Arts Lab

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY

The Food Sovereignty lab focuses attention on how ideas and practices of history, power, and justice are integral to food production and cultures of food consumption.

News, links and resources:

We have a dedicated webpage for our "Understanding Sembrando Vida" project.

We have a dedicated webpage for our "Accompanying the Plan de Vida" project. 

Lab Description:

The Food Sovereignty Network (FSN) was formed in 2021 amidst a series of crises (Covid-19, Brexit, the climate emergency) that revealed structural vulnerabilities in the UK food system and exposed the scale of food poverty in the UK today. The FSN brings together academics, activists, artists, and practitioners (especially growers!), to understand the problems in our interconnected global and local food systems, the obstacles to change, and how we can work together to grow a better world.

 The term ‘food sovereignty’ connotes ‘peoples’ democratic control of the food system’, and encompasses access to land and productive resources, access to seeds, the promotion of local knowledge and local markets, and the centrality of food to cultural identity. The Food Sovereignty Movement emerged in 1993 with the establishment of La Via Campesina during an international meeting of social organisations and small-scale food cooperatives in Belgium. La Via Campesina has since developed into a global social movement that calls for recognition of ‘the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods’ (Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007).

Unlike ‘food security’ - the dominant lens used by governments and international institutions to evaluate food systems – food sovereignty rejects reliance on highly industrialised, corporate-led models of food production. Food sovereignty activists seek to construct alternative food systems that are more ecologically sustainable and socially just, in reflection of how food systems today are the products of complex historical processes and power dynamics that perpetuate legacies of colonialism, racism, and social inequality.