These critiques of the global food system make apparent that millions of people remain food insecure, and that global trade and commodity markets have progressively diminished the ability of countries and citizens to determine their trade policies and manage their food supply. This has been exacerbated by the expansion of biotechnology as Vandana Shiva has expounded in many fora. Shiva (2000) revealed how a concentration of powerful multinational companies has actively sought to lock farmers into cycles of dependency, in developing and developed countries alike. This has been achieved by limiting the ongoing viability of seeds through genetic modification, rendering seed-saving practices worthless, and the resultant crops reliant on the chemical fertilisers and
pesticides formulated and sold by the very same companies. While the multinationals’ profits are assured, rural livelihoods, health, traditions and biodiversity are being devastated.
Consequently, there is a growing literature reflecting civil and grassroots
opposition to globalised trade, such as Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing (2010), and more specifically to how its dynamics are impacting people who produce food everywhere. This opposition is captured in the principles of food
sovereignty, which anthropologist Marc Edelman (2013) traces back to Mexico in the 1980s. It has become more commonly associated, however, with the international peasants’ social justice movement, La Via Campesina (LVC):
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It develops a
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model of small scale sustainable production benefiting communities and their environment. It puts the aspirations, needs and livelihoods of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations (La Via Campesina, n.d, para. 8).
Food sovereignty has a strong human rights orientation, with La Via Campesina (n.d.) stressing that the rights of food producers extend to lands, territories, water, seeds, livestock and biodiversity. This distinguishes it from food security, currently defined by the FAO as “when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 2014b). The concept of food security pre-dated food sovereignty by around 50 years and was punctuated by the formation of the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security in 1974 (FAO, 2012). The emphasis of food security has shifted in application, as Nicolette Larder, Kirsten Lyons and Geoff
Woolcock (2012) explained in their Australian study. The focus expands from production and trade, to addressing the issue of social barriers to equitable distribution of food and the role of food in public health.
Food sovereignty is now being positioned as a precondition to food security (Patel, 2009; Schanbacher, 2010). This is also conveyed in Lang’s urging to move beyond “the three As - access, availability, and affordability … to deliver sufficiency of production only on ecological terms, with sustainable food
systems at the heart of international development” (2010, pp. 94-95). In
developed countries these principles are being adopted by grassroots alliances, further defining alternative food movements in the process. In Canada,
Resetting the Table: APeople’s Food Policy appeared in 2011 (Food Secure Canada, 2011), and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) recently released The People’s Food Plan (Parfitt, Rose, Green, Alden & Beilby, 2013). The latter represents a social reform challenge to the Australian government’s unambitious and trade-focused National Food Plan green paper (DAFF, 2012). This literature highlights that the pursuit of food security and food sovereignty is not limited to developing countries, nor the field of international development. The complex situation that has arisen in food systems is what Lang describes
as “a triple burden of over-, under- and malconsumption, all coexisting, often within the same region and country” (2010, p. 89). In Australia, even with its weighty ecological footprint, in excess of five per cent of the population has been estimated to experience food insecurity (Rosier, 2011). Further, food insecurity was shown to be experienced most commonly by those who are indigenous, unemployed, in single parent households, and on low incomes.
Foreshadowing my discussion of the literature of food and space in Section 2.2, there is growing concern for the spatial and infrastructural dimensions of food insecurity and related ill health in several fields including public health, social inclusion, geography and urban planning. The Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design (FSPUD) project in the Australian state of Victoria is one innovative example (Donovan, Larsen & McWhinnie, 2011). It urges future planning to redress the pattern of ‘food desert’ formation, which urban policy scholar Brendan Gleeson (2010) characterised as urban areas comprising lower-income housing, a lack of services and public transport, and the
constrained mobility of residents to shop for nutritious food. In such localities, the availability of fresh food is typically limited, reinforcing the routine
consumption of cheap, high-energy, processed foods and poor health patterns. Community and school gardens have emerged as key strategies in addressing food desert conditions and food insecurity, as I discuss in the following section.