What Do We Mean When We Talk About Food Justice and Food Sovereignty? It means to deprive (someone) of a right or privilege to be disenfranchised. A community is said to be disenfranchised when its members are denied the rights or privileges necessary for full participation in society, any community, or any organization; this deprivation is most often associated with the inability to have an impact on policy or to have their voices heard. A disenfranchised population is a group of people who do not have a place to call home and do not have a political voice; they are subject to the whims of a host.The term "marginalized populations" refers to groups and communities that are subjected to discrimination and exclusion on multiple fronts, including the social, political, and economic spheres, as a result of unequal power relationships spanning the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions.

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Food justice refers to the practice of communities exercising their right to cultivate, market, and consume nutritious food. Food is considered healthy if it is locally grown, fresh, nutrient-dense, inexpensive, culturally relevant, and produced with consideration for the welfare of the land, the people who work the land, and the animals that live on it.

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The United States Food Sovereignty Alliance defines food sovereignty 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." Food sovereignty is "the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems," according to the definition. It is more of a process than a principle that cannot be changed. According to the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, the movement got its start in 1996 during the World Food Summit in Rome, which took place in Italy. On the other hand, throughout the course of the last decade, there has been a rise in the prominence of indigenous people within the movement for food sovereignty. Peasants and small farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, workers and migrant workers, and consumer and urban movements were the six sectors that were represented at the conference. Diversity was also reflected in the attendees of the forum. The resistance to free trade and the globalizing influence of neoliberalism is the intellectual foundation of the concept of food sovereignty.

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What is the key distinction between food sovereignty and food justice? In an ideal world, both movements would be able to build off of one another: food justice movements would encourage shorter-term political action and rights in domestic contexts, while food sovereignty movements would support longer-term political action and networks on a national, regional, and international scale.

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Food Deserts are a new phenomenon that have emerged as a result of urbanization. Food Deserts are metropolitan areas in which it might be challenging to acquire fresh food that is either economical or of a high quality.

“Food sovereignty is not a fixed principle, it's a process… It’s happening and it’s been made to happen, through the struggle of millions of people all over the world”. (Paul Micholson). Some believe it is a struggle against capitalism. Food sovereignty is the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to decide their own food and agricultural systems. It was rooted in neoliberal globalization and free trade, movements for food sovereignty are globalizing as well and inspires tens of millions of people around the world. There are contradictions in strategies for food sovereignty between attempts for local activists to create food systems that are autonomous from the whims of global market to change state policy and motivate institutional support for small farmers between proposals championing communal versus individual rights and between a focus on marketing trade fairer and efforts to build autonomous local food systems. There is also tension between the different actors in the food sovereignty movement. Interests of small farmers and different classes of rural farmers cannot be easily reconciled while the need of producers to receive fair prices seems at odds with the dependence of poor urban consumers on cheap food. The family farm and systems of patriarchy often go hand in hand. The question of who is sovereign in food sovereignty? Persist as well. All these debates represent political challenges for a growing movement. This makes it difficult to find a blueprint for realizing food sovereignty that can be scaled up and reproduced.

The concept of food sovereignty had its roots in nationalist food politics of the 1980’s and then in the mid 1990’s social movements were confronted by free trade agreements. Cheap commodities flooded rural economies in the Global south and agriculture consolidated. Weak states were left weaker with respect to regulating flows of food and agricultural goods. The peasant farmers of La Via Campesina were the collateral damage of this era. The call to sovereignty was an effort to bring power back to the state from deregulated markets and free trade regimes and bolster the rights of peasants. Since the onset in 1996 peasants are dealing with many events including new financial actors in agriculture products, increasing ecological pressures and more rural-urban circular migration.

