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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The gutsy food sovereignty movement
  • Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:26:39 -0700

The gutsy food sovereignty movement
by Olga Bonfiglio Published Jan 25 2011
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-01-25/gutsy-food-sovereignty-movement-helps-shape-policy-and-rekindle-and-model-democra

It is a basic tenet that a community's food supply should be healthy and
accessible for everyone.

Truth is that local communities have very little control over their food.
Corporate food producers dominate the American food system by providing cheap
and plentiful food. While this may seem to be a good thing, the food and the
processes used don't necessarily guarantee the nutrition or health they
purport to provide.

The food companies have created an industrialized agriculture system that
uses a multitude of chemicals in fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides as
well as genetically-modified products. Some people believe these additives
contribute to skyrocketing rates of diabetes and obesity not to mention
asthma, food allergies and other health problems.

Accessibility to good food can also be a problem, especially for lower-income
groups in large metropolitan areas who typically do not have grocery stores
in their neighborhoods. Instead, these “food deserts” have an ample supply of
party and liquor stores that stock snacks and processed foods but not fresh
fruits, vegetables and meats.

Participants in the food movement have actively taken on these “food
security” or “food sovereignty” issues by creating substitutes to the
industrialized food system including community-supported agriculture (CSA),
farmers markets, local food, family and neighborhood gardens, farm-to-school
initiatives, food as economic development, food policy councils, food
assessment programs, and youth programming and training. And, they are
beginning to make a difference in the way America eats.

Food sovereignty means that people have the right to decide what they eat and
to ensure that food in their community is healthy and accessible for
everyone, according to the Community Food Security Coalition. It also means
that producers receive a fair price for their products and that local family
farmers and fishers should have the first right to local and regional markets.

With this mission in mind, food security advocates have been successfully
changing food policy not only in the United States but all over the world.

Here are some good examples of groups that were honored at the Community Food
Security Coalition at its annual conference held recently in New Orleans.
Family Farm Defenders received the 2010 Food Sovereignty Prize, which
recognizes organizations that uphold the principles of food sovereignty and
fight for and make real change to end hunger and poverty.

Honorable mentions were also awarded to ROPPA (Burkina Faso), the Detroit
Black Community Food Security Network, and the Working Group on Indigenous
Food Sovereignty (Vancouver, BC).

Family Farm Defenders
Family Farm Defenders (FFD), a grassroots non-profit organization in Madison,
WI, was founded in 1994 to support the livelihoods of small dairy and
vegetable farmers.

John Kinsman, who is president of FFD, began pushing for food sovereignty
when he helped protest the injection of bovine growth hormones (rGBH) in
dairy cows on the University of Wisconsin campus. Researchers there were
beneficiaries of corporate gifts that encouraged and affirmed its use. Even
the National Dairy Board promoted rGBH. But no one ever asked the dairy
farmers if rGBH hurt their production, said Kinsman, despite Monsanto’s
claims that it did.

Kinsman worked with former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold who at the time was a
state senator, on labeling rGBH milk, which the corporate milk producers
didn't want to do. A labeling law was eventually passed, however, and it
became a model for the organic food movement, which now is trying to label
genetically-engineered (GM) foods.

Through FFD, Kinsman also worked to re-localize food/farm economies and forge
new economic relationships between consumers and farmers. An example of this
cooperative effort is the Family Farmer Fair Trade Project that enables FFD
to direct market cheese from Cedar Grove in Plain, WI. One outcome of this
relationship is that farmers receive a fair price for their products as they
provide consumers with rGBH-free alternatives.

“I'm a peasant farmer,” said Kinsman who uses this term to differentiate
himself from food corporations that are now trying to call themselves “family
farmers” just as Monsanto is trying to call itself “green.”

“We need to find new words,” he said.

It is important to note that Family Farm Defenders makes sure that urban
people are on its board—40 percent of them. This is because the board
believes that they must be as involved in defending the family farm as the
farmers themselves.

“Farmers are so beaten down by industrial food companies and low prices,” he
said. “They have had their dignity taken away from them.”

