The commons-based international Food Treaty: A legal architecture to sustain a fair and sustainable food transition
Abstract
Food as a purely private good prevents millions to get such a basic resource, since the purchasing power determines access and the price of food does not reflect its multiple dimensions and the value to society. With the dominant no money-no food rationality, hunger still prevails in a world of abundance. Hunger is needlessly killing millions of our fellow humans, including 3.1 million young children every year, condemning many others to life-long exposure to illness and social exclusion. This paper argues this narrative has to be re-conceived and a binding Food Treaty, based on a commons approach to food, will create a more appropriate framework to work together towards a fairer and more sustainable world. The eradication of hunger no later than 2025 would be the main objective within a broader framework whereby food and nutrition security shall be understood as a Global Public Good. Within the treaty framework, those governments that are genuinely determined to end hunger (a coalition of the willing) could commit themselves to mutually-agreed binding goals, strategies and predictable funding. The paper presents the rationale to substantiate the treaty, as well as objectives, provisions and a possible route map for the process.
This thesis demonstrates how the actions directed to the public mind through communication
processes focused on economic growth contribute to the propagation of a monocultural
development, enabling the perpetuation of a colonization of knowledge and power, with an
exclusion vision. In this way, we find ourselves facing a machinic process of capture whose
violence goes unnoticed for many, because it presents itself as a communicative process
where the welfare is promoted as commanded by the laws of the market, where science and
technology are submitted to those laws that are considered as sovereign and legitimating. In
this way, the perceptions and values of reference are modeled, making the path of
development followed by the West desired and considered as the only possibility of existence.
Therefore, all levels of social reproduction and subjectivity production are affected, including
food, which is represented by the hegemonic food system. We corroborate the necessity to
find other ways to communicate other values, verifying that agroecology can be considered a
communicative process which legitimizes and produces other types of knowledges and is a
bearer of principles that are opposed to the supreme value supported by the law of the market,
promoting precepts such as care and defense of the integrity of nature laws. We find in
agroecology an ethical-political commitment that communicates a type of autonomous
development expressed by praxis and alternative food systems, a kind of own grammar where
autonomy restores the idea of production as a source of creation and human emancipation, re-
connecting men with men and men with nature in order to produce a more solidary planetary
society.
KEY WORDS: Communication, Agroecology, Communication for social transformation,
Media Ecology, Knowledge Ecology, Complexity
Food is now treated as a commodity, and the global industrial food system is now broken. Food should be a public good, with producers supported by government and industry in the public interest. This paper explains why, how and what concrete implications can be stem from this narrative shift.
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