Change for Children encourages rights-based development. We support initiatives that put the control of food into the hands of those who produce, distribute, and consume food, rather than being at the mercy of markets and large corporations.

The right to food is a human right. It protects the rights of all human beings to live in dignity, free from hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.

Support this cause. Learn more. For nearly twenty years, CFCA has been working in Comitancillo. This project works with the Mayan Mam indigenous peoples to provide tools, seeds, and agricultural training for farmers marginalized by the Guatemalan government.

Food Sovereignty. Food sovereignty focuses on production and harvesting methods that maximize the contribution of ecosystems, avoid costly and toxic inputs and improve the resiliency of local food systems in the face of climate change.

For more on food sovereignty, see: La Via Campesina Nyéléni Global Forum for Food Sovereignty National Family Farm Coalition [PDF] Harvesting Justice. Menu Skip to content. Home About Overview Our Work: Current Collectives Founding Document Member Organizations Support USFSA Vision and Operating Principles Food Sovereignty News Resources Our History: A Background of the U.

Food Sovereignty Alliance Publication: Food Sovereignty in the USA: A Selection of Stories Videos: USFSA Food Sovereignty Stories USFSA Report on Seeds and Seed Practices across the US Nyéléni Newsletter Reading Lists Get Involved Join the Alliance Contact Us Food Sovereignty Prize.

While corporations and governments profit from top-down, market-driven policy approaches, food sovereignty is an approach focused instead on people and communities, based on the following principles: FOCUSES ON FOOD FOR PEOPLE Food sovereignty puts the right to sufficient, healthy and culturally appropriate food for all at the center of food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries policies.

VALUES FOOD PROVIDERS Food sovereignty values all those who grow, harvest and process food, including women, family farmers, herders, fisherpeople, forest dwellers, indigenous peoples, and agricultural, migrant and fisheries workers.

LOCALIZES FOOD SYSTEMS Food sovereignty brings food providers and consumers closer together so they can make joint decisions on food issues that benefit and protect all. PUTS CONTROL LOCALLY Food sovereignty respects the right of food providers to have control over their land, seeds and water and rejects the privatization of natural resources.

BUILDS KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS Food sovereignty values the sharing of local knowledge and skills that have been passed down over generations for sustainable food production free from technologies that undermine health and well-being.

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Introduction Food insecurity remains a pressing issue, particularly in the Global South Berry ; FAO et al. Contrasting Food Security and Food Sovereignty According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO , "Food security exists when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life" FAO , p.

Food Sovereignty as a Spatial Phenomenon Food sovereignty proponents call for localised food systems where consumers and producers play a leading role in determining the type of food they eat and its production modes Blom et al.

A Global Food System? Nation-State Structures, Localised Food Systems and Food Security Although some scholars believe that food sovereignty is dynamic and takes place at different scales, which also applies to actors von Braun et al.

Sovereignty for Sustainability: Overcoming the Limitations of Neoliberal Food Security Having made a case for a multi-scalar approach to food security, how, from this perspective, does food sovereignty address the current shortcomings?

Institutional Change and the Role of Social Movements Institutional, political, and organisational changes must shift towards socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable food systems von Braun et al.

The Role of Activism in Transforming Food Systems The literature indicates that transforming food systems would be "impossible without social movements that create the political will among decision-makers to dismantle and transform the institutions and regulations that hold back sustainable agricultural development"… Altieri , p.

Implications for Food Ethics While it is logical to perceive food sovereignty as presenting a more ethical argument for meeting food needs in a way that ensures "sustainable and healthy diets" Fanzo , we believe that both food security and food sovereignty encompass ethical contradictions.

Concluding Remarks This paper presents an argument for the need to reimagine the concept of food sovereignty from conceptualising it as an alternative to food security to view it as a necessary precondition for achieving sustainable food security.

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Google Scholar LvC. Google Scholar Martínez-Torres, María Elena. In India, caste, clan, and socioeconomic status were found to affect the ability of women to access public food distribution systems and thus their right to food; this was aggravated by gendered relations, resulting in negative outcomes for women's food security Pradhan and Rao, While the overwhelming majority of studies reported a positive relationship between rights-based approaches and FSN outcomes, studies that report neutral or negative impacts on FSN also provide valuable insight into the efficacy of these approaches, and the barriers to their effective implementation.

