Food sovereignty

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.

[2][3][4][5][6] 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.

[9]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.

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.

[7] Climate change is impacting the food security of indigenous communities as well, including Pacific Islanders and those in the Circumpolar North, due to rising sea levels or erosion.

[15] Native Americans have been directly impacted in their ability to acquire and prepare their food and this disruption of traditional diets has resulted in health problems, including diabetes and heart disease.

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.

[22] 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.”[23] Prior to the colonization of the Americas, Native Americans had a diverse diet and food culture, procuring food in various ways across tribes.

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.

The "Good Life" suggests that there are alternative methods of action through Indigenous community development that do not involve governmental funding or state provisioning.

[36] Narragansett people exercised their own food sovereignty initiative by reappropriating landscapes, seascapes, estuaries, spaces, and built places from a Rhode Island "Farm",[37] which had, in earnest after 1690, sustained southern New England proprietorship, land banks, and currency within a Greater Caribbean plantation complex.

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, religiosity, and race.

[38] 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.).

[39] Previous debts to "Farmers", especially for gunpowder during hunting sojourns and for compensating "seasoned slaves" in assistance with fishing canoe transportation, had resulted in a mid-eighteenth-century emphasis on horticulture and agriculture, with limited animal husbandry.

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 missionary Curtis] 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.

"[40] Despite the antebellum rise of "Greater Northeast" industrial agriculture,[41] the southern New England "Farms" and the carrying trade[42] in Caribbean sugar, molasses, rice, coffee, indigo, mahogany, and pre-1740 "seasoned slaves",[43] began to dissipate by the Election of 1800[44] and largely collapsed into agrarian ruins by the War of 1812.

[45] 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 by both historians and anthropologists.

[48] These activists argue that seed saving allows for a closed food system that can help communities gain independence from major agricultural companies.

"[53] Food sovereignty includes support for smallholders and for collectively owned farms, fisheries, etc., rather than industrializing these sectors in a minimally regulated global economy.

[59] 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.

[60] While the green revolution greatly increased food production and averted famine, world hunger continues because it did not address the problem of access.

[62] Critics also argue that the green revolution's increased use of herbicides caused widespread environmental destruction and reduced biodiversity in many areas.

[64] Offering slightly different conclusions, recent work by Harriet Friedmann suggests that "food from somewhere" is already being co-opted under an emergent "corporate-environmental" regime[65] (cf.

[67] 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" [68] are directed.

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.

He claims that such analyses tend to present the agrarian population as a unified, singular and world-historical social category, failing to account for: