Food Sovereignty: What is it and does it matter?

Food sovereignty and what that means will be an ongoing series of posts.  Access to food is an important issue.  How that is achieved is the debate.

“As is often the case, critics of markets and private property mistake means with ends, and assume a lack of concern for ‘human’ considerations is necessarily bound up with rigorous concern for material considerations.” Jeff Deist[1]

What does that even mean?

Food sovereignty seems an odd phrase. It is either freedom from the government to raise, buy, consume the food you wish to or it is not.

I posted the question in a Facebook group, “When you read the phrase food sovereignty, what comes to mind? I have an idea, but I’ve read an alternative, so I’m curious. Whatever is your first thought, let me know, please.”

For the most part, the sentiment was growing, eating, selling food free from government interference. One chap responded it was “commie shit.”

What was intended?

The term food sovereignty was coined in 1993 by La Via Campesina, the International Peasant’s Movement, and now has organizations in 81 countries. They mean, by the phrase food sovereignty, that people who make and eat the food should be in charge of the production and the distribution of that food.

That doesn’t sound too bad. They contrast that position with the current corporate food system. Since La Via Campesina is international, there are aspects to food systems abroad I cannot address.

Functionally, La Via Campesina is a union. They are fighting, in part, for peasants’ rights to land and food and water. On their page about peasants’ rights, this line stands out, “[w]e dedicate this work to more than a billion people living in rural areas, who exist and resist the assault of global capital.”[2]

International food systems cannot be addressed. US commercial food systems, however, are known and can be addressed.

Commercial food is in at least two parts. The part you see in the grocery store and the part you see in restaurants.

There is a third part of the food system which starts to get to what food sovereignty means to both La Via Campesina and those people I asked on Facebook: the food they make, share, sell, and eat is produced and distributed by them.

The good parts

La Via Campesina is fully committed to fighting industrial agriculture and industrial livestock.

I’m in.

Continue reading “Food Sovereignty: A good idea or gussied up Communism?”