Corporations continue their patterns of vertical integration, while new schemes of contract farming incorporate smallholders into global food chains where small farmers may own the land but cede degrees of control over their economies and labor. A new wave of investment in the transformation of global agriculture politics and trade forced farmers to defend their way of life on the land against market forces but also organized physical and economic closures. While countries in the G8 remain major players in global food politics, powerful new actors from the BRICS COUNTRIES (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to the growing pink tide of left leaning countries in Latin America need to be contended with. There is a new reformed UN Committee on World Food Security and new developments pose new challenges for the role of the state vis-a-vis food sovereignty. These changes in geopolitics and structural transformation come at a time of continued climate change among other challenges and rural and urban ways of making a living are no longer as distinct. Migration between the rural areas and the city is the only way to make ends meet. Pesticide toxicity affects more farmers and consumers making healthy food a rallying cry. These new realities have changed the context of the original food sovereignty (social economic, political, and ecological) has also changed. The movement and positions of the food sovereignty umbrella has always been diverse, but these shifts demand a new degree of flexibility. Food sovereignty is conceptualized and practiced today.

There is no one international sphere capable of regulating booming commodities markets, financial investments in farmland, or contract farming schemes. These flows of capital represent a power shift, an increase in power of the unregulated markets to distribute resources. Unlike the beginnings of the WTO (world trade organization), there is no single governing authority from which to regain food sovereignty. There are both internal and external dimensions of sovereignty. External sovereignty, sovereignty of nations within their own territories is the most widely accepted definition of food sovereignty. Internal sovereignty is the political structure of society with belief that the authority resides within the political community or with people. These two definitions should be mutually exclusive, and the duality could help explain why food sovereignty might simultaneously invoke national control over a country’s food supply and productive resources implying a state centric view and people’s internal control a more popular vision of food sovereignty. Activists have worked for political change at multiple scales such as peasants’ rights, agrarian reform, creation of local markets and agroecological farming techniques. Efforts centered on the local- building alternatives, bolstering local markets, building peasant autonomy, practicing agroecology, creating strong base organizations and resuscitating local food cultures- are all essential and growing. The local movement addresses immediate needs and demonstrates tangible alternatives, but it cannot replace organized efforts to turn the power of the state toward the food sovereignty project. Few other parties have the power to undertake this reform. Rather than seeing food sovereignty as being either “of the state” or “of the peoples/communities”, one to the exclusion of the other, understanding sovereignty as relational leaves room for different actors to coexist. This challenges the illusion of neoliberalism- that the state and society are separate domains. The integral state is a schema for understanding the delicate balance of coercion and consent that cements power in any given situation. Diverse attempts to implement food sovereignty are happening by national governments and from below. Via citizen-led social institutions known as comunas, with dynamic interaction between the two. Sovereignty is less about building silos and more about building relationships between state and societal actors and urban and rural divide.

The WTO (World Trade Organization), the UN (United Nations), and the CFS are not the only bodies where multiple sovereignties are negotiated. Asking who is sovereign in food sovereignty is a question of power and the many levels of power are negotiated. Applying a relational approach to sovereignty reflects the different ways power is contested and governance is changing with the development of new institutions to contest and transform politics and moves away from the ideal notion of what food sovereignty is, focused instead on how it changes the ways in which power is structured to change everyday lives of people. Food sovereignty does not look the same everywhere. This diversity is not because of confusion over what food sovereignty is but the differences are the product of history, identity, cultural memory, and political moments. If rural origins in an urbanizing world and not food are the center of conflict, food sovereignty principles may translate more clearly. The Healthy Food Hub in Chicago, who may not see themselves in the struggle for food sovereignty to begin with, used collective buying to carve out economic spaces, improve access to healthy food and revive cultural memory. The people centered approach to food sovereignty focuses on lived experience and dynamism at different scales. Political concepts like food sovereignty do not just travel, they are translated which requires a change in the original language and the one it is being translated into. Seen as a concept always being translated, food sovereignty can take various forms. Others may explore what food sovereignty looks like in a more authoritarian political context. The solution can take the form of “quite sustainability”. Where peasants don’t see themselves as part of a social movement. Principles of food sovereignty then can be adaptable to a variety of political contexts where direct action, formal organizing and other tactics may not be politically productive. A broad definition of food sovereignty may mean that it can be used as a basis for building coalitions between diverse actors (UFE).  The ways in which relations of production, consumption, and cultural politics can change because of food sovereignty organizing highly developing context-specific iterations. The relational approach to food sovereignty keeps its focus on power not simply on food. Food sovereignty may be a path toward ending world hunger and a proposal for a new kind of relationship between the state and society. Food sovereignty means “a right to act”. 

