The Food Sovereignty Prize 2014: A Focus on People & Agroecology by Bill Ayres, Huffington Post Oct 14, 2014 huffingtonpost/bill-ayres/the-food-sovereignty-priz_b_5976632.html The idea of food sovereignty emerges from and energizes an international movement, growing from the bottom up. Its members believe that all people have the right to produce the food they want, in the way they want, and in ways that feed their families and communities and bring them a fair return. Members of the food sovereignty movement also stand in solidarity against illegal land grabs - one of the main threats to creating food sovereignty and fulfilling the human right to food - in which governments and large corporations evict farmers from their land. On Wednesday, October 15th, at 7 pm CT in Des Moines, IA, the 2014 Food Sovereignty Prize will be awarded to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) from Palestine and Community to Community Development of Bellingham, WA. Both of these organizations have worked to protect the rights of their members - Palestinian farmers and fishers and indigenous migrant farmworkers in the berry fields around Bellingham, WA - many of them without basic human rights and struggling to feed their families, often in the face of deportation, violence and land grabs. The Food Sovereignty Prize was created in 2009 to raise the voices of grassroots leaders and movements and to share their stories and understand their reality. The idea, the movement, and the practice of food sovereignty show us that people on the frontlines of crisis - the almost 1 billion whose families are made so poor that they cannot eat - are the ones with the vision and authority to lead and develop the solutions for change. You may be aware of another more famous food prize: the World Food Prize was created in 1987 by agri-foods companies and were joined in 2007 by Monsanto, which donated $5 million to the prize. Their contribution was rewarded last year, when Monsantos own executive, Bob Fraley, won the prize in 2013 alongside the executive of another biotech company, Syngenta, as well as another biotech scientist. Cesar Chavez once said in the midst of a grape boycott, our struggle should not be about grapes; our struggle should be about people. The solutions to hunger that both of these prizes represent are widely divergent. The Food Sovereignty Prize starts with and focuses on people, the billions of small farmers who grow the majority of the worlds food and who are desperately poor. It honors the leadership of farmers themselves, not the discoveries of scientists. It does not trumpet technical solutions imposed on farmers but celebrates the lifelong expertise of farmers and respects their needs and resources as the only way to build lasting solutions. The food sovereignty movement is truly about people, not new chemical or technical discoveries that produce agricultural commodities. And by focusing on people, and on their indigenous, passed-down knowledge about agriculture in their local ecological and cultural context, it is helping millions of people to learn a better method of farming called agroecology that produces healthy food for families, protects the environment, restores the soil, and builds community and culture. Follow Bill Ayres on Twitter: twitter/whyhunger -- Come to Des Moines IA for our 3rd and final 2014 Occupy the World Food event Oct 16, 2014 Thursday, Oct. 16 OWFP Rally and Direct Action 6 p.m. State Capitol building, World Food Prize Awards Ceremony (9 min) Video 2013 OWFP Rally and Direct Action State Capitol https://youtube/watch?v=_ER03ZTGJQU Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry to speak at Oct 16 Occupy the World Food Prize Rally in DM https://groups.google/forum/?hl=en#!topic/national-cw-e-mail-list/CtUiO8BpBmQ All of our OWFP events are part of our efforts to redirect the public discourse about our Global World Food System through the use of public programs, an alternative food prize and direct action & nonviolent civil disobedience. OWFP contacts for more info: Sharon Donovan 515-987-5443 Frank Cordaro- 515 282 4781 / c 515 4902490 Occupy the World Food Prize campaign occupytheworldfoodprize About the World Food Prize in their own words worldfoodprize.org/en/about_the_prize/ About the World Food Prize by Food and Water Watch occupytheworldfoodprize/about13 3 min video of Frank Cordaro’s on Occupy World Food Prize 2013 Oct. Program vimeo/78375280 2013 Occupy the World Food Prize Summary Report occupytheworldfoodprize/post/64694610695/2013-occupy-the-world-food-prize-summary-report 2012 Occupy the World Food Prize Summary Report occupytheworldfoodprize/post/37122299064/2012-occupy-the-world-food-prize-summary-report
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 14:48:34 +0000