ROPPA
Our culture requires us to behave in a certain way and that is centered
around food, said Djibo Bagna, of the Network of West African Peasant and
Agricultural Producers' Organizations.

Food policies are usually formulated by people in offices and agriculture is
governed only by financial considerations, he said. However, peasants are
leaving their farms because they cannot earn a living.

“As a food sovereignty council, we first had to decide that we would no
longer allow others to speak for us or tell us what kind of agriculture we
should have,” said Bagna.

Poverty is a rural phenomenon and its strongest conflicts center around
resources. Unfortunately, there typically is no investment in rural areas nor
is credit offered at reasonable rates. ROPPA tried to change this situation
and decided that in order to do so it had to be present at the policy table.

The United Nations Agriculture Policy group was surprised to learn of ROPPA's
request. At first it allowed them only one representative but ROPPA baulked.
It didn't just want representation; it wanted to shape the policy. When the
UN refused to give ROPPA representation, ROPPA promised that it would
organize 10,000 farmers to take the streets during the policy group's
meetings. The UN capitulated and allowed ROPPA a seat at the table.

“You can't have food sovereignty unless you are involved in the debate,” said
Bagna. “You need funding for farmers to grow food and communication to break
down the barriers between policymakers who set the rules and farmers who
produce the products. You need agricultural research, value-added products
and a dialogue space to talk to each other.”

Detroit Black Community Food Security Network
Detroit has one of the poorest urban populations in the country. With 50
percent unemployment in the city and a terrible “food desert,” a group of
school parents, teachers and administrators decided it was time to act: they
would learn how to grow their own food for their children.

In 2006, this group became known as the Detroit Black Community Food Security
Network. It focuses on urban agriculture, policy development and cooperative
buying.

The group observed that “many of the key players in the city's local urban
agriculture movement were young whites, who while well-intentioned,
nevertheless exerted a degree of control inordinate to their numbers in
Detroit’s population,” according to its website.

DBCFSN believes that the most effective movements “grow organically from the
people whom they are designed to serve.” So, the group is creating model
urban agricultural projects that seek to build community self-reliance and to
change people's consciousness about food.

For example, its urban agriculture program planted and maintained a
quarter-acre garden in 2006 and a three-quarter-acre mini-farm in 2007. In
2008 it built the D-Town Community Garden where it grows 35 crops, keeps bees
and maintains a vermiculture compost program.

All produce is grown using sustainable, chemical-free practices, and sold at
the farm sites, the Eastern Market, and markets for urban growers throughout
Detroit. The group also holds harvest festivals four times a year.

Policy development, however, is DBCFSN's “jewel in our crown.” It has crafted
food policy for the city that was adopted by the Detroit City Council. This
policy includes provisions for education, economic justice, finding ways to
combat hunger, discerning the school's role in food security, advocating and
providing for urban agriculture, developing emergency responses to food
shortages and food deserts and forming a food policy council.

With cooperative buying, the network has tried to go beyond the basic co-op
model and include food distribution networks. So the network formed a
regional system with Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, and Milwaukee in cooperation
with the trucking industry.

“We didn't do anything that we didn't feel we had to do,” said Aba Ifeoma,
one of the members of the network.

Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty
Dawn Morrison of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty is a member
of the Vancouver Island Network that has mobilized people to define the food
system in Canada for indigenous peoples of 27 nations. They did this by
working together with non-indigenous people.

Morrison pointed out that food is a sacred gift of the Creator and humans
have a responsibility to maintain right relationship to plants and animals
that provide us with food.

“We must be free from corporate control to determine where we get our food
and how we grow it,” she said. “We do this in our day to day actions with
family and the community. Our policies, meanwhile, must be driven by practice
and be community-based.”

Citizen participation is the key to establishing and keeping a democracy. As
we watch our representative government crumble through corporate influence,
political corruption and hate speech, we can look to the food sovereignty
movement to remind us how democracy really works. Then, let's hope that
spirit will spread.





  • [Livingontheland] The gutsy food sovereignty movement, Tradingpost, 01/25/2011

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