Food Sovereignty: Global Rallying Cry Of Farmer Movements

(Oakland)-'Food sovereignty,' the right of local farmers to grow food for local consumers and the ability of each country to produce enough food to feed its own people, has become the rallying cry of the world's farmer movements and is an important concept family farm groups use in Northern and Southern countries when challenging government positions in trade negotiations, according to a new report released by Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

Unlike food security, which suggests only that people have enough to eat but fails to address who produces it or how, food sovereignty emphasizes the right of each nation to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade to achieve sustainability, guarantee a livelihood for farmers, and assure its citizens are fed. As such, farmer and peasant groups, like those who form part of the Via Campesina (http://www.viacampesina.org), consider food sovereignty to be a matter of national security.

'Food security says that every child, woman, and man must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day, but it says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced,' said Dr. Peter Rosset, co-director of Food First and author of the report. 'Thus in trade negotiations underway in the WTO, NAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Washington is able to argue that importing cheap food from the US is a better way for poor countries to achieve food security than producing it themselves. But this policy is killing small family farmers, as they cannot compete with cheap, subsidized imports, and is taking entire communities down with them.'

Agricultural trade has destroyed local agriculture critical to the survival of many Third World countries. Through generous subsidies, the largest food exporting countries produce a surplus of crops at below the cost of production that are then dumped on poorer countries, driving prices down and forcing local farmers off the land.

According to the report, genuine food security could be achieved by opening up productive land for the rural poor via real land reform, and by ensuring a fair price for the crops they produce. Local farmers would buy their necessities from local suppliers and sell their crop to local consumers. This allows capital to circulate through communities several times over, generating economic development, creating jobs, and ensuring a decent livelihood for family farmers.

'Via Campesina, the international farmer's and peasants' movement, says it best: 'food sovereignty gives priority of market access to local producers. Liberalized agricultural trade, which gives access to markets on the basis of market power and low, often subsidized prices, denies local producers access to their own markets,'' said Dr. Rosset. 'Food sovereignty recognizes the role of the family farmer as the basis of a healthy local economy and of national economic development.'

Via Campesina, the largest international farmer's organization, and other organizations that adhere to the food sovereignty principle, call for excluding food and agriculture from trade agreements like the WTO, NAFTA and the FTAA. Trade liberalization has disrupted family farms that have fed local communities for generations, and has caused an exodus from the land to the inner cities or to other countries.

To read the full report, please visit:

HTML version - {http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2003/f03v9n4.html}

PDF version - {http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2003/f03v9n4.pdf}

For more information or to interview Dr. Rosset, please call Nick Parker, media coordinator, at (510) 654-4400, ext. 229, {nparker@foodfirst.org }