Food Sovereignty and Local Control of Food Systems
BACK TO: Food System Sustainability Issues
Food Sovereignty:
Stresses the right to sufficient, healthy and culturally appropriate food for all individuals. It rejects the proposition that food is just another commodity for international agribusiness.
Values and supports the contributions, and respects the rights of workers who cultivate, grow, harvest and process food; and rejects those policies, actions and programs that undervalue them, threaten their livelihoods and eliminate them.
Brings food providers and consumers together in common cause; puts providers and consumers at the center of decision making on food issues.
Seeks control over and access to territory, land, grazing, water, seeds, livestock and fish populations for local food providers. These resources ought to be used and shared in socially and environmentally sustainable ways that conserve diversity.
Builds on the skills and local knowledge of food providers and their local organizations that conserve, develop and manage localized food production and harvesting. Food sovereignty rejects technologies that undermine, threaten or contaminate these, e.g. genetic engineering.
Works with nature and seeks to heal the planet so that the planet may heal us; and, rejects methods that harm beneficial ecosystem functions, that depend on energy intensive monocultures and livestock factories, destructive fishing practices and other industrialized production methods which damage the environment and contribute to global warming.
- 2007 Forum on Food Sovereignty, Sélingué, Mali
- La Via Campesina International Peasant Movement
- The Progressive Magazine
“A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food” by Francis Moore Lappé
- Environmental Commons
Four Local Food Systems 2-page fact sheets
Available in English and Spanish.
- Grassroots International
Six Food Sovereignty Principles
Food Sovereignty Curriculum
- Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
International Gender and Trade Network
A Row to Hoe: The Gender Impact of Trade Liberalization on our Food System, Agricultural Markets and Women‘s Human Rights
- Center of Concern
U.S. Poultry in the Global Economy: Impacts on women, livelihoods, and the environment
- John Ikerd, University of Missouri
The Real Costs of Globalization To Farmers, Consumers, and Our Food System
- H.E. Father Miquel d’Escoto Brockmann
President, United Nations General Assembly
The Politics of Food: Food Bio-Diversity and Democracy
- Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund
A non-profit organization made up of farmers and consumers joining together and pooling resources to protect the constitutional right of the nation’s family farms to provide processed and unprocessed farm foods directly to consumers
- Agricultural Missions, Inc.
A Faith Response to Rural Poverty and Injustice
