The concept of food sovereignty continues to gain momentum among the people with whom we work. In this issue of Seedling we look at several experiences in different parts of the world to maintain – or wrest back – control over the cultivation and preparation of our foods.
For many people in Africa and Asia, sorghum – a crop virtually unknown in Europe and Latin America – lies at the heart of their daily lives. It is eaten as a staple, made into an ingredient of both injera (a kind of bread) and beer, and used as a construction material. Farmers meet regularly to exchange its seeds. In all, sorghum is part of the fabric of community life. Once scorned by the food industry for being a crop of low nutritional value consumed by the poor, sorghum is now attracting great attention, largely because of its extraordinary versatility, which makes it a prime candidate for development by the biofuels industry. Some analysts are even saying that sorghum could become the key agricultural crop of the 21st century. Despite resistance from many communities, the biotech companies are developing genetically modified sorghum, even though it would almost inevitably contaminate wild varieties (of which there are hundreds in Ethiopia alone) and cause serious and irreversible genetic erosion. It is shocking that, in the name of progress and development, so many official and private institutions (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are funding this onslaught against the age-old rural communities whose knowledge will prove invaluable as the planet struggles to adapt to climate change.
In Europe bread has long been regarded as “the staff of life”. Over the last 50 years global food companies have taken over the bakery sector and, in the name of efficiency, have set up huge factories where tasteless industrial bread, deliberately denuded of much of its nutritional value, comes off the production line at breakneck speed. It is perhaps not surprising that it is France, the home of so much good food, that is leading the struggle to regain control over bread-making. In various regions of the country, groups of paysans boulangers (peasant bakers) are tracking down traditional varieties of wheat, some of which have not been grown for decades, and rediscovering old methods of bread-making that produce healthy and tasty bread.
It is necessary to develop global organisations that bring together the myriad local struggles. One step in this direction was the staging in Mali in February 2007 of the Nyéléni Forum on Food Sovereignty. The forum brought together a tremendous diversity of people and a wealth of experiences and perspectives on food sovereignty. Participants worked in seven thematic working groups for two days, had discussions within their sectors, met in regional contexts, and got together in a plenary session to pull things together. It was quite a challenge to construct a meaningful consensus out of such diversity, but the participants managed to come up with a clear declaration* highlighting what the struggle for food sovereignty is about. It stressed that: “Food sovereignty puts those who produce, distribute and need wholesome, local food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations that reduce food to internationally tradable commodities and components. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle this inequitable and unsustainable system that perversely results in both chronic malnutrition and rapidly rising obesity.”
The Forum agreed on a plan of action, now being finalised, which specifies what the movements will do to further the struggle for food sovereignty. The challenge now is to maintain the momentum created at the Forum.
* The declaration can be downloaded from the Nyéléni website, where you can also find a wealth of other documents and experiences that were shared at the Forum – http://www.nyeleni2007.org