Farmers Without Borders - Food Sovereignty Versus Food Security

Food Sovereignty Versus Food Security

Food sovereignty was born in response to campaigners' disillusion with food security, the dominant global discourse on food provisioning and policy. The latter emphasises access to adequate nutrition for all, which may be provided by food from one's own country or from global imports. In the name of efficiency and enhanced productivity, it has therefore served to promote what has been termed the “corporate food regime”: large-scale, industrialised corporate farming based on specialised production, land concentration and trade liberalisation. Food security’s inattention to the political economy of the corporate food regime blinds it to the adverse effects of that regime, notably the widespread dispossession of small producers and global ecological degradation, as can be seen in the case of Haiti. There has been a flow of people from the countryside to the cities, in a transition from subsistence agriculture to factory labor. Farmers were forced to make this move because of heavy imports of "Miami rice", with which their natively-grown rice could not compete in the local market. By 2008, Haiti was importing 80 percent of its rice, leaving them extremely vulnerable to price and supply fluctuations. When the price of rice did triple in 2008, many Haitians could not afford to buy it, and resorted to eating things like dirt pies.

Writing in Food First's Backgrounder, fall 2003, Peter Rosset argues that "food sovereignty goes beyond the concept of food security… means that… must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day … but says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced." Food sovereignty includes support for smallholders and for collectively owned farms, fisheries, etc., rather than industrializing these sectors in a minimally regulated global economy. In another publication, Food First describes "food sovereignty" as "a platform for rural revitalization at a global level based on equitable distribution of farmland and water, farmer control over seeds, and productive small-scale farms supplying consumers with healthy, locally grown food."