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The Marion Institute’s Southcoast Food Policy Council and Freed Seed Federation Hosted a Virtual Food Summit on September 18, 2024, Highlighting the Shift from Food Security to Food Sovereignty.

This year’s food summit brought together experts, advocates, and community members to explore the crucial shift from ensuring food security to achieving food sovereignty—a concept defined by the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance as, “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”

Keynote Address:

Alison Cohen, Director and General Coordinator of the National Right to Food, delivered the keynote speech. Cohen discussed the paradigm shift from dependence on food pantries to the establishment of a regional food system rooted in food sovereignty, emphasizing the importance of choice and autonomy in our food systems.

Panel Discussion:

A panel moderated Bill Braun (Freed Seed Federation) panel followed the keynote, featuring discussions on the root causes of food insecurity and the path to food sovereignty. The panel addressed critical topics such as:

  • Fair and Living Wages: Tackling economic barriers and solutions to accessing healthy food.
  • The True Cost of Food: Investigating the impact of costs along the food supply chain.
  • Root Cause of Food Insecurity: Identifying the underlying factors of food insecurity.
  • Food and Seed Sovereignty: Highlighting the significance of local control over food production and seed resources.

Highlights & Resources:

Highlights from the Keynote:

Keynote: Alison Cohen, National Right to Food Community of Practice
Link to Presentation
Link to Notes
  • To quote Marion Nestle, an expert on nutrition and health and author of Food Politics, “What’s especially tragic is the reversal of the pandemic decline of food insecurity. Pandemic income support and higher SNAP benefits did exactly what they were supposed to do. They reduced poverty. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, stopped those benefits. The results are entirely predictable.”
  • Food banks are the primary way people get food outside SNAP and other benefits. Despite efforts by food pantries and volunteers to provide access to charitable food, hunger in the US continues to rise.
  • The public perception that hunger can be solved with improved food access, especially capturing food waste, ignores the other systemic root causes of hunger, such as low wages, corporate control of farming, and the legacy of racial oppression.
  • SLIDE 5 Captures the contradictions in the Narratives.
  • Food Systems Change along the continuum:
    • Food Charity: Food is rescued, redistributed, or donated to nourish people who are food insecure.
    • Food Justice is achieved by removing structural inequities within our food and economic systems such that our food system is inclusive, community-led, and participatory.
    • Food Sovereignty is a food system in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution. This contrasts with the present corporate structure in which market institutions control the global food system.
  • What strategies can we use to move to a system where food is available and accessible to everyone in a self-determined way? Slide 8 illustrates the movement from Food Charity to Food.
  • Slide 9 shows how the National Right to Food sees the movement to Food Sovereignty:
    • Problem: Policies and laws lack coordination and intersectionality across food, agriculture, health, labor, and the environment.
    • Actors: Social movements, people as food rights holders, governments as duty bearers.
    • Strategy: Build a new system and transform society.
    • Outcomes: Food is available, accessible, adequate, sustainable, and self-determined for everyone.
  • Slide 10: The Right to Food Model
    • Available Food: To purchase food in stores, the governments need policies that support food in geographical areas, for example, by building and maintaining good roads and transport routes and supporting the conditions for farmers and fishermen to thrive.
    • Accessible Food: Physically and economically. This means having enough income to afford adequate food with dignity and choice. Food should be available to everyone, regardless of location or physical barriers.
    • Adequate Food: Safe from harmful substances, nutritious, culturally and socially appropriate. Food that meets our needs physically, emotionally, and culturally.
    • Sustainable Foods: Available, accessible, and adequate for the present and future generations.
    • Agency/Self-determination: We all have the right to decide what the food system looks like and who benefits.

Panel:

Casey Burns, Coalition for a Healthy Greater Worcester
Link to Presentation

Highlights:
In your experience working with Coalition for a Healthy Greater Worchester, would you share the complicating factors concerning how people currently experience food insecurity?

  • Just a quick qualification: this discussion is about food insecurity in terms of root causes. Root causes include historical racism, land access, ownership models, supply chain concentration, trade deals, wages, and politics.
  • What we are talking about is how racism and inequities are embedded into our economy and our systems, our living conditions, and our access points to food. Look at the competing costs on Slide 14.
  • Look at the Cliff Effect slide 21. People are lacking because of the inequities of how the systems are built, core resources of time and money, and they can make decisions and utilize those resources for their benefit in the face of families with access to those resources. Everyone should have the choice, ability, solidarity, and support to do that when they want to. Land should be healthy and supportive to be able to do that.
Ulum Pixan, Global Village Farms
Link to Ulum Pixan, Global Village Farms Opening Slideshow
Link to Soil, Food and Youth Leadership Presentation

How do we pass on knowledge of growing our food? How do we build a bridge between elders and youth in the food system?

