Framing food provisioning research in the UK

This chapter argues that the concept of food sovereignty is currently not a particularly prominent feature of public and political discourse associated with food provisioning in the UK. A ‘Food Sovereignty Now’ campaign was established as recently as 2011 which, following the 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, ¹ defines food sovereignty 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”. ² Much more pronounced than food sovereignty in the UK is the concept of food security which has, since the latter part of the 2000s, become a key driver of national agri-food policy ³ although whether it has found its way into the popular lexicon is less clear (Battachary and Hunter, 2012; TNS-BMRB, 2012). A widely cited definition of food security, which has been mobilised in the UK context by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) (2006, p. 6), derives from the 1996 World Food Summit and describes a condition whereby “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). The relative prominence of these two concepts of food security and food sovereignty is particularly important since it has been suggested that they understand the problems and challenges of food provisioning and their proposed solutions in very different ways. For example, it is argued that “food sovereignty goes beyond the concept of food security… [Food security] means that… [everyone] must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day[,] … but says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced”. ⁴