effects of that regime, notably the widespread dispossession of small producers and global ecological degradation.
While the green revolution greatly increased food production and averted famine, world hunger continues because it did not address the problem of access. Food sovereignty advocates argue that the green revolution failed to alter the highly concentrated distribution of economic power, particularly access to land and purchasing power. Critics also argue that the green revolution's increased use of herbicides caused widespread environmental destruction and reduced biodiversity in many areas.
Those who take a radically critical view on state sovereignty would argue against the possibility that national sovereignty can be reconciled with that of local communities (see also the debate about multiculturalism and indigenous autonomy in Mexico ).
/ref> In addition, seed sovereignty advocates often argue that seed saving is an important mechanism in creating agricultural systems that can adapt to climate change.
/ref>
Food sovereignty research and projects
In 2021, a comprehensive literature review of IFS (Indigenous Food Sovereignty) and the effectiveness of food sovereignty principles concluded that Indigenous people in the United States and Canada have higher rates of obesity, food insecurity, and Type 2 diabetes than the general population.
(1998). 9780815332800, Garland Pub. ISBN 9780815332800 which had, in earnest after 1690, sustained southern New England proprietorship, land banks, Private library, and currency within a Greater Caribbean plantation complex. This carrying trade became a potential leg of the Triangular trade, although historians also argue that the self-contained carrying trade belied the triangle as a sequential circuit. By 1769, the woodlands and wetlands of the Narragansett tribal reserve near Charlestown, Rhode Island, had been reduced to less than five square miles, with multivalent consequences for resource allocation, survivance, race, and the "emotional fellowship" of religiosity. Census and missionary records appraised the reserve population at approximately 600 tribal members, on the eve of Narragansett tribal veterans' return from the Seven Years' War. But these same records did not address the seasonal fishing exodus and indicated that, for example, the Narragansett "have for ages been intermixing with Whites and Blacks...a number of others, of mixed nations, live among them, who, by their customs, are not of the tribe." One missionary later observed that less than a third of the reserve was available for tillage and sustenance, with the remainder devoted to tenancy and the maintenance of woodlands for timber (sales, etc.).
(2026). 9780801898198, Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801898198 Despite the antebellum rise of "Greater Northeast" industrial agriculture, the southern New England "Farms" and the carrying trade in Caribbean sugar, molasses, rice, coffee, indigo, mahogany, and pre-1740 "seasoned slaves", began to dissipate by the Election of 1800 and largely collapsed into agrarian ruins by the War of 1812.
Seed sovereignty
Seed sovereignty can be defined as the right "to breed and exchange diverse open-sourced seeds." It is closely connected to food sovereignty, as seed sovereignty activists argue for the practice of seed saving partly as a means of increasing food security. These activists argue that seed saving allows for a closed food system that can help communities gain independence from major agricultural companies. Seed sovereignty is distinct from food sovereignty in its emphasis on seed saving specifically, rather than food systems in their entirety. Seed sovereignty activists often argue for seed saving based on environmental reasoning, not just food justice ones. They argue that seed saving fills an important role of restoring biodiversity to agriculture, and producing plant varieties that are more resilient to change climatic conditions in light of climate change.
Food sovereignty versus food security
Food sovereignty
Movements to reclaim sovereignty over food have existed around the world for centuries; however, the concept of "food sovereignty" itself emerged in 1996. Food sovereignty was initially defined by "small-scale producers who organized as the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina (LVC), and was launched globally at the 1996 United Nations World Food Summit." It is a concept that explains how the industrialization of food pathways has decreased one's freedom to choose one's own food source.Desmarais, A. A., & Wittman, H. (2014). Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41
/ref> "Food sovereignty movements work hard to increase local community control of the production, processing, and distribution of food, as this is seen as a necessary condition for liberating communities from oppression," which has transformed food movements toward building more overall security.
Food Security
In the 90's the Food and Agriculture Organization defined food security as "all people, at all times, having physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." Despite the fact that food security has become more widely understood in the US as availability and access to nutritious foods all the time, this definition is not universally applicable. For instance, in the European Union, "the official food insecurity indicator includes the unaffordability of 'a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day'" This definition differs greatly from food insecurity measurements of the US for instance. The existence of contradicting markers of food insecurity happening globally reflects different research and interpretations of that research.
Criticisms of the Green Revolution
The Green Revolution, which refers to developments in plant breeding between the 1960s and 1980s that improved yields from major cereal crops, is upheld by some proponents of food security as a success story in increasing crop yields and combating world hunger. The policy focused primarily in research, development and transfer of agricultural technology, such as hybrid seeds and fertilisers, through massive private and public investment that went into transforming agriculture in a number of countries, starting in Mexico and India. However, many in the food sovereignty movement are critical of the green revolution and accuse those who advocate it as following too much of a Western culture technocratic program that is out of touch with the needs of majority of small producers and peasants.
Academic perspectives
Food Regime theory
According to Philip McMichael, a "world agriculture" under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture ("food from nowhere") represents one pole of the "central contradiction" of the present regime. He is interested in the food sovereignty movement's potential to escalate the tension between this and its opposing pole, the agroecology-based localism ("food from somewhere") advocated by various grassroots food movements. Offering slightly different conclusions, recent work by Harriet Friedmann suggests that "food from somewhere" is already being co-opted under an emergent "green capitalism" regime (2026). 9780762312504 ISBN 9780762312504 (cf. Campbell 2009).
Criticisms
Wrong baseline assumptions
Some scholars argue that the Food Sovereignty movement follows wrong baseline assumptions, citing that small-scale farming is not necessarily a freely chosen lifestyle and farmers in least developed and highly developed countries do not face the same challenges. These critics claim the Food Sovereignty movement may be right about the mistakes of neoliberal economic ideology, but it is silent about the fact that many actually occurred under socialist and communist regimes that pursued the goal of food self-sufficiency (cf. Aerni 2011).[4].
Political-jurisdictional model
There is a lack of consensus within the food sovereignty movement regarding the political or jurisdictional community at which its calls for democratisation and renewed "agrarian citizenship" are directed. In public statements, the food sovereignty movement urges strong action from both national governments and local communities (in the vein of the indigenous rights movement, Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) . Elsewhere it has also appealed to global civil society to act as a check against abuses by national and supranational governing bodies.
Crisis of the peasantry?
In its strong reassertion of rural and peasant identities, the food sovereignty movement has been read as a challenge to modernist narratives of inexorable urbanisation, industrialisation of agriculture, and de-peasantisation. However, as part of ongoing debates over the contemporary relevance of agrarianism in classical Marxism, (2026). 9781134064649, Routledge. ISBN 9781134064649 Henry Bernstein is critical of these accounts. He claims that such analyses tend to present the agrarian population as a unified, singular and world-historical social category, failing to account for:
(2026). 9780203891834, Routledge. ISBN 9780203891834 (Boyer discusses whether food sovereignty is a counter or anti-development narrative) Berstein claims that these accounts cannot escape a certain agrarian populism (or agrarianism). For a response to Bernstein, see McMichael (2009). (2026). 9780203891834, Routledge. ISBN 9780203891834
See also
Footnotes
Literature
External links
|
|
