The production and availability of nutritious, healthy and culturally adequate food depends on functioning ecosystems, but also on our ability to recognize human rights and the intrinsic values of other living beings, from animals and plants to microorganisms.
The 2020 issue of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, Overcoming Ecological Crises: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Human Rights, from the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition explores a new generation of human rights and environmental law that reimagines interrelatedness between human societies and the rest of nature.
The issue includes input by ISS researchers and alumni:
- Christina M. Schiavoni (PhD alumnus) and C. Sathyamala (PhD alumnus and presently Academic researcher at ISS) are on the editorial board of the Watch
- A chapter by Salena Tramel (current PhD scholar) entitled ‘Converging to Overcome Crisis and Change the System A Conversation among Food and Climate Movements and Activists’
- Sathyamala is one of the ‘scholar activists’ interviewed for the chapter entitled, ‘Is Veganism the Solution to Climate Change? A Dialogue among Food Activists’ (by M. Alejandra Morena)
All the articles call for an overhaul of how we produce, distribute and eat food – if we are to regain control and radically transform our societies – but also, of how we collectively resist the exploitation of nature.
Building upon longstanding struggles of small-scale food producers’ organizations and Indigenous Peoples for food sovereignty and agroecology, today’s movements show us that ecological concerns are inseparable from socio-economic realities, including the political and ecological roots of our food systems. In these struggles, a fundamental approach will be to embrace diversity, build strong alliances and make peoples’ voices heard in all of the spaces where decisions are made.