Corporations treat people as mere consumers and that is wrong 2021 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch Video Series
Food is more than just about silencing a growling tummy. Many of us consider it as a blessing and thus we pray and give thanks before meals. We share it with our neighbors as an act of friendship. Among Japan’s Okinawans, a group of indigenous peoples known for their longevity, food is medicine that often includes more than five servings a day of fruits and vegetables.
But in the last 70 years, the values, cultures, and spirituality in food that brought us together have been eroded by a food system that prioritizes profit over our welfare and harmonious relationship with nature.
In this video*, FIAN International’s Ana María Suárez Franco discusses the content of the article, “The Emergence of the ‘Food Systems’ Discourse and Corporate Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition.”
The article criticizes the agro-industrial food system, which she compares to a “vessel” emptied out of real solutions to hunger and malnutrition and then filled with false solutions that “favor the enrichment of big corporations to the detriment of everyone else.”
For Suárez, food isn’t just another commodity – a product that can be sold and bought if one has the means to obtain it. “Food should be for all,” she says.
Corporations have shallowed and narrowed people’s connection to food by treating them as mere consumers, according to Suárez. And this is wrong because people are holders of food rights and governments are duty-bound to fulfill these rights by fulfilling other rights – such as the right to land, health, work, and education. This, Suárez says, will enable people not just to access food but also define their own food systems.
*This video is part of the Oct. 13, 2021 online seminar, Not Our Menu: False Solution to Hunger and Malnutrition, organized by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition.
**Subtitles in English and other languages are available. Click the CC icon at the bottom of the YouTube video.
HUNGRY FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS ISSUE?
Read “The Emergence of the ‘Food Systems’ Discourse and Corporate Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition” written by Ana María Suárez Franco, Elisabetta Recine, and Colin Gonsalves, via this link: https://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/files/rtfn_watch_art.01-2021_eng_web.pdf
The article is part of the 2021 edition of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, “Not Our Menu: False Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition.”
#righttofood #foodsovereignty #foodsystems4people #notocorporatecapture #foodystems
