Feeding Ourselves Webinar 
Tuesday, May 19th @ 15:30 – 17.00

As global shocks expose the fragility of Ireland’s input-dependent, export-oriented food system,we ask – what would it take to secure our food sovereignty? 

The session will explore how measures including a stronger domestic food economy, public procurement and changes in trade dynamics can help build a fairer, healthier and more resilient food future, in Ireland and elsewhere.

Register here or through the QR code in the image above
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/al5uvVKlT6CGLDLbqFRSdQ

Featuring guest speakers:

Morgan Ody is General Coordinator of La Via Campesina, and a small-scale vegetable farmer from Brittany, France. La Vía Campesina is a global farmers organization of small and middle-scale food producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe. It includes 182 organisations in 81 countries. With a strong focus on food sovereignty, it mobilizes and advocates for agrarian reform in peasant territories and provides training on agroecological production methods.

Sophia Murphy is Executive Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). She is a food systems and international economy expert whose work is focused on resilient food systems and international trade. IATP’s mission is to work locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm and trade systems. It takes a systems-based approach to identifying measures that could support agroecology and food sovereignty worldwide.

Recommended reading:

• The Kandy Declaration of the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum
• Can the food sovereignty movement really play a role in systemic transformation? Freedom, egalitarian societies, and planetary boundaries
• Agroecology Meets the Care Economy: Bridging feminist economics and healthy food systems 
• LA Via Campesina and IATP proposals for a new world trade framework 

Context: 

As war disrupts supplies of fertiliser and fuel, people in Ireland are increasingly concerned about the nation’s food security, with many questioning the highly specialised, export-oriented and input dependent food system model that prevails. The statistics on Irish agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, water quality impacts, net exports vs imports, low domestic vegetable production, food poverty rates, obesity rates, consumption of UPFs, precarious farm incomes, farm succession, farm consolidation and the decline in the number of field scale vegetable growers show that something has to give. We can no longer reaffirm a model that has long run its course. Rather, farmers and food workers, millers, bakers, seed growers, chefs, activists, local authorities are building a system prioritising local food economies shaped by communities and geared towards wellbeing. 

With current interest signalling that a positive tipping point may have been reached, now is the moment for Ireland to pivot to a food system less vulnerable to global shocks, and more oriented to providing communities with healthy ecologically produced food for resilience —and set a national plan in motion.

Food sovereignty is defined by La Via Campesina “as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” 

Though practised primarily at the local level, food sovereignty is an outward-looking movement rooted in solidarity, diversity, and cultures – and  supportive of international trade when it is underpinned by food sovereignty’s own principles. To advance it nationally in Ireland we need to strengthen the base of local food producers able to meet the consumption needs of their communities, we need to ensure access to healthy, culturally appropriate food for all regardless of background, and we need to advocate strongly for reforms to the global and EU trade systems that are currently undermining food sovereignty in Ireland and elsewhere,  . 

Strengthening Local Food Economies in Ireland is the name and objective of the IEN supported collaboration between Cultivate, Feasta and Talamh Beo. For 1.5 years we have been developing research and proposals to this end – from ways to better resource Ireland’s food producers who supply their local communities with ecologically produced food, to public food procurement models that can shift sourcing to local food producers, to broader policy measures to change trade dynamics. 

Join us on May 19 to discuss this paradigm shift to food sovereignty in Ireland and elsewhere and the steps to get there, in conversation with global partners.