  • We teach the youth how to use tools in the food system, not tell them what they should be doing. Youth gardens bring families together, so the entire family unit is impacted. Information on farming and health practices is shared in this space.

Can we close the loop in the food chain? What is the cultural importance of seeds in creating healthy soil and healthy bodies? How does this impact health and save culture?

  • One of the downsides to classism and racism is that we can see something that is wrong, but it is unclear how to fix it because it is part of the bigger system. In Global Village, we look at the values of the food system (Slide 3). You can see the Native Values next to the corresponding Capitalist values. For instance, the Native Value is Cooperation, and the Capitalist value is Competition. Maybe we must unlearn what we were taught and relearn a new value system to be fully community-led and cooperative in our struggle for food sovereignty.
  • In elevating the role of seeds to create healthy soil, healthy body, and healthy communities, seed re-matriation (matrilineal line of seeds coming back to their communities of origin), the culture and history of seeds are critical elements. We are honoring the traditional knowledge that has worked for our people for thousands of years. Seeds learn and adapt to an area. The seed is then better resistant to local climate, pest, and disease pressures. Seeds can grow without industrial pesticides. Without seed security, there is no food security. Who controls the seeds controls what we eat now and in the future. Seed security starts and ends with the cultural and spiritual components. Our connection needs to be to seeds and communities, especially in which seeds are literal embodiments of ancestors.
Estefania Galvis, One Fair Wage Campaign
Resources to Take Action:

What does a fair wage mean, and what is a living wage?

  • I am the daughter of a mixed, indigenous family that survived genocide in Colombia, and this year, for the first time in my life, I was able to grow my food. This was a liberating experience for the entire family and deeply moved us spiritually and communally.
  • A fair wage is a wage where a person can have time to do other things beyond work–access food when needed, have enough income to apply for a loan to purchase a home, and have the right not to have to live paycheck by paycheck.
  • When we talk about wages, we are talking about people on the front lines, producing and processing food, but also making the food in restaurants and serving food to you. Restaurant workers are paid a minimum wage with tips. Many restaurant workers work three jobs to pay for rent and eat. The salary for restaurant workers should be commensurate, and it should be treated as another professional job. Many of our restaurant workers are from other countries, have to learn a new language and culture, and are often vulnerable to exploitation. You cannot live in dignity when you are paid a minimum wage.

What is the One Fair Wage Campaign?

  • The One Fair Wage ballot initiative would phase out the tipped minimum wage over five years until it reaches the full state minimum wage of $15/hour, plus tips on top. Once the full minimum wage is reached, restaurants and bars can include back-of-house workers in tip pools, increasing teamwork within the staff and lifting up all workers.
Susannah Hinman, Red Tomato

Red Tomato works closely with small and mid-size farmers and growers.  What are producers’ most significant challenges when trying to compete wholesale?

  • The industrial food system produces only that which can sit in a cooler for two weeks and drive across the country. The system is established to support year-round supply at the lowest cost. The more our food system encourages market concentration, the more susceptible we will be to supply disruptions, price fluctuations, and inflation.
  • Efficiency tends to stifle diversity, so it’s easier and cheaper for a supermarket chain to fill up their trucks with 21 pallets of one thing like broccoli and truck it across the US than to try to source the food from your local farmers. The top 5 grocery chains that control over 60% of grocery sales lean on the economy of scale to keep their profits, while local farmers try to compete with that supermarket economy.

What disparities do you and the producers observe?

  • Regarding the actual cost of food, everything in crop production costs more when buying in small quantities. There is also the invisible cost on the processing and distribution side, such as the cost of fertilizers and cardboard for packaging, which increased by 20 to 40% during COVID and still has not gone down.
  • Food prices, both what was at the grocery store and what farmers felt they could charge, were known as parity. Parity was the standard set by which one could grow food and derive a livelihood. Post World War II, parity was discarded to increase commodities and speculative trade. As a result, farmers constantly try to balance what people will pay for produce versus the actual cost of time, labor, and supplies farmers use.
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