Food Justice: A process whereby communities most impacted and exploited by our current corporate controlled, extractive agricultural system shift power to re-shape, re-define and provide indigenous, community-based solutions to accessing and controlling food that are humanizing, fair, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, environmentally sound and just. Food Sovereignty A framework going beyond access to ensure that our communities have not only the right, but the ability to have community control of our food including the means of production and distribution.
Food Apartheid: The systematic destruction of Black self determination to control our food (including land, resource theft and discrimination), a hyper-saturation of destructive foods and predatory marketing, and a blatantly discriminatory corporate controlled food system that results in our communities suffering from some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes of all times. Many tend to use the term “food desert,” however food apartheid is a much more accurate representation of the structural racialized inequities perpetuated through our current system.
Food sovereignty entails a shift away from corporate agricultural system and towards our own governance of our own food systems. It is about our right to healthy food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, with the right to define and ultimately control our own food and agriculture systems. Shifting from an exclusively rights-based framework to one of governance puts the needs of those who work and consume at all points of the food chain at the center rather than the demands of corporations and markets.
*Courtesy of the National Black Food & Justice Alliance (www.blackfoodjustice.org)
What is Food Justice? - dara cooper
