Newsletter no 23 - Food Justice and Sovereignty in USA

Editorial: Food Justice and Food Sovereignty in USA Food Sovereignty emerged as La Via Campesina’s bold response to the “free trade” regimes destroying livelihoods around the world. It’s been taken up widely across the Global South by communities reeling from the spread of agrofuels, GMOs, land grabs and the “privatization of everything.”
One reason for food sovereignty’s popularity is because neoliberal globalization has concentrated nearly half the planet’s wealth into the hands of just 80 (...)

Racism and Capitalism Our modern food system has co-evolved with 30 years of neoliberal globalization that privatized public goods and deregulated all forms of corporate capital, worldwide. This has led to the highest levels of global inequality in history. The staggering social and environmental costs of this transition have hit people of color the hardest, reflected in the record levels of hunger and massive migrations of impoverished farmers in the global South, and the appalling levels (...)

Reform or Transformation?
The global food crisis has pushed the U.S. food movement to a political juncture. A sixth of the world’s population is now hungry—just as a sixth of the U.S. population is “food insecure.” These severe levels of hunger and insecurity share root causes, located in the political economy of a global, corporate food regime.
Because of its political location between reformist calls for food security and radical calls for food sovereignty, food justice is pivotally placed (...)

Box 1 - Definition of Food Justice Food Justice refers to a wide spectrum of efforts that address injustices within the U.S. food system. Weak forms of food justice focus on the effects of an inequitable food system, while stronger forms of food justice focus on the structural causes of those inequities. For example, reformist projects for food justice work to provide food access in underserved communities to alleviate food insecurity and/or strive to improve food and labor conditions (...)

Voices from the field 1 Food Justice 2.0
LaDonna Redmond, Founder and executive director of The Campaign for Food Justice Now, http://www.cfjn.org/
I became a food activist because my son Wade developed food allergies at a very early age and I wanted to get the healthiest food I could for him. I really wasn’t any different from any other mother in my community. I wanted the best for my son. But that food—the best food—was not available in my neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. I live (...)