All people have the right to decide what they eat and to ensure that food in their community is healthy and accessible for everyone. This is the basic principle behind food sovereignty. If you want to support domestic food security through the production of healthy food at a fair price, and you believe that family farmers and fishers should have the first right to local and regional markets, then food sovereignty is for you.
Food is a right, a responsibility, a gift, a life, a mystery, a puzzle of unequal distribution of resources which must be solved right now.
Many developing countries and civil society organizations welcomed with great excitement and relief the once-again-collapsed World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in July 2006. However, the suspension of the global trade organization’s authority on agriculture has not resulted in a sea change in global agricultural policy.
Grassroots movements have made great strides towards putting the power of the food system in citizens’ hands, but ongoing bi-lateral and regional trade negotiations threaten to curtail these advances.
Grassroots International is pleased to announce a new book co-edited by our Resource Rights Specialist, Corrina Steward, "Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in the Americas" (International Institute for Environment and Development, IUCN Commission on Environmental Economic and Social Policy, and Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2006). The publication explores the emerging alliances among small farmer organizations, environmentalists and scholars to promote ecologically sound and economically just food and agriculture systems across the Americas.
Where I come from, we are born farmers. Our entire life, our entire livelihood and our entire economy depend upon agriculture.
--Mariam Sissoko, CNOP, Mali
What better place to talk about the right to food, land and water than in one of the US's great food capitals, New Orleans? I've just returned from Share our Strength's (http://www.strength.org) annual Conference of Leaders - a remarkable network of restaurateurs and chefs seeking to end childhood hunger, a network with which Grassroots International is honored to collaborate.
Building local, national and international solutions for hunger and the crisis in the global rural economy
Earlier ths week at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Vancouver, BC, Grassroots and the National Family Farm Coalition debuted a new booklet that we created this summer on food sovereignty.
In the simplest terms, food sovereignty is the belief that communities should have plenty of food that's not only healthy for the bodies, healthy for their way of life and that the communities themselves have control over.
The Nation ran a special "food issue" that addressed America's values with respect to food, farming and policy. The main tenet of the issue is that the U.S. food system is broken. At Grassroots we believe this is true. We take the notion even further: the global food system is broken.
U.S. food and farm policy is foreign policy that shapes agricultural conditions globally. The results are devastating for millions around the world: hunger, environmental degradation and human rights violations.
Interview with Ahmed Sourani, PARC-Gaza
September 13, 2006
In New Orleans, today, farmers, fishers, shrimpers and chefs will join the community in a Thanksgiving dinner at the Crescent City Farmers Market. They will give thanks and "celebrate surviving, reinventing and rediscovering the power of community." On our recent trip to the South, Azalia and I had the privilege to experience the power and strength of the Crescent City Farmers Market. We witnessed the endurance of the producers to continue with a long tradition of going to the market, and the customers' relief that they continue to be there.
Corrina and I just returned from a whirlwind three-state tour of the South. Our trip began in Alabama, took us to Mississippi and ended in New Orleans, Louisiana. The landscape was beautiful, the heat and humidity bordering on oppressive, the vowels pronounced long and slowly, the people welcoming and the food delicious.
I tracked my food labels for 4 days. I had originally planned on doing five days, but it was a very time consuming process. Fortunately, for me it was somewhat easy because I repeated many dishes and ate the same thing for breakfast all week. But it took me a good two hours on the internet doing research on the foods that I ate.
A few years ago I was driving around lost on the Olympic Peninsula. I was in a hurry, trying to make my way to Hurricane Ridge overlook in the Olympic Mountains in time to see the sunset. When I figured out where I'd gone wrong, I made a u-turn and I almost didn't stop at the little farm stand that caught my eyes both times I drove by it, but I decided that maybe the forces of serendipity had sent me on that detour just so that I could try the local fruit.
I bought a few peaches--individually nestled in extra-large egg carton type material--and a pint of cherries, and chatted with the folks on the other side of the table for a few moments, about the growing season (it seemed late for peaches to me), about the other crops they grow, what a lovely day it was, that kind of thing.
Day One–Total Spent: $6.26
Breakfast
Bag of generic oats--$1.99
I am used to cooking the instant oats that come in a package. My plan was to buy a big bag of oats and eat oatmeal for breakfast and dinner. I was very inept at making oatmeal on the stovetop. In addition, I was already at the $2.00 mark so I decided not to buy sugar or butter to add to the oatmeal. This was disgusting and I was unable to eat my oatmeal for breakfast let alone dinner. My plan was to eat oatmeal for breakfast all week. I quickly gave up on this plan completely.
Our curriculum "Land and Hunger: Making the Rights Connection" is complete and up on our website. All of the exercises have been tested at least once. One of the exercises that we're most excited about is called "What You Can Do." This is the exercise that lets us know whether or not the workshop compels participants to act. This movement from education to action is a crucial element in our effort to raise consciousness and build social movements.
Many things have changed in the Gaza Strip since Hamas won the elections in January 2006 according to the public will. The E.U. and U.S.
"Farm to Cafeteria" is a wonderful idea being promoted by a large number of organizations representing family farmers, farm workers, children's and youth advocates, environmental, health and hunger activists, organic consumers, faith-based groups and others, including Grassroots International, the National Family Farm Coalition, the Rural Coalition, the Organic Consumers Association and the Community Food Security Coalition.
This week, Grassroots is participating in a series of events that we helped the National Family Farm Coalition organize in Washington, D.C..
I was in D.C. on Monday for an exciting public forum (you can see a PDF of the program here), hosted by the NFFC and featuring speakers from many other members of the Via Capesina, including Pedro Christoffoli, a representative of Grassroots' partner, the MST.
Leaders of the movement of family farmers and farm workers from all over the United States met with leaders of farmer and peasant movements from Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Mali to talk about the right of people everywhere to have enough food, to be able to choose how and where that food is produced and to have a dignified livelihood.
Everyday more than 800 million people go hungry. Many of the hungry are family farmers or landless farm workers in the Global South. In the U.S., family farmers are struggling to stay in business and fighting for a cleaner environment and for a food system that will protect rural livelihoods and provide consumers with safe, delicious, local food. To face these daunting challenges, family farmers from around the world are organizing themselves into a global movement for social justice.
In Washington D.C., Grassroots and the National Family Farm Coalition organized a public forum for farmers movements, academics and activists from around the nation and around the world to share theirglobal vision for food and farming.
Jose Bove, who spoke here at Grassroots International about the campaign to protect the European food system and environment from the dangers of genetically modified crops, has been denied entry to the United States as he was en route to speak at a meeting with farmers, labor activists, students and others in Ithaca, New York.
Immigration authorities accused Bove of lying on his entry form about a history of prosecution for "moral crimes." Bove admitted he had been jailed in France for "political crimes," including protests against Monsanto and McDonald's.
