Cereals and fruits for Breakfast, salad and bread for Lunch, vegetables and pasta for Dinner – our lives deeply depend on food. This shows: We as humans are closely interlinked with nature. The way we produce our food affects nature. The way we distribute it raises questions of equality. The food-nature relationships are complex and include various ecological and social aspects such as power relation, gender, land use or natural resources.
„Food Sovereignty is a paradigm that raises the voices of the actual people practicing agriculture. It should be through the thoughts of farmers that we develop and built our research and not the other way around, as it is often what we do in academia. I had, for the first time, the opportunity to write an article built from a grassroots paradigm. I think that made it special.”
Camila Benavides-Frias from the SES-Institute was part of the research team.
Because of the importance of food for sustainable development, researchers increasingly discuss the question how food and nature is interwoven. Of the several lenses one might use to study foo-nature relationships, Food Sovereignty is an interesting one. Food Sovereignty is a grassroots paradigm and includes social and ecological issues. It is about access to nutritious and culturally suitable food that is produced using environmentally friendly and sustainable approaches. Additionally, it contains the autonomy to determine food and agriculture systems.
Food Sovereignty has six pillars. Camila Benavides-Frias and colleagues focused on one of those pillars. The one focusing on human-nature relationships, the so called ‘Works with Nature pillar’. This pillar emphasizes the interconnection between food and nature, highlighting the importance of responsibly managing and utilizing land, water, and seeds in a sustainable manner. This approach aims to safeguard biodiversity and the essential functions of ecosystems, which are crucial for achieving Food Sovereignty.
Camila Benavides-Frias and colleagues analysed how the “works with nature pillar” was covered in the scientific literature. In their new paper “Exploring the ‘works with nature’ pillar of food sovereignty: A review of empirical cases in academic literature”, they asked: How does academic literature cover the works with nature pillar of food sovereignty? For that, they reviewed empirical case studies from 92 scientific articles.
Results & Discussion:
Several key topics were already frequently discussed in scientific research, which is positive for Food Sovereignty. Firstly, it is the topic of ecological agriculture practices and mainstreaming the refusal of intensive-industrial agriculture practices. Secondly, the importance of ecological agriculture and its specific practices, particularly within the context of intensifying food systems and the abandonment of rural areas. Thirdly, there was a prevailing emphasis in the literature on the urgent need to address the rapid decline of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the values associated with nature.
However, the analysis also revealed that some topics are side-lined in research. For instance, topics such as non-agricultural extractive activities, traditional wildlife, hunting, harvesting, and fishing as well as natural processes. Future research could pick up on them to contribute to the discussions about food-nature interdependences.
“The difficult part was to be respectful to the essence of the paradigm. It was the first time I was going to be writing about Food Sovereignty (FS). Until now, my only experience with it were my observations through the years I worked with peasant-indigenous communities, however I never engaged directly with this particular topic. I had thus to be careful to not distort or over interpret the results we obtained. This articles results’ do contribute to supporting the paradigms’ importance for understanding human-nature interplays. However, it was important to discuss and acknowledge the importance of the social and political pillars of this field of research. We had to recall that FSs’ social-ecological-political nature is fundamental as a whole, to avoid its co-optation by mainstream research.“
Camila Benavides-Frias from the SES-Institute was part of the research team.
If you would like to explore this topic further, you can find the whole paper here.
Benavides-Frias, Camila; Stefan Ortiz Przychodzka, Isabel Díaz-Reviriego, Elisa Oteros-Rozas, Leonie Burke, and Jan Hanspach (2023): Exploring the “works with nature” pillar of food sovereignty: a review of empirical cases in academic literature. In: Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2023.2288318
Text by Mareike Andert
Ideas for Sustainability 