Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift [Hardcover]

Who should provide food, and through what relationships? Whose livelihoods should be protected? For over 20 years the peasant farmers of La Via Campesina have been engaged in the fight against injustice, hunger and poverty under the banner of food sovereignty, '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'. They campaign for healthy, sustainable alternatives to an industrial food system controlled by agribusiness companies and the architects of unfair trade agreements. This book draws on grounded case studies of agrarian movements in the Americas and Europe as exemplars of a 'power shift,' as local opposition scales up to global action in an effort to wrest control of our food away from transnational corporations and back to communities.1. Introduction 2. An Undemocratic Food System 3. The Peasant Way, Thorough Food Sovereignty 4. Poor, Rural and Indigenous: The Treble Struggle of Chilean Women 5. From the Tequila Crisis to the Tortilla Crisis: The Case of Mexican agriculture 6. Challenging Notions of Sovereignty: The Basque Farmers 7. The Campaign for Food Sovereignty 20 Years On

This book offers a comprehensive, multi-dimensional account of the global food system and the generation of a burgeoning food sovereignty counter-movement from crisis. Not only does the author provide a substantive mapping of the structuring and institutional politics of agribusiness from production to retailing; she also details the organising trajectory and culture of global opposition through cumulative networking and successful discursive reframing of what is at stake in a food insecure and environmentally challenged world. A didactic and challenging template to agri-food scholars and activists alike. - Philip McMichael, Professor of Development Sociology, Cornell University, USA

A detailed insight into how the worlc