Food Sovereignty: Building New Futures
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 2006
All over the world, farmers and indigenous communities are suffering the effects of the dominant industrial agricultural model, where bigger is considered better, and individual labourers an inefficient expense to be replaced with machines and other technologies.
This vision is resulting in fewer farm families on the land through the consolidation of small farms into large monocultures, and a reliance on commercial seeds and chemical agricultural inputs. Against this trend, in the Medak District of Andhra Pradesh, India, women farmers and seed keepers are blazing the trail for a new future for agriculture. Like farmers around the world, they understand that local agriculture – agriculture based on local knowledge and local labour – is often the cornerstone of thriving rural communities.
The women in Medak District organize themselves into sanghams, or village-level women's groups, and work together to ensure that everyone in their communities have enough to eat. At the core of all their work are seeds that have evolved over time to thrive in local conditions. The sangham women have an intimate knowledge of local plant varieties, and decide what to plant, depending on everchanging variables such as the weather and potential insect influxes. For these decisions, they choose from among hundreds of carefully selected and saved seeds, all grown and exchanged within their own communities. Should they not have the seeds they would like to plant, they can always borrow from another sangham member and return double what they have borrowed at harvest.
The sangham women do not rely on outside agricultural inputs of any kind, preferring locally available animal manure and green compost for fertilizer, and carefully inter-planting various varieties to keep away unwanted insects. At harvest, surplus goes into a community grain bank and is kept for distribution within the community at leaner times of the year. This independence allows the women to be in control of their own food systems, making decisions based on local abilities and local needs. This autonomy to make decisions about food systems grounded in local knowledge and in the public interest, whether on a municipal, regional or national scale, has come to be known as food sovereignty.
Food sovereignty, like locally adapted seed, is rooted in local contexts. At its core is the premise that people, communities, regions and nations should have the freedom to decide what agricultural systems suit them best, and the legislative and policy flexibility to translate that preference into action. In some instances this may mean preventing the introduction of genetically engineered (GE) seeds into areas that rely on local seeds and which would be negatively impacted by GE contamination. In others, it may mean refusing to comply with World Trade Organization rules limiting countries' abilities to protect themselves from food being dumped into local markets at prices below cost of production. In others it could mean organizing for land reform and indigenous land claims in the face of well-funded commercial interests. At the same time, food sovereignty is also affected by conflict, and in many communities around the world, an end to tyranny and violence will go hand in hand with increased food security.
At Inter Pares, our analysis of food sovereignty grows out of a recognition that social justice is about relating to people based on their own aspirations and capacities. It is about starting from strengths that exist locally and developing future plans and policies in ways that build on these foundations. Capacity to plan for the future in ways that will nurture livelihoods and sustainable rural development lie within communities, in wisdom from the past and in strategies for the future. The growing food sovereignty movement is rooted in communities, and is strengthened by broader international actions that build on and support local initiatives.
This Bulletin explores the concept of food sovereignty through examples in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Canada. Through these stories, Inter Pares and our counterparts celebrate communities all over the world – communities like those in Medak District – who are coming together to defend their autonomy and to demonstrate that local solutions work.
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| Reviewed February 13, 2006 |  |
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