4 Pillars of Food Systems Transformation
Why Just, Equitable, Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems?
Just, Equitable, Healthy, and Sustainable Food Systems serve the interest and needs of the people, peoples, and planet first above profit.
Why Just Food Systems?
At its core, our food systems should embody the right to life and human dignity. Yet the current food systems are stacked against the poorest of the poor, structured to maximize profit.
A human-rights based approach to transforming our food systems is critical in realizing the right to safe, healthy, and culturally appropriate food for all. It is unacceptable that almost a third of the world do not have regular access to safe and nutritious food despite the growing surplus in production. Rural food producers, especially in the Global South, do not own the land they till, control the seeds they sow, nor decide on the destination of their produce. In many countries, indigenous peoples, farmers, and land defenders are under constant threat of eviction, harassment, and even murder.
Just food systems put land and life at the center of transformation.
Why Equitable Food Systems?
Our food systems today connect us like never before. Yet, this connection is built atop unequal trade routes, inequality, and plunder.
A people’s right framework in transforming our food systems is the key in rebuilding production and trade towards decolonization, solidarity and lasting peace. Neoliberal reforms of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation since the Green Revolution has corporatized and denationalized food systems. Transnational and multinational companies from a handful of rich nations have monopolized the ownership and control of seeds, inputs, production machineries, and tradelines of poor agrarian nations. Food aid and embargoes are also weaponized by powerful nations as political tools against poorer and food-deprived countries.
Equitable food systems uphold the people’s right to development and sovereignty.
Why Healthy Food Systems?
Malnutrition, especially among the poorest of the poor have been plaguing the world for centuries without end in sight.
Poverty has shackled half the globe into hunger and a huge chunk of the other half into consuming cheap and heavily subsidized sources of carbohydrates. The current chemical-intensive corporate-driven agriculture is fostering collapse in food and seed diversity while further profiting from unhealthy diets. Zoonotic diseases emerging from corporate farms threaten the already fragile healthcare systems of the world. Along with genetically-modified seeds that further destroy seed sovereignty and agro-biodiversity, food producers are trapped in a cycle of dependency on hazardous technologies, while consumers find healthy food more and more inaccessible.
Healthy food systems reconnect the link between diversity in production and consumption.
Why Sustainable Food Systems?
Our planet is at its limits thanks, in part, to today’s fossil fuel hungry corporate food systems. And the poor and marginalized of the Global South are bearing the brunt.
There should not be a tradeoff between the right to healthy food and a healthy planet. Despite the Neomalthussian fear mongering talk of food shortage by 2050, we are producing more today than what we need. Decades of “sustainable intensification” have deforested wildlife areas, collapsed fish stocks, and eroded environmental boundaries. Additionally, the support for agroecological, traditional, artisanal, and smallholder production have since been shifted towards fossil-fuel hungry agriculture and food waste-prone corporate farming and transnational distribution chains. The massive use of toxic pesticides has polluted air, soil and water; caused the acute poisoning of an estimated 385 million people each year; and placed harmful chemicals on our plates.
Agroecology — a productive, resilient, and sustainable approach to farming— integrates cutting edge science with local and Indigenous knowledge and practice and can replace corporate-controlled chemical-intensive agriculture by putting farmers first.
Sustainable food systems harmonize humanity’s needs and aspirations to our planetary boundaries.