 The ’land grab” is a current indicator of the restructuring of the global food regime forcing the food sovereignty movement to respond. The strategic question of food sovereignty is refocusing from asserting the right of the states to food policy autonomy to asserting the right of small-scale producers to productive autonomy. Food sovereignty includes public health, rights of consumers to local food, food justice, worker protections, urban-rural alliance building, territorial rights among land users, opposition to GMOs, and the environment. Beyond food's material benefits and nutritional quality, food also has social, cultural, and environmental dimensions. Land use however remains at the foundation of the food sovereignty movement because of its peasant farmer mobilization and because human planetary survival depends on regenerative and resilient agro-ecosystems. The first decade of this century saw the crash of the neoliberal food regime which claimed to feed the world through global free trade through granaries in the EU and the USA. Unfortunately this resulted in a new form of colonization and put as much as 50% of the world's food systems in jeopardy. Non-compliance from some of the largest states (China, Brazil, India) as well as inflation shock in 2007 & 2008 and some rule breaking and land acquisitions by some major states and cheap food flooding local markets land acquisitions offshore feeding the world rhetoric followed the food crises along with population projections, legitimizing a new era of large-scale investment in industrial agriculture which came to be known as the “land grab”. The World Banks, 2007 World Development Report underwrote this sentiment at the World Food Summit of 2008 refocusing on investing in smallholders in the global south, via value chains organized by agribusiness- further putting the land and land use practice in jeopardy. This in-direct land grabbing now refocuses the food sovereignty project on the rights of producers and the responsibilities of the states. These new initiatives will depend on broad alliance building based on growing recognition of the salience of food producer rights for general socio-ecological reproduction. Such alliance building among producers and state and rural and urban has potential to reform states from the bottom up and appears to be underway in many places around the world. In 2008 L Via Campesina proclaimed the massive movement of food around the world is forcing a massive movement of people around the world. The shift in food regime is from a trade-centered assault on small producers with artificially cheapened food agriculture commodities to an investment-centered assault on land users everywhere via land grabs enabled by state complicity in new forms of transnational governance. Both direct and indirect land acquisitions constitute forms of land grabbing as they assert control over land substituting industrial agriculture.

The commandeering of lands inhabited and used by small farmers, landless laborers, forest dwellers, pastoralists have two dimensions: 1) a direct question of cultural and livelihood rights and 2) the is a question of privileging an unsustainable world scale of natural resources over securing and promoting low input lands use to provision locals and preserve bio-diverse environments. Protecting rights of small farmers involves focusing on land rights and addressing territorial rights and farmer to farmer networks building local and regional knowledge including agro-ecological farming practices creating seed banks, managing landscapes making cultural and practical claims to the land and its management to society. The rise of the peasant coalition, symbolized by its largest organization, La Via Campesina, which united over 200 million small producers in 160 organizations from over 80 countries, demanded in the 1990’s the rights of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agriculture policies. Developmentalism was founded on the assumption of a disappearing peasantry as it serviced urban industrialism. The rise of transnational agrarian movement not only inverts this episteme, but also denaturalizes the “global food system” by establishing claims of small producers to their own local food system- which account for two-thirds of the world's food. Food sovereignty presents as a process of social transformation and a reformulation of states from within. Such a vision is epochal in inverting the assumptions of modernity: mastering nature with industrial technique, subordinating agriculture to urban industrialism and devaluing human labor. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Association FAO is taking the lead in urging massive investment in smallholder agriculture. To resuscitate the African agriculture peasant systems, the Special Access Programs SAP’s short circuited in the 1980's donors are looking for a way to bolster smallholder agriculture. The world bank claims effective instruments in using agriculture for development include increasing assets of poor households, making smallholders more productive, expanding rural nonfarm economy. This new agriculture is to be led by private entrepreneurs in value chains linking producers to consumers and including many entrepreneurial smallholders for sub-Saharan Africa especially. The world bank sidesteps the global orientation of value chains, claiming that they promise local rural development to stimulate national orientation growth, even when they compromise local food security and sovereignty. While development institutions pay lip service to the importance of smallholders this generally refers to their significance as a new extractive resource as farming skills and practices are replaced with agro-inputs via forms of contract farming. Meanwhile land controversies and resettlement have propelled the investor community toward the value chain fix where the world bank acknowledges that contract farming allows farmers to hold on to their most important investment – their land avoiding disputes of ownership and community resettlement. However, these contemporary contracts represent a form of land grabbing with value chains specializing in the business of “control grabbing”. The current object of development, peasantries are redefined in entrepreneurial terms.

