Food sovereignty

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According to its proponents, food sovereignty denotes the right of all peoples, countries and groups of countries to define their agricultural and food policies themselves. The term was coined by the international smallholder and agricultural workers' movement La Via Campesina on the occasion of the World Food Conference in 1996. It is not a scientific term, but a political concept that goes hand in hand with various demands, such as access to land.

Subject

The main model of Via Campesina is small-scale agriculture that is primarily intended to produce food for the local population in a sustainable way. Self-sufficiency , local and regional trade should have priority over exports and world trade.

To justify this, reference is made to the fact that hunger and malnutrition mainly affect the rural population worldwide. Two thirds of the hungry live in rural regions, which, however, are hardly taken into account by government development cooperation and international institutions such as the World Bank . Nevertheless, most of the world's food would be produced by around a billion small farmers , small-scale fishermen and herders. Therefore, every concept for the sustainable security of world food must pay special attention to these small producers.

The concept of food sovereignty includes land reforms , respect for the rights of farmers and agricultural workers as well as the human right to food , the rejection of the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, the protection of small farmers from cheap imports ( dumping ) and social justice . This concept is often summed up in the words "bread, land and freedom".

Food sovereignty can, but does not have to be, synonymous with the self-sufficiency of a country or people.

Representatives of the concept of food sovereignty include numerous non-governmental organizations such as Via Campesina , the Brazilian landless movement MST , the MIJARC (International Catholic Rural and Peasant Youth Movement) and the human rights organization FIAN . A prominent supporter of food sovereignty is Indian activist Vandana Shiva . Venezuela , Nepal and Senegal have anchored the concept of food sovereignty in their constitutions, and Mali is planning to do so too. In Bolivia , efforts are also being made to establish food sovereignty in the planned new constitution.

From February 23 to 27, 2007, the first World Forum for Food Sovereignty took place in Mali. Participants were over 500 people from eighty countries who, according to the organizing committee, represented the various continents and interest groups fairly. On February 27, they adopted in Nyéléni, a purpose-built for the forum village, the Declaration of Nyéléni .

The next step in this process to strengthen the global movement for food sovereignty was the first Europe-wide forum, the Nyéléni-Europe Forum 2011 in Krems (Austria). The European Nyéléni Forum took place in Cluj (Romania) in 2016, and a delegation from Germany also took part.

criticism

The food sovereignty movement is accused by scholars such as Philipp Aerni , William A. Kerr , Ramesh Sharma , Douglas Southgate and others of being too politically confrontational and ideological. Some of their basic assumptions are also misleading, for example with regard to the influence of the World Trade Organization or the solution of the world hunger problem through redistribution or a right to food . The movement also conceals that the famines mostly occurred in socialist and communist countries that pursued the goal of self-sufficiency. Protectionist measures are a propagated means of the movement to achieve food sovereignty. However, these measures served neither the declared goals of food sovereignty, nor food security or poverty reduction.

swell

  1. ↑ Astrid Engel: Food sovereignty, still an unknown term? (PDF; 143 kB).
  2. ↑ Windfuhr, Michael and Jonsén, Jennie: Food Sovereignty. Towards democracy in localized food systems , ITDG Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1853396109 (PDF available at: http://www.ukabc.org/foodsovpaper.htm , pp. 3–10).
  3. ↑ Via Campesina: Why Food Sovereignty in the Bolivian Constitution? ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / viacampesina.org
  4. ↑ http://www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article331 .
  5. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nyelenieurope.net
  6. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 11, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. accessed on January 11, 2017 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nyeleni.de

literature

  • ATDF Journal Volume 8 Issue 1 & 2, 2011 - Food Sovereignty
  • Choplin, Gérard; Strickner, Alexandra; Trouvé, Aurélie [ed.] (Jan. 2011): Food sovereignty. For a different agricultural and food policy in Europe . 127 p., Mandelbaum Verlag. ISBN 978-3-85476-346-8
  • Annette Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, and Hannah Wittman (2010) Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community (English). 224 pp., Pambazuka Press. ISBN 978-0-85749-029-2
  • Grieshop, Carolin (2006): Food Sovereignty . Looking at food up close . 91 p., Federal Board of the Catholic Rural Youth Movement of Germany (KLJB) eV (ed.), Landjugendverlag, Bad Honnef-Rhöndorf. ISBN 3-931716-40-6
  • Vandana Shiva (2004): Stolen Harvest . 179 p., Rotpunktverlag. ISBN 3-85869-284-0
  • Green Educational Workshop Vienna; Via Campesina Austria [ed.] (June 2011): The time is ripe for food sovereignty . 34 p., AgrarAttac, Creative Commons License (agrarattac@attac.at)

See also

Web links