Sustainable Food City Witzenhausen

 

We hear and read more often about it; food sovereignty. But what is it exactly and why is it so important?

Back in the days food belonged to the people of the land. These people within a community had the knowledge in how to produce healthy foods, to decide what they wanted to eat, to ensure enough food for physical needs and the accessibility for everyone living in the community. However, in current times corporations are the ones who own the land and who control and dominate the global food system. This has several consequences; valuable knowledge is getting lost, small farmers can’t beat up against big corporations, accessibility for food becomes harder for people living in poverty, and the control of the community is taken away. In 1996 the movement La Vie Campesina stood up against this phenomena, and introduced the idea of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is defined as:

‘The right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets, and; to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources." (LaVieCampesina 2003).

In 2011 the World Development movements adds to this definition: Food Sovereignty rejects corporate control. It "requires that women and men who provide food have control of land and resources such as water and seeds, to be used and shared in socially and environmentally sustainable ways. Privatisation of such resources, for example through intellectual property rights regimes or commercial contracts, is explicitly rejected." (World development movement 2011)

Food security has been defined by the World Food Summit as: “when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (WHO 2014)

In Witzenhausen several initiatives try to give the control back to the community. Find out more about different project (again click on project)!