Seeds of change: healthy food for everyone

Type: Campaign briefings
Date: 2 February 2014
Campaigns: Food

Growing food sovereignty from the grassroots.

Food is central to our health, quality and length of life. It is integral to our local cultures: producing and eating together binds people, families and communities together, and good food is at the heart of many celebrations.

But the global food system is in crisis. Access to food is a basic human right, but the industrialisation and commercialisation of food is turning it into a commodity to make a profit for a few.
The rapid growth of industrial agriculture has done little to stem the scourge of hunger that hundreds of millions of people face on a daily basis.

It has already pushed millions of small family farmers off the land in industrialised countries, and the same process is underway in non-industrialised countries, with farmers’ land increasingly being grabbed from them to make way for vast expanses of monoculture crops such as soybeans and oil palm for export. And highly processed, poor quality food is now the norm on supermarket shelves.