Ignoring the existence, the value, of local markets, the value-chain project is largely geared to incorporating small producers into international markets, and to growth in agribusiness profit, turning farmers into farm labor on their own land. Public Private Partnerships PPPs tend to be organized around a business model for small producers- including bankrolling states with private funds, particularly in Africa. The Gates Foundation’s financial resources are attracting the interest of poor African governments, making them more amenable to the suggestions of institutions from outside of Africa. Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) encourages support from the G8, the International Monetary Fund for Agriculture Development(IMFAD), the World Bank and the African Development Bank for the African agricultural sector, particularly in infrastructures to facilitate private investment: concentrating ODA Official Development Assistance ODA funds on public goods will free up domestic resources to focus on providing support to smallholder farmers to take advantage of new agriculture technologies to raise agriculture productivity. Associated Growth Corridors incorporate peasants into value chains as out growers, and target common lands alienated from small producers- millions, in the case of the Nacala corridor in Mozambique, where common lands have been declared abandoned and leased. A local corporation Rei do Agro finances small- scale producers providing Agri-inputs seeds and chemicals and mechanized field preparation for beans and maize and sunflowers. Unfortunately, even this model is organized for dependence. Our methods at Urban Farming Education UFE in Africa incorporates the one-time use of mechanized machines to level the field for drainage and provide windrows initially for fields and then to help with seeds until seed banking can be accomplished and we provide help and expertise in manufacturing organic compost until local farmers can do this on their own. The World Bank's Principles for Responsible Agriculture Investment (PRAI) strives to distinguish the different meanings for financial investment for large scale enterprises, and labor investment for small scale producers. This requires recognition that small -scale producers are the majority producers in the global south and are more effective in feeding themselves.

Contrary to liberal conceptions of individual rights, food sovereignty implies collective or group rights. This is the expressed grassroots resistance to food security land grabbing. The current Peasants Rights Convention campaign objective is not just to secure compliance with international norms, but to shift the norms themselves. The international Convention on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights only mentions access to food as the fulfillment of rights to food, whereas the right to produce food is much more fundamental to fulfilling the rights to food. Rather than having a market access right to food, the more fundamental right to produce food requires stabilizing the world’s small-producer population, responsible for 50% of the world’s food at the same time as it constitutes 50% of the worlds hungry. The normative shift, which some activists term “new generation” rights, is not simply about collective peasant rights but also about substituting the multi-functional character of small-scale production. The food sovereignty movement now confronts codes of conduct that define peasants as potential “smallholder business'', and project a singular commercial mode of agriculture investment. A misrepresentation of small-scale producers expresses the convenience of a development narrative of peasants as relics. The primary reason for peasant farming is livelihood and labor. Land is not only an object to secure but also is being reclaimed for the purpose of resource building as ecological capital and to secure cultural identity and to re-build food self-reliance. Food sovereignty is a principle and an ethical lifestyle that does not correlate with an academic definition but arises from a collective, participatory process. Under these circumstances the food sovereignty movement is confronted with targeting states and inter-government organizations that recognize, protect, and enhance agrarian- producing communities. It will be a challenge for inter-government institutions to make these national governments responsive to international rules. Meanwhile, local movements pressure states with direct action and legal means to slow or regulate land acquisition but political elites have reason to resist such pressure under of foreign aid and food security concerns, and cooperate with donors to license large-scale land grabs or value chain enclosures. The food sovereignty movement is to use pressure from above in the UN and below with grassroots movements on states to recognize and secure rights and capacities of their rural populations to produce food and regulate trade in the interest of human rights. Productivism is the operative principle for corporate and development institutions, as they concentrate on yield gaps in smallholder farming to justify improvement and impose a yield metric of farming comparisons that elides history, culture and ecology. It also only measures plant yields and not efficiency of water and energy nor environmental externalities rather than the ecology of farming land as wealth itself.

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