Vision and Operating Principles

Vision Statement

We believe that food and water must be treated as basic human rights and we uphold the internationally recognized principles of food sovereignty.

We honor Mother Earth, value biodiversity, and support ecological farming and fishing practices that protect the Earth, animals, and people.

We support movement away from the dominant, corporate-controlled food system, which is shaped by systems of power and oppression. Our solutions must dismantle systemic food injustice rooted in race, class, and gender oppression.

We respect people and other forms of life over profits. We honor everyone’s work in the food system, including unpaid, underpaid, and devalued labor. We work to honor our human commonalities and restore traditional ways of growing, preparing, sharing, and eating food as a community.

Operating Principles

  • We embrace international solidarity as central to our organizing and view our struggles in the US as part of a broader global food sovereignty movement.
  • We believe in transparency and decentralized leadership and power.
  • We are committed to a membership and leadership that reflects the entire population of the US and the full spectrum of people impacted by the food system, particularly low-income communities and communities of color in both rural and urban areas.
  • We recognize and prioritize the leadership of women, Indigenous Peoples, people of color, migrant workers, and other food providers and workers marginalized by the global food system.
  • We listen to and honor all voices, languages, and forms of knowledge.
  • We work to strengthen the links between urban and rural struggles for food justice.
  • We seek to create a space of mutual education and knowledge exchange.
  • We trace and hold accountable our funding sources and ask that they also honor our vision and these principles.
  • We strive to create an inclusive and efficient decision-making process.
  • We all commit to contribute the resources needed to ensure a strong alliance.

Movement-Building Goals

  1. Build and coalesce a domestic food sovereignty movement that identifies itself as part of the broader global movement for food sovereignty and is recognized as such by international counterparts.
  2. Build strategic partnerships with existing food justice and food worker initiatives in the US around the theme of ending poverty through rebuilding local food economies. Ensure that the Alliance is informed by these initiatives, honors them, and actively supports them.
  3. Build strategic partnerships with international allies. Facilitate the active participation of US-based groups in global food sovereignty campaigns and initiatives (e.g., representation in the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty and involvement in global days of action called by La Via Campesina and other international allies).
  4. Lead a broad-based educational campaign on food sovereignty in the US, helping communities to understand how their local struggles are connected to broader struggles and imbalances of power.
  5. Raise awareness of how US foreign aid, trade, climate, and development policies are undermining food sovereignty of communities across the globe and build political capacity to challenge these policies and offer alternatives.
  6. Identify common struggles that intersect global and domestic arenas – e.g., land grabbing, water rights, and corporate control of the food system. Build mechanisms for communities to effectively support each other’s struggles, both within the US and across borders and continents.
  7. Through grassroots organizing and alliance-building, work to build political power to bring about structural change in the US and internationally. Use the Call to Action to End the Food Crisis as a tool for organizing.
  8. Build strategic alliances with related movements – e.g., climate justice, economic justice, community control of land, water, and others.
  9. Work collectively to raise and share resources that support the leadership and full participation of grassroots members of the Alliance.
  10. Actively support the leadership of the next generation.