Description
The present corporate food regime dominating the planet’s food systems is environmentally destructive, financially volatile and socially unjust. Though the regime’s contributions to the planet’s four-fold food-fuel-finance and climate crises are well documented, the “solutions” advanced by our national and global institutions reinforce the same destructive technological path, the same global market fundamentalism, and the same unregulated consolidation of corporate power in the food system that brought us the crisis in the first place.
A dynamic global food movement has risen up in the face of this sustained corporate assault on our food systems. Around the world, local food justice activists have taken back pieces of the food system through local gardening, organic farming, community-supported agriculture, farmers markets, and locally-owned processing and retail operations. Food sovereignty advocates have organized locally and internationally for land reform, the end of destructive free trade agreements, and support for family farmers, women and peasants. Protests against—and viable alternatives to—the expansion of GMOs, agrofuels, land grabs and the oligopolistic control of our food, are growing everywhere every day, giving the impression that food movements are literally “breaking through the asphalt” of a reified corporate food regime.
The social and political convergence of the “practitioners” and “advocates” in these food movements is also well underway, as evidenced by the growing trend in local-regional food policy councils in the US, coalitions for food sovereignty spreading across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, and the increasing attention to practical-political solutions to the food crisis appearing in academic literature and the popular media. The global food movement springs from strong commitments to food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty on the part of thousands of farmers unions, consumer groups, faith-based, civil society and community organizations across the urban-rural and north-south divides of our food systems. This magnificent “movement of movements” is widespread, highly diverse, refreshingly creative—and politically amorphous.
Food Movements Unite! is a collection of essays by food movement leaders from around the world that all seek to answer the perennial political question: What is to be done?
The answers—from the multiple perspectives of community food security activists, peasants and family farm leaders, labor activists, and leading food systems analysts—will lay out convergent strategies for the fair, sustainable, and democratic transformation of our food systems. Authors will address the corporate food regime head on, arguing persuasively not only for specific changes to the way our food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed, but specifying how these changes may come about, politically.
What Readers and Scholars Say
Food Movements Unite! lays out a new grassroots and social movements approach for creating a new food system. The leaders writing in this book call on us to come together to dismantle the industrial agri-foods complex and to construct local food systems based on food sovereignty. They challenge us to scale up agroecological alternatives among local urban and rural farmers and forge new market arrangements that make healthy food equitably and broadly accessible, especially to poor consumers.
Miquel A Altieri University of California, Berkeley
Food Movements Unite! is a significant and timely collection of key voices from a swelling global movement for alternative agri-food systems. At a time of great social and ecological uncertainty the world needs the visions of those on the front lines of resisting an unsustainable agro-food regime through political advocacy, social organizing and ecological adaptation to environmental and climatic changes. This volume offers a broad and unifying perspective on the conjunction of crises (inequality, food, energy, climate) and pathways toward just and sustainable ways of living with the earth, anchored in the principle of agricultural multifunctionality.
Philip McMichael, Cornell University
The writings in this remarkable collection illustrate the structural conditions that result in food crises and present compelling proposals for changing the ways in which food is produced, procured, distributed and consumed. Food Movements Unite! brings together the voices of those who are at the forefront of actions to end the violence, destruction and injustices of the corporate food regime and to democratize our food and economic systems. While their approaches differ—some call for revolution while others seek reform—all of them seek economic, ecological and gender justice, with the inalienable right to food serving as a pivot. This volume is a window into the amazing diversity and strength of food movements, and points to the tremendous potential that exists among peoples and social movements to transform systems and structures.
Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South
Two green thumbs up! Food Movements Unite is a critical resource to turn the tables on the food crisis and advance food sovereignty.
US Food Sovereignty Allianc
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.