In many of the 14 studies reporting neutral impacts of food sovereignty on FSN, the intervention of choice was insufficient for overcoming larger structural barriers to realizing FSN. In northern Nicaragua, for example, many farmers participating in a coffee cooperative's initiative to establish home gardens saw the potential benefits to their household food security, but expressed doubt about their ability to maintain gardens in the long-term given the expense and labor required Boone and Taylor, Two studies, in the United States and Canada, pointed to the mixed effects of urban gardening and farming projects that provide healthy food but also contribute to rising costs of living and gentrification that excluded the most food-insecure people Miewald and McCann, ; Vitiello et al.

The sole study reporting negative results similarly cites constraints on farmer decisions and livelihoods that could not be overcome by food sovereignty interventions. For impoverished farmers in the Telengana region near Hyderabad, India, local and agroecological modes of farming promoted by an NGO were often insufficient to meet household needs.

Farmers were often constrained by small land holdings and low social status, and in many cases, growing market-oriented monocultures of cotton or corn presented a better option to provide cash income Louis, In the right to food review, the nine studies reporting negative or neutral impacts of the right to food on FSN describe ineffective policies and insufficient government interventions.

Studies in two locations in India reported that household food subsidies were insufficient and exacerbated local state corruption Garg, ; Jha et al.

In South Africa, schools provided an important point of food access for girls, but also accelerated unhealthy transitions in body image and eating behaviors Stupar et al. One study in Greece documented the ways emergency food assistance programs conflict with political efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty and hunger Kravva, The studies reporting negative and neutral outcomes point to the possibility that poorly implemented right to food programs can have unintended consequences, and are in some cases simply insufficient to impact FSN.

This review compiles a broad set of cases in which food sovereignty and right to food approaches have strengthened food security and nutrition outcomes, demonstrating a general positive impact of food sovereignty and the right to food on FSN.

It also includes several studies in which a loss of rights, or a failure to ensure rights, resulted in negative FSN outcomes. These studies are widespread, based on data from all continents except Antarctica, and documented in both peer-reviewed and gray literature.

Publication bias typically favors positive results, so it would be misleading to judge the efficacy of rights-based approaches by the ratio of positive or reverse positive to negative or neutral impacts. However, the fact that reports of food sovereignty and the right to food supporting FSN are widespread across geographic regions in both the gray and peer-reviewed literature indicates that these approaches hold the potential to strengthen FSN in a wide range of contexts.

Taken together, these studies indicate that rights-based approaches can be used to solve urgent problems of food insecurity and malnutrition. Future research should focus on how, and under what circumstances, these rights-based approaches positively impact FSN, or fail to do so. The few observed neutral effects, and even fewer negative effects, of rights-based approaches on FSN are informative.

In the food sovereignty literature these were largely cases in which a food sovereignty-oriented intervention was insufficient to overcome larger structural barriers to realizing FSN.

Thus, neutral and negative outcomes of case studies should not be seen as an indication that the approach does not work. It is not the case, for example, that urban gardens and local food projects exhibiting mixed results such as the gentrification documented in Miewald and McCann, cannot have positive impacts on FSN.

Rather, their results may be limited because there are structures and forces in place that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Pre-existing forms of discrimination that fall along categories of difference such as race, indigeneity or ethnicity, class, gender, and ability, among others, can be so entrenched that a policy or intervention focused rights closely tied to FSN is not broad enough to overcome these oppressions.

For those whose social locations are placed at the intersection of multiple oppressions, the structural barriers to realizing FSN are even higher Crenshaw, ; Nyantakyi-Frimpong, This indicates a need for intersectional analyses and attention to human rights and entitlements beyond those most directly linked to food i.

Similarly, the lack of studies on land access and tenure food sovereignty action type B and gender equity food sovereignty action type F should not be taken as an indication that these aspects of food sovereignty matter less for FSN outcomes. Instead, this review shows that there is an assessment gap in both research and policy with respect to these two action types.

The same is true for the relatively few studies on access to markets right to food action type B , which indicates market engagement is understudied in regards to realizing the right to food.

The low number of studies in these action types indicates a particular need for research linking human rights-based FSN interventions to land access, gender equity, and engagement with markets. Rights-based approaches to FSN, including food sovereignty and the right to food, hold the potential to advance the slow and seemingly intractable progress toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition.

Current approaches to food security and nutrition are highly unlikely to meet intergovernmental targets by , including the FAO's Zero Hunger target, and the food security and nutrition targets in the Sustainable Development Goals FAO, Rights-based approaches like food sovereignty and the right to food differ from other approaches in that they work on the underlying set of human rights and entitlements that allow people and communities to achieve adequate food security and nutrition, in contrast to policies and approaches that, for example, focus solely on food availability and affordability e.

This review includes ample evidence from across the globe that rights-based approaches can and do positively impact FSN in a wide range of contexts, and can potentially contribute to progress on intergovernmental targets in ways that increasing production and expanding supplementation cannot.

The collective scope and diversity of case studies in this review—documenting positive impacts of rights-based approaches, negative impacts of the loss of rights, and the limitations of some actions that that addressed one kind of right but were unable to overcome lack of rights of another kind— suggest a course of action for rights-based approaches.

Realizing FSN requires multiple efforts to address the different ways in which communities are made vulnerable, their agency to respond to changing conditions is constrained, and structural forces may limit their ability to secure adequate and culturally appropriate food and livelihoods.

This review searched for evidence of the contribution of rights-based approaches—food sovereignty and the right to food—to FSN. Overall, we conclude that the majority of reviewed studies found that food sovereignty directly improves FSN, that processes impairing food sovereignty and the right to food negatively impact FSN, that efforts to improve FSN through rights based approaches can be limited by structural barriers difficult to overcome, and that impacts of the right to food on FSN are context-dependent.

Most studies regarding food sovereignty examined the effect of increasing autonomy over the production process through the adoption of agroecological practices, with a positive effect on FSN.

Comparatively, few studies focused on the role of land access, local markets, and gender equity to advance FSN. Literature in the right to food concentrated on advancing physical availability and economic access to adequate food through appropriate actions by governments and non-state actors, with mixed effects on FSN; and on fulfilling human rights that affect food access, availability, and utilization, with some negative impacts on FSN.

Studies reporting negative or neutral effects of rights-based approaches involved unintended consequences regarding enhancement of structural barriers or displacement of former food habits and cultural norms that further impaired FSN.

These constitute important cautionary examples for planners of rights-based interventions in land and food systems. There is a need for research that assesses the factors that increase or decrease the efficacy of rights-based approaches to FSN, and that describe the conditions for the changes.

This study provides clear indications on different action types articulated by rights-based approaches that result in positive outcomes for FSN. However, more studies are needed to address dynamics determinants to equal access to productive resources such as water and land for men and women, intersectional approaches to FSN; and that detail how, and under what circumstances food sovereignty and the right to food positively impact FSN—or fail to do so.

This is the first review to assess whether rights-based approaches have positive impacts on FSN, and adds weight to recent global calls for further research investment in rights-based approaches and their importance for FSN, and other benefits beyond direct human well-being HLPE, The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories.

DS coordinated the review process and prepared the final draft. MC-S led the coding process, contributed to concepts and analysis, assisted in preparing the final draft, designed charts, and revised the manuscript based on feedback from anonymous reviewers. BG-H developed the concepts and methods for the review, prepared the first draft of the manuscript, and contributed to screening and keying the literature.

NB contributed to screening and coding and provided feedback on the final draft. AB contributed to coding, provided feedback on the final draft, and revised the manuscript based on feedback from anonymous reviewers.

RB contributed to coding, provided guidance on methods and concepts, and provided feedback on the final draft. JB contributed to coding and provided feedback on the final draft.

EB contributed to coding, provided input on methods, and provided feedback on the final draft. MF contributed to screening and coding. DJ contributed to coding, provided input on methods, and provided feedback on the final draft.

TK contributed to coding. SK contributed to coding, provided input on analysis, and contributed to the final draft. AG contributed text from the HLPE report.

AW contributed text from the HLPE report. HW contributed initial concepts and methods and provided feedback on the final draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This review was partially funded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Committee of World Food Security CFS , and the World Agroforestry Centre.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers.

Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. We are thankful for the support of the library staff at Cornell University, USA.

We appreciate the work of S. Ortiz, who contributed to the final stage of the coding process. This review was partially funded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Committee of World Food Security CFS , and the World Agroforestry Centre to support the writing of the HLPE expert report on Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition.

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