Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement
Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement

Author: Priscilla Claeys

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-01-09

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1317645774

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Our global food system is undergoing rapid change. Since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, a range of new issues have come to public attention, such as land grabbing, food prices volatility, agrofuels and climate change. Peasant social movements are trying to respond to these challenges by organizing from the local to the global to demand food sovereignty. As the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina celebrates its 20th anniversary, this book takes stock of the movement’s achievements and reflects on challenges for the future. It provides an in-depth analysis of the movement’s vision and strategies, and shows how it has contributed not only to the emergence of an alternative development paradigm but also of an alternative conception of human rights. The book assesses efforts to achieve the international recognition of new human rights for peasants at the international level, namely the 'right to food sovereignty' and 'peasants’ rights'. It explores why La Via Campesina was successful in mobilizing a human rights discourse in its struggle against neoliberalism, and also the limitations and potential pitfalls of using the human rights framework. The book shows that, to inject subversive potential in their rights-based claims rural social activists developed an alternative conception of rights, that is more plural, less statist, less individualistic, and more multi-cultural than dominant conceptions of human rights. Further, they deployed a combination of institutional (from above) and extrainstitutional (from below) strategies to demand new rights and reinforce grassroots mobilization through rights.

Translating Food Sovereignty
Translating Food Sovereignty

Author: Matthew C. Canfield

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1503631311

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In its current state, the global food system is socially and ecologically unsustainable: nearly two billion people are food insecure, and food systems are the number one contributor to climate change. While agro-industrial production is promoted as the solution to these problems, growing global "food sovereignty" movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems. Translating Food Sovereignty accompanies activists based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. In contrast to social movements that frame their claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists are one of the first to have articulated themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance. While this global regulatory framework emerged to deepen market logics, Matthew C. Canfield reveals how activists are leveraging this order to make more expansive social justice claims. This nuanced, deeply engaged ethnography illustrates how food sovereignty activists are cultivating new forms of transnational governance from the ground up.

We Are Not Starving
We Are Not Starving

Author: Joeva Sean Rock

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1628954698

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This critical text is a timely ethnography of how global powers, local resistance, and capital flows are shaping contemporary African foodways. Ghana was one of the first countries targeted by a group of US donors and agribusiness corporations that funded an ambitious plan to develop genetically modified (GM) crops for African farmers. The collective believed that GM crops would help farmers increase their yields and help spark a “new” Green Revolution on the continent. Soon after the project began in Ghana, a nationwide food sovereignty movement emerged in opposition to GM crops. Today, in spite of impressive efforts and investments by proponents, only two GM crops remain in the pipeline. Why, after years of preparation, millions of dollars of funding, and multiple policy reforms, did these megaprojects effectively come to a halt? One of the first ethnographies to take on the question of GM crops in the African context, We Are Not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana blends archival analysis, interviews, and participant observation with Ghanaian scientists, farmers, activists, and officials. Ultimately the text aims to illuminate why GM crops have animated the country and to highlight how their introduction has opened an opportunity to air grievances about the systematic de-valuing and exploitation of African land, labor, and knowledge that have been centuries in the making.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States
Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States

Author: Devon A. Mihesuah

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0806165782

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“All those interested in Indigenous food systems, sovereignty issues, or environment, and their path toward recovery should read this powerful book.” —Kathie L. Beebe, American Indian Quarterly Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities’ ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

Food Sovereignty
Food Sovereignty

Author: Annette Aurélie Desmarais

Publisher: Fahamu Books

Published: 2011-03-31

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780857490292

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With increasing hunger globally, people are resisting the industrialised food system and returning control to small farmers. This radical food sovereignty movement leads to increased production, safe food and agricultural practices that respect the earth.

Food Insecurity
Food Insecurity

Author: Tamar Mayer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0429783922

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This book explores the experiences, causes, and consequences of food insecurity in different geographical regions and historical eras. It highlights collective and political actions aimed at food sovereignty as solutions to mitigate suffering. Despite global efforts to end hunger, it persists and has even increased in some regions. This book provides interdisciplinary and historical perspectives on the manifestations of food insecurity, with case studies illustrating how people coped with violations of their rights during the war-time deprivation in France; the neoliberal incursions on food supply in Turkey, Greece, and Nicaragua; as well as the consequences of radioactive contamination of farmland in Japan. This edited collection adopts an analytical approach to understanding food insecurity by examining how the historical and political situations in different countries have resulted in an unfolding dialectic of food insecurity and resistance, with the most marginalized people—immigrants, those in refugee camps, poor peasants, and so forth—consistently suffering the worst effects, yet still maintaining agency to fight back. The book tackles food insecurity on a local as well as a global scale and will thus be useful for a broad range of audiences, including students, scholars, and the general public interested in studying food crises, globalization, and current global issues.

Globalization and Food Sovereignty
Globalization and Food Sovereignty

Author: Peter Andrée

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1442612282

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This collection examines expressions of food sovereignty ranging from the direct action tactics of La Vía Campesina in Brazil to the consumer activism of the Slow Food movement and the negotiating stances of states from the global South at WTO negotiations. With each case, the contributors explore how claiming food sovereignty allows individuals to challenge the power of global agribusiness and reject neoliberal market economics.

Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty
Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty

Author: Marc Edelman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 1317424514

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This volume is a pioneering contribution to the study of food politics and critical agrarian studies, where food sovereignty has emerged as a pivotal concept over the past few decades, with a wide variety of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, and policy innovations flying under its broad banner. Despite its large and growing popularity, the history, theoretical foundations, and political program of food sovereignty have only occasionally received in-depth analysis and critical scrutiny. This collection brings together both longstanding scholars in critical agrarian studies, such as Philip McMichael, Bina Agarwal, Henry Bernstein, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, and Marc Edelman, as well as a dynamic roster of early- and mid-career researchers. The ultimate aim is to advance this important frontier of research and organizing, and put food sovereignty on stronger footing as a mobilizing frame, a policy objective, and a plan of action for the human future. This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Freedom Farmers
Freedom Farmers

Author: Monica M. White

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-11-06

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1469643707

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In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.