Preamble

Food is essential to life. Food not only provides the basic sustenance for physical survival and nutrition for healthy human existance; food is also a key element of people's culture.

The world now produces enough food to feed everyone, and yet millions of people, including 6 million children under the age of five, die each year as a result of hunger and chronic malnutrition. Everyday the toll is 25,000 deaths from hunger. [1] This number does not include preventable deaths from illnesses related to malnutrition and poverty.

Hunger exists because food and resources are not equitably distributed. In 2000 the richest 20% enjoyed 86% of the world's total income and wealth while the poorest 20% still only has one percent. [2] Neoliberal globalization threatens to further intensify this imbalance as corporations of rich industrialized countries utilize new technology and policies to wrest control over genetic and other resources for food production, leaving the poor even more powerless and further preventing them from feeding themselves and their communities.

Food security remains an elusive but critically important goal of communities and countries. The irony of increasing global hunger in the midst of plenty reminds us that food security cannot simply be the UN FAO definition of being able to ensure that food is available at all times, that all persons have the means and access to it, that it is nutritionally adequate in terms of quantity, quality and variety, and that it is acceptable within the given culture.

Neoliberal policies implemented by multilateral institutions such as IFIs, WTO and even FAO are continually breaking down the capacity of countries and peoples for self-sufficient food production and assuring food for everyone in their societies. While new technologies and " ‹Å“modern' production controlled by corporations and promoted by these policies promise supposedly better and greater food production, these present new products that are poisoned and genetically modified for the poor rural and urban majority who have lost their livelihood and income as a result of corporate takeover of agriculture and food production, and poison the environment in the process.

For nations and countries, a rights-based policy to ensure community and peoples control over food systems is the only solution in assuring food for all, especially the poor and marginalized. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples, communities and countries to determine their own production systems related to agricultural labor, fishing, food and land and associated policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances.

Food sovereignty is the power of people and their communities to assert and realize the right to food and produce food and fight the power of corporations and other forces that destroy the people's food production systems and deny them food and life. Nations and states must exercise food sovereignty to protect, promote and develop the people's food sovereignty from which it draws power.

Statement of Principles and Goals

1. Every human being has a fundamental, inalienable right to safe nutritious and culturally-appropriate food. As food is most essential to life, the right to food is an extension of the basic human right to life.
2. Systems of food production, distribution and exchange is a preeminent responsibility of the community and society. Assuring food stock, securing resources for food production, equitable distribution of food and management must be ensured and controlled by the community, giving first priority to the majority small food producers and conservers and preventing ownership and control over resources and production by corporations.
3. Food policy must be premised on achieving self-sufficiency in food production through the local food producers, particularly farmers, fishers, indigenous communities, pastoralists, etc., and not the corporations; such policy inevitably gives priority to domestic food production enhancing livelihood of people and not over export agriculture and fisheries that almost always indicates loss of livelihood and consequently compels people to be exploited in export oriented food industries.
4. Food production programs must be premised on mobilizing the majority small food producers and providing them, especially the marginalized sectors like women, Dalits and indigenous peoples, access to resources such as land, water, seeds and livestock.
5. Food policy and food programs must assure access to food not only through sufficient income for everyone, but also by providing mechanisms for free or subsidized distribution of nutritious and culturally-appropriate food to those who have insufficient income, as well as to those who suffer from natural and man-made calamities.
6. Food distribution and food production programs of communities and societies must be formulated and created with the full participation of the people, especially ensuring the participation of marginalized sectors of producers and consumers. Such programs must recognize and promote the initiative of the people to assert their rights to access to food and food production.
7. Food is inextricably linked to nature and the environment. Conservation of genetic resources and the environment should be promoted in food production through biodiversity based- ecological methods, providing the framework for technology development in food production, conservation and distribution that runs counter to patents on life and genetic modification of crops and livestock.
8. Food and by extension food production as fundamental human activities embody key elements of culture of a community and society, and such role must be recognized, conserved and promoted.
9. Safe and nutritious food must be assured through effective mechanisms and regulations the formulation and implementation of which promote and safeguard the interests of small producers and consumers in processes that involve the full participation of the people.
10. As food sustains life and society, food must remain an element of peace and cooperation among communities and among nations and societies. Turning it into instruments of whatever form of domination and even war by one community or society over another runs counter to norms of humankind in relation to food.

ENSURE THE PEOPLE'S ACCESS TO FOOD

1. National food programs must be based on strong community food programs that promote self-reliance and self-sufficiency, equitable distribution of food especially to the poor and supported by national food distribution programs.
2. Structural adjustment conditionalities of international financial institutions like the World Bank that dismantle food programs, food price regulations, and various forms of public food distribution must be rejected and reversed.
3. Workers wages and people's incomes must assure access to basic food and other needs through employment with dignity. Trade union rights must be promoted and protected so that living wages and working conditions are assured.
4. Price control laws and mechanisms must be put in place to ensure affordable and stable prices for staple and basic food products. Programs to provide free staple food or depending on circumstances, at subsidized prