Food Sovereignty
The term “food sovereignty” first emerged as a political term in the 1980s, though the “more commonly known origin story asserts that food sovereignty as a concept was first discussed by La Via Campesina at its second international conference in Mexico in 1996” (Trauger 22). Since then, it has been used by a wide variety of individuals, communities, and movements worldwide in the fight against unequal food distribution as a term and political ideology, gaining significant traction in the decades since. In the ensuing decades a wide variety of definitions have emerged, some of which are contradictory in nature.
When first introduced, food sovereignty was understood as the “rights of nations” to self-determine their own food systems and for the nation’s peasant class to control food production. Over a decade later, the Nyéléni Declaration shifted the meaning to instead focus on the “right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own agricultural systems” (Nyéléni 2007). Even as the Nyéléni Declaration alters the notion of sovereignty to apply to the people themselves rather than the nations they reside in, both of these definitions argue for the means of food production to be taken back from corporations and returned to agrarian working-class people. But what the Nyéléni Declaration’s shift in language allows for is the representation of people who aren’t represented by their governing nation, as well as nations that aren’t viewed as sovereign by occupying colonial forces. This second definition of food sovereignty is critical to understandings of Black and Indigenous food sovereignty as it takes shape in the US.
Food sovereignty is often understood as counter to food security, and is frequently seen as an emergent strategy among peoples, communities, and nations experiencing food crisis. The current global “‘food crisis’ is a culmination of a deeper agrarian crisis associated with the longtwentieth-century food regime, and its reproduction of capital’s labor force via cheap food provisioning,” and takes form in sites of food apartheid, mass-production of cheap, unnourishing and overly packaged foods, monoculturization, and the forced dependency on large-scale agricultural products ridden with GMOs, antibiotics, and pesticides (McMichael 935). Food security, as defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, is “a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization 2001). While it seeks to provide people with access to food in the present, food security relies heavily on charity and, crucially, does not provide agency for people living in environments of food injustice, only working to change the present material reality rather than allowing the people to control the future of their food access. Food sovereignty, on the other hand, is focused returning agency and self-governance to the people by invoking a“radical change in the food system through alternative ways of knowing and doing” (Trauger 31).
For Indigenous food sovereigntists, food sovereignty is inherently tied to tribal autonomy, self-governance, and political sovereignty. There is widespread debate over the term sovereignty in reference to Native self-governance, as some Natives, like Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred argue that because “sovereignty is a definition that comes from a European governance system based on monarchy and empire,” it has no place in the conversation surrounding Native self-governance and autonomy. Still others, like Joanne Barker, argue that sovereignty, like any other word, has no fixed meaning and can therefore be understood as “the recognition of rights to political institutions that are historically and culturally located,” which is crucial in the fight for autonomy that exists outside the settler-colonial state (Hoover and Mihesuah 10). For many Native food sovereigntists, tribal sovereignty cannot be achieved without the autonomy and agency to restore and evolve traditional and culturally important foodways that food sovereignty requires.
Above all, food sovereignty proposes “a broader vision of how to rethink the ecological conditions and scale at which human communities can live, and survive” (McMichael 936-7). It asks us to reconsider what life and death look like within the food system, and affirms the need and right for people to create food systems that construct self-reliant sustainable communities that can exist into futurity.
