Food Sovereignty

I.S.F.D. 41

Misa Ulises

Written and Language Expression IV

Food Sovereignty: Women’s Resistance to the World’s Current Food Distribution System within a Globalized Agricultural Era.

Selling, processing and exchanging local food have played for centuries an essential role in the small-scale farmers sphere and local agricultural industries, especially among developing countries. Incidentally, women have not represented a minor aspect in this regard. Actually, more than a half of the World’s growing and harvesting is carried out by women.  However, despite hundreds of years of technology improvement and the usage of more complex and efficient methods to produce and collect agri-food, the current food distribution system does not precisely guarantee the right for healthy food to everyone. Moreover, developments of greater industries and supermarkets along with unfair international trade agreements affect many women whose daily incomes are gained through working in the crops and local storages that cannot compete with the lower costs of bigger markets or imported rations. Nonetheless, in the past ten years, women’s involvement in farm movements and food organizations, have achieved a more favorable perspective about this matter. This article explores the role of women in the World’s Food System and their resistance to a Globalized Agricultural Scheme. For the purposes of this paper, in order to address the importance of women within the vision and constraints of such a system, I shall firstly deal with the place that multinational food corporations take nowadays and how they have shaped and still stir the role of women in localized food systems and small agricultural industries. Then, it will be determined in what ways Food Sovereignty provides a new framework and better alternative to Food Security.  Finally, I shall examine the participation of women in the farm movement, La Via Campesina and their determination to achieve Food Sovereignty.

Undoubtedly different periods of industrialization, privatization and liberalization have been followed by an abrupt expansion and development of an alarming number of Multinational food corporations able to access credit and taxes more advantageously than other regional farm operators. On the basis of this Globalized Scheme, most family farm work and specially women’s labour’ force, have been diminished by the global effects of these powerful Enterprises and Trade Business Companies. While many food corporations get quickly integrated in the global market, many women’s farming skills, knowledge of seeds and traditional products remain unrecognized. Most of these disadvantages of this kind of system have been already discussed and being considered by different food distribution frameworks. Most of them underlined the importance of the regeneration of local food production and the reimplementation of agroecological procedures allowing  the incorporation of renewable resources accessible from the farm.  Nevertheless, as it will be discussed later in this paper, eventually women would occupy a more respectable and active place in the reformation of the current food system working along with many other entities in order  to explore the effects of this neoliberal agricultural model.

The concept of food security, which primarily focuses on food supply problems, has allowed food exports to believe that the most profitable way to provide sufficient food for everyone relies on the import of cheaper comestibles rather than producing them locally.  The rudimentary ideas of this food system of the 1960’s  have not only failed to address the importance of who produces the comestibles and under which conditions are grown, but has also encouraged many countries to become unnecessarily dependent on the international market and consequently driving them away from their farms in the search for “better” possibilities in the city. Conversely, including agrarian reforms, considering equity within gender relations, valuing local food providers and natural resources, and featuring a shift to agroecological production, among others, the emergent framework of Food Sovereignty introduces an alternative food regime and paradigm to reconsider, and even challenges unequal agrarian polices at an international level. Furthermore, placing focus on monitoring the production and consumption of comestibles, rather than granting access to food via safeguarding sufficient trade and technology development, the ideas of Food Sovereignty promote and foster autonomy at a community scale and eventually encompass a more suitable option to solve hunger issues around the world.

Despite striking social inequalities amidst a male-dominated society, women’s influence and participation in the development of a more democratic food distribution system determined to value local food production, have been widely acknowledged in the last decades. From the analysis and experimentation of those who produce greater part of the World’s food, the concept of Food Sovereignty has been little by little framed and thus incorporated by different agrarian movements and organizations. La Via Campesina, originated around the 1990’s by different food sovereignty activists around the word, finally would set the ground and proper path to represent not only small-scale farmers, but landless people, many women farmers, indigenous and peasants from different communities as well. Incidentally, women’s radical avocation to this concern put emphasis not only on the methods used to grow and harvest food but also on issues of gender inequality, which become key for further symmetrical and global representation. Nowadays La Via Campesina has already gathered farmers from more than 60 countries and continues pushing forward to achieve a more autonomous and sustainable way to produce and administer every day’s food.

 All in all, women’s role in the reformation of the current food system has become decisive to promote via the Food Sovereignty framework a more convenient way to allow more ecological units to produce healthy food and preserve the environment as well. Evidently there are still many aspects to keep on developing if we consider the fact that in spite of the existence of enough food to feed every person in the world, yet many communities suffer from food shortage or bad alimentation.  However, without undermining the consequences of this globalized and neoliberal food distribution framework in which we are all immersed, the possibilities for a systemic change in this society are now more feasible to be achieved. Advocated to the concepts of Food Sovereignty and embraced by the supportive principles of La Via Campesina, women have little by little acquired and earned their respect and own place to define the future of the World’s agricultural system, avoiding an unnecessary reliance on the International Market, and ultimately overcoming poverty and inequality at an international scale.

References

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Wittman, H. (2011). “Food Sovereignty A New Rights Framework for Food and Nature?” Environment and Society: Advances in Research. Retrieved October 22, 2014 from http://vssweb1.landfood.ubc.ca/publications/Wittman_2011_Food_Sovereignty_Review_Env_Society.pdf.

World Development Movement: "Justice for the World's Poor. (2012). “Food Sovereignty”. Retrieved October 20, 2014 from http://www.wdm.org.uk/sites/default/files/food_sov_tricky_questions.pdf.