Converging to Overcome Crisis and Change the System

A Conversation among Food and Climate Movements and Activists by Salena Fay Tramel

Indeed, this political moment is a perfect storm of two opposing pressure systems, human health in an era of pandemic, and planetary health in the throes of climate change.

In her powerful and timely article featured in this year’s Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, Grassroots International’s Salena Tramel explores diverse social movements’ responses to crisis. In the face of converging crises, both the struggles and strategies are intertwining to amplify movements’ power and advance collective solutions.

The piece draws on interviews with social movement leaders of women’s, peasants’, fishers’, Indigenous Peoples’, youth, environmental, and workers’ organizations from five continents. Salena looks at how race, class, gender, and generation have been used as levers of oppression within the capitalist system. She then hones in on feminisms, agroecology, water, and just transition as particularly vibrant areas of cross-movement synergy. Read the full article here and check out the full issue of the 2020 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch (Overcoming Ecological Crises: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Human Rights) here.

Transformation is inevitable at this time of reverberating global economic and environmental shocks, but what that change looks like is up to us. As capitalism’s descent into an unlivable future accelerates, social justice movements are showing humanity once more that another world is possible, necessary, and already in the works.