Photo from Somali Bantu Community Association Facebook page

The Somali Bantu Community Association’s Liberation Farms have served as a lifeline of food and financial security to more than 200 refugee farmers whose communities are disproportionately hit by both COVID and hunger, while also serving the broader community, including provision of fresh, healthy foods to local schools.

With over two million members, the All Nepal Peasants’ Federation is working to dismantle casteism, as well as sexism and ageism, with special branches dedicated to the empowerment of Dalits (“untouchables” in the caste system), women, and youth. ANFPa has also played an active role in Nepal’s democratization process, achieving the inclusion of food sovereignty in the country’s new constitution. Nepal is now one of several countries in the world to have adopted food sovereignty into law.

Organized by the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, the Food Sovereignty Prize is awarded each year as a counterweight to the “World Food Prize” which critics decry for its singular focus on top-down, industrial approaches.

Learn more about the 2020 Food Sovereignty Prize awardees here. 

Featured image: All Nepal Peasants’ Federation courtesy of US Food Sovereignty Alliance

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As many have been saying for a long time (ah-hem, my mother), the biggest crisis in our food system isn’t a scarcity of food, it’s a scarcity of democracy. The world is producing 2,900 calories for every man, woman, and child on the planet—more than enough—and yet one in three children is malnourished. One in three!  And most of those children are malnourished not because they don’t have enough calories, but because they’re consuming too many of the wrong calories. Consider that 62 percent of teenagers in high-income countries drink one sugary drink a day or that only 42 percent of babies under 6 months are exclusively breastfed. Being clear on root causes is how we get clear on solutions. 

If the problem is not productivity, but rather democracy, then the solutions will clearly not be found in technological solutions, but in policy ones. We need to be asking: Who is calling the shots about what foods are regulated and what foods are taxed? Who has a say over what farming practices are incentivized and what agricultural research is funded? Who’s deciding the role food companies can play in our lives, from what marketing to kids is allowed to who sits at the table at governing bodies like the World Health Organization? 

To make real, transformative change in the food system, more of us—regular people and communities, not corporations—need to be asking those questions (and answering them). To fix our food, in other words, we need to fix our democracy.

Header photo: Future of Food panel at SOCAP 2019. Pictured (L-R): Roy Steiner, Rockefeller Foundation; Anna Lappé, Real Food Media; and Deb Eschmeyer, Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. Photo by SOCAP. 

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On Tuesday afternoons, North Oakland’s Driver’s Plaza is a lively place. Neighbors gather to listen to music, play chess, hang out and share a meal. The chef is “Aunti” Frances Moore, a former Black Panther and founder of the Love Mission Self Help Hunger Program, which has been serving a weekly meal for much of the past decade. Those gathering at Driver’s are typical of “the old Oakland,” largely but not exclusively African American, and struggling to get by in this rapidly gentrifying city. Many are visibly disabled. Most are elders, though there are also younger adults and children ranging from elementary to high school-age. Some rent rooms nearby while others are homeless, crashing with friends or living in vehicles.

Aunti Frances shares the experiences of those dealing with food insecurity: “I have slept on that sidewalk. I’ve slept on the rooftops. I’ve slept in the campgrounds and the shelters,” she says, “Therefore, I know how to give. I know what you need.” What is needed, according to Aunti Frances, is a healthy, well-balanced meal and a place to spend time with your neighbors and friends. This builds a sense that “we’re in this together, and have to take care of each other.” Aunti Francis pays for much of the food with her SSI check, though there have also been donations from neighbors and even a small grant. More recently, through a partnership with Phat Beets Produce, she has also been able to incorporate locally-grown produce, and volunteers have planted fruit trees and tree collards in the plaza itself.

For the past eight years, Aunti Frances has rented an apartment a few blocks away. But the triplex where it’s located was sold to Natalia Morphy and her parents James and Alexandra Morphy in 2016. Oakland’s rent control laws limit how much landlords can raise the rent on existing tenants, and follow the tenants even when the building is sold. Median rents have skyrocketed in this gentrifying city, and can only be raised to market rates when tenants move out. So even though Aunti Frances pays her rent on time, the Morphys want her out. Aunti Frances was served eviction papers on November 19th. This is the Morphys’ third attempt to push her out. Rent control should make this impossible, but there are gaps in the legislation for unscrupulous landlords to exploit. If the eviction is successful, it is unlikely that Aunti Frances will be able to find other housing. She’ll either be forced out of the city, or into the streets.

In recent years,food justice activists have been reflecting on whether gentrification is an unintended consequence of their work. Detroit’s Patrick Crouch worries that urban agriculture “inevitably attracts young white people” while DC’s Brian Massey is “increasingly finding that our work is being associated with, and even coopted by, the forces that are driving extreme gentrification and displacement.” Phat Beets is no stranger to these debates. In 2012, a local realtor profiled their community garden and farmer’s market as evidence of North Oakland’s “revitalization,” and the ensuing controversy prompted them to more deeply connect with long-term residents, including Aunti Frances. Together, they have tried to insulate the Self Help Hunger Program from the threat of gentrification by forming alliances with neighbors. Bringing people together is one of the Self Help Hunger Program’s fundamental goals, and Aunti Frances’ warmth and generous spirit easily bridges divides between Black and white, rich and poor, and old residents and new.

So it’s no surprise that dozens of food justice, housing rights, and anti-racist organizations, as well as neighborhood residents, have come together to support Aunti Frances. To launch their eviction defense campaign, they are planning a rally this Sunday December 10th that will show the landlords the strength of Aunti Frances’ community support. They are also collecting signatures, accepting donations, and asking supporters to share Aunti Frances’ story.

Just as activists have increased access to healthy food and green spaces in underserved neighborhoods, long-term residents are being displaced. Sustainable and just food means supporting residents who face eviction as well as creating livable, green, and affordable communities.

Alison Alkon is co-editor of the book The New Food Activism, our December #realfoodreads selection. Anna interviews Alison and chapter authors Joann Lo and Tanya Kerssen in this month’s podcast episode. 

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Fifteen years after the book’s original publication in 2002, Luis Medina, a graduate Food Studies student at New York University, hopes to bring these stories to the screen by traveling through four continents to discover people who find solutions to hunger, poverty, and landlessness in their communities.

“These stories need to be shared now more than ever. At this point in history, people fear for their democracy. Film has the power to engage our senses and compel us to act in ways a book does not,” says the director. “I believe all people want to make a positive difference in the world, to be of something bigger and life serving, but so often we are afraid and feel powerless. “Hope’s Edge” seeks to inspire us to take action by showing regular people around the world doing what we never thought possible.”

The book itself was a follow-up to Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, which challenged the idea that society needs to produce more food to feed the world.

According to the Friends of the Earth report Farming for the Future, we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. Still, as consequence of a model of food production which significantly contributes to climate change, environmental degradation, and poor diets, around 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity in food, it’s caused by a scarcity in democracy and unequal access to land, water, credit, and fair markets, preventing people from acquiring the resources necessary to feed themselves.

“Hope’s Edge” finds new spaces for people to find the courage to take action by showing others effecting change, challenging inequalities, and finding solutions to hunger, poverty, and landlessness around the world.

Originally published in Food Tank

Click here for the “Hope’s Edge” Kickstarter campaign.

Hope’s Edge

Read more on the Hope’s Edge website.

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by Anna Lappé

Nearly two decades ago, I stood on a train platform in the city of Bhatinda in the north Indian state of Punjab at sunrise. Flies buzzed. Young men dozed nearby with legs curled up for warmth. Next to me stood Afsar Jafri, an organic farming advocate who had been with us for days, taking my mother and me on a tour of nearby farmlands devastated by decades of chemical agriculture and communities thrown into crippling debt as a result. It had been a bleak journey. Yet, there in that train station, as the sun rose, I couldn’t help but notice our guide wasn’t exuding hopelessness. In fact, quite the opposite.

Curious, we asked how – in light of all we had seen and all he and his colleagues were up against – he seemed so hopeful. Jafri answered with a clarity that surprised me at first: His source of hope, he explained, came from being engaged, from working every day to change the fate of all those farmers we had met, and the many more beyond them. Action itself, he said, was his wellspring of hope, not any sure promise that the dire conditions we witnessed would lift anytime soon.

Until that moment, I had thought of hope as an emotion for the naïve, for people either too closed-minded to see how bad things were or too flip to realize the gravity of it all. I thought that to absorb reality – a warming planet, billions going hungry, endless war, persistent bigotry – meant tossing hope out the window.

I see hope differently now – and that morning in India was a turning point. Hope is not derived from a calculation: Are things bad, and getting worse? Or good and getting better? Hope arises from action.

But hope isn’t synonymous with optimism. Optimism, or pessimism for that matter, comes from a sort of hubris that you know how things will turn out – for better or worse. Hope, instead, grows from knowing the future has yet to be been written, and hope emerges from doing our part to write it.

At this moment, facing an administration whose leaders have trumpeted racism and xenophobia and denied climate change, and who have attacked immigrants and Muslims along with women and people with disabilities, I must say, this seems a particularly hopeful take on hope. But it’s also a radical one. As the author and activist Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

And consider Howard Zinn’s wisdom: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic,” wrote Zinn in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. “It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness…. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Let us then be victorious together.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

Photo by Mandias, Richard Ha

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