The small-scale food producers and their allies in the US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) – family farmers, rural workers, fishermen, peasants, farmworkers, and food justice advocates – call for a democratic transformation of our food systems based on human rights and social, ecological, economic, and cultural justice principles of Food Sovereignty. We make our demand just after the historical week of World Food Day 2023, and we will continue to work and organize in the United States, and with our allies in North America and globally, in the face of on-going systemic challenges, including the crises of climate change and corporate power. We draw strength from our united alliance across the food system, and collective power at the grassroots base of our movements, as we strive for the transformative vision articulated by our global food sovereignty movement for decades.
As humanity faces a crucial point in its history to move away from the extractive and destructive economic model that has brought about this climate crisis, we oppose the industrial, corporate agrifoods model that is privatizing, commodifying, and financializing public services, land, nature, and data, increasing inequality, and accelerating environmental damage. We fight for human rights of all people and work to promote agroecology, food sovereignty, biodiversity, climate justice, and gender and racial equality, aiming to achieve the well-being of all people to and guarantee the future for humanity and Mother Earth. As we advance with vision, we call on our allies in, and outside, of the food and agriculture movement to join USFSA and others in the global Nyeleni process for Food Sovereignty.
The US Food Sovereignty Alliance
Family farmers, food and farm workers, urban gardeners and food justice communities, fishing communities, non-profit organizations, food-systems research networks, youth and people of color have been organizing with the US Food Sovereignty Alliance since 2010, working to bring about food systems that produce healthy food, take care of nature, and ensure that food producers and communities are at the center of decision-making around food systems. We have fought especially the intense corporate concentration and consolidation in food and agriculture, and the more general corporate domination over rural life, in the US, as well as the complicity of our government in handing over more and more power to transnational corporations. We have fought against a system that sees 1 in 5 children in the U.S. and more than 700 million people going hungry around the world as acceptable. We have fought against a system that is destroying and wasting our natural resources and polluting our air and water. And we have fought a system that sees rural workers and their labor as disposable and exploitable.
Why We Are Called to Act
Food insecurity, in many ways, is present in the US and globally, because the rights of food producers and their communities are being ignored, in favor of the interests of transnational corporations and the private sector. Opaque, unaccountable multistakeholder networks are taking the place of transparent, democratic, and multilateral processes in decision-making and policy development. We cannot stand by as governments abandon commitments to ensuring the right to food and a dignified life for rural peoples.
Moving Forward for Food Sovereignty and Agroecology
We continue our efforts to organize people who want a better world and who are done with destructive and extractive economies and corporate control of our lives. We renew our commitment to a better world, in the face of the climate crisis that is a catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude, through the vision of the food sovereignty movement and welcome you to join us.
READ “Beyond World Food Day”
The Statement from the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPP)