Food Security and Food Sovereignty
Photo Credit © Roberto Carlos Roman on Unsplash.
These are terms we hear in discussions around food access, food production, hunger and malnutrition. They each give us a framework in which to consider food and hunger issues.
Food Security envisages constant and assured access to food for all humans, with duty of care assumed by inter-government institutions and international NGOs from mostly developed economies. Economically advanced countries’ potential for delivering huge quantities of food is gratefully acknowledged, but the side effects of free food can disrupt local economic systems and create long-term dependency instead of resilience. Due partly to these problems, scholars and many least- and less-developed countries have seen Food Security programs leading to a dominant “Western” discourse on food production which can disrupt local and indigenous practices. International economic development policies often introduced European and US agrochemical companies to less-developed countries in the name of modernization and increased productivity, as experienced during the so-called “Green Revolution”.
In contrast to Food Security, Food Sovereignty concerns itself with the “nature of food” and the regulatory framework for production of food. Nature of food means the whole spectrum of cultivation and cultural conditions, as well as qualitative indicators of the food in terms of its nutrients. Through a Food Sovereignty lens, “regulatory framework” implies rights such as access to land, right to plant on land, to select seed types and save seeds; the right to cultivate food in ecologically adapted ways, and to cultivate and harvest food, often according to the traditions of particular First Nation indigenous peoples.
Historical Backdrop to the Food Security Concept
The term “Food Security” was coined during the 1974 United Nations Food Security Conference. The backdrop was the three-year war between Biafra and Nigeria that was sparked by Biafra’s attempt to secede from Nigeria. Nigerian troops surrounded the Biafrans and blocked all access to imports; this led to high mortality rates from famine, especially among Biafran children. These stark events brought international NGOs and the first aerial hunger relief missions into the public consciousness via television. The UN conference concluded that a global food security system would from then on “ensure adequate availability of, and reasonable prices for, food at all times.” [FN1]
It was also in 1974 that the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) was established as an inter-governmental body and a forum in the UN system to review and implement world food security programs. CFS is responsible for coordinating production, physical access and economic means of procuring food. CFS defines the state of food security as “all people, at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.” In 2009, CFS underwent significant reform to make sure other stakeholders were heard in the global debate on food security and nutrition. [FN2]
According to some scholars, the emergence of the Food Sovereignty concept was driven by disillusionment with Food Security’s evolution. [FN3] Though a dominant part of the discourse around hunger, Food Security programs have not been able to fulfill their mission to assure access to food for all humans. Today, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 690 million people are still going hungry and undernourished or malnourished. [FN4] In 2019, international relief agency Mercy Corps estimated that around 9 million people were still dying of starvation annually. [FN5] At the time of this writing, alarm bells are ringing at the UN because for the first time in 30 years, the numbers of people living on less than US$ 2 a day may rise sharply because of economic fallout from the Coronavirus pandemic. [FN6] The attaining of Sustainable Goal 2 (a world without hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition) is an ongoing challenge.
The Food Sovereignty Doctrine
The ideas and aspirations that together constitute Food Sovereignty doctrine are highly diverse and numerous; in this article we will therefore just lay down a little history and some of the first attempts at definition, diving deeper into these questions in articles to come. Perhaps first we should remind ourselves of the meaning of the word “sovereign’ when it is not referring to a king or a geo-political terrain: “sovereign” implies “being above” and holding power and authority. In the case of food sovereignty, it means that food growers possess the power to govern how food is grown, without interference.
The term “Food Sovereignty” was coined in 1993 during the launch of the peasant movement now known as Via Campesina (Spanish for the Peasants’ Way) in Harare, South Africa. Via Campesina defined food sovereignty as “the rights of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their rights to define their own food and agriculture. It puts the aspirations, needs and livelihoods of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” [FN7]
Practitioners working for universal food security in the increasingly unpredictable conditions of climate change have been investing in resilience building within natural systems at the local level. This work investment has intensified since the signing of Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Needing detailed knowledge on the ground leads teams at the FAO and other international development NGOs to reach out to local knowledge holders and experts with holistic and historical information that was never written down.[FN8] In this way, a new conversation is building between those trained in classic international economic development and those who, from the beginning of time, have unknowingly upheld the doctrine of food sovereignty.
Resources
1. For a detailed description of the Biafran war, see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51094093
2. http://www.fao.org/cfs/home/about/en/
3. See Beuchelt, Tina D; Virchow, Detlef (2012). "Food sovereignty or the human right to adequate food: which concept serves better as international development policy for global hunger and poverty reduction?". Agriculture and Human Values. 29 (2): 259–273. doi:10.1007/s10460-012-9355-0.
4. See Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations website at http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/
6. See warnings made by Mark Lowcock, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/05/850470436/u-n-warns-number-of-people-starving-to-death-could-double-amid-pandemic
7. See Via Campesina website at https://viacampesina.org/en/ for more information on its history and current campaigns
8. See http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1166867/icode/ for example of formal exchanges.