Occupy the Farm Highlights Issue of Food Sovereignty

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/167822/occupy-farm-highlights-issue-food-sovereignty

To those who had become accustomed to seeing the Occupy movement build its camps in squares and buildings, the occupation of a farm seemed a curious choice for the protest group. However, the truth is Occupy the Farm is arguably one of OWS’s most important offshoots—a movement that not only draws attention to the rotten corporate practices of Big Ag but also focuses on issues near and dear to Occupy’s heart, such as the environment and overall health of society.

Media coverage of superbugs, food recalls and pink slime meat have all brought the issue of bad food production to the forefront in American culture. Yet the issue of food sovereignty not only includes safety, but also access, and this concerns everyone even if they’re not a farmer. As the author and farmer Wendell Berry once wrote, “If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.”

According to the Obama administration’s Health Food Financing Initiative, about 23.5 million Americans live in low-income areas that are more than one mile from a supermarket. Unfortunately, sometimes the so-called “solution” proposed to alleviate this crisis is to build a Walmart, which will indeed sell produce, but that produce is unlikely to come from a local, sustainable farm. The result may be the alleviation of one problem (food deserts) but at the cost of worsening other areas (food safety, sustainability, environment) while quietly tolerating Walmarts already legendary mistreatment of workers.

Another way to think of food sovereignty is in terms of food security. La Via Campesina, an international movement that coordinates peasant organizations of small producers, agricultural workers, rural women and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America and Europe, defines food sovereignty as “the right of people to define agriculture and food policy, including prioritizing local agricultural production, access of peasants and landless people to land, water, seeds, and credit.”