Download Food Sovereignty

From FAO
Number of hungry people, 1969-2010
Increasing Hunger
Source: FAO
Food Security
• The term ‘Food Security’ is often used to denote a solution
for hunger. A definition from the 1996 World Food Summit
in Rome suggests that food security is achieved "when all
people, at all times have physical and economic access to
sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary
needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life".
How and where such food comes from is not embodied in
the concept of food security. For example, the food could
be purchased from multinationals; could be dumped at
cheap rates by countries/companies with excess production
thereby ‘marketing out’ or dismantling local production
which might be higher priced; or it could come as food aid.
Ecological Footprints
Ecological Debt
• Do rich nations “owe” poor ones for eco-damage?
• Considering climate change, ozone depletion, agricultural
intensification and expansion, deforestation, over fishing and
mangrove conversion, environmental damage caused by rich
nations disproportionately harms poor ones— and costs them
more than their total foreign debt of $1.8 trillion, concludes a
study billed as the first global accounting in dollar terms of
nations’ toll on the environment. The calculations were for the 40
year period, 1961-2000 (University of Berkeley, Jan 2008)
• At least to some extent, “rich nations have developed at the
expense of the poor... in effect, there is a debt to the poor,” said
Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist at the University of
California-Berkeley, one of the researchers. “That, perhaps, is one
reason that they are poor.”
Eco Debt
Food Sovereignty
• "the right of peoples, communities, and countries to
define their own agricultural, pastoral, labour, fishing,
food and land policies which are ecologically, socially,
economically and culturally appropriate to their unique
circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to
produce food, which means that all people have the
right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food
and to food-producing resources and the ability to
sustain themselves and their societies." (Food
Sovereignty: A Right For All, Political Statement of the
NGO/CSO Forum for Food Sovereignty. Rome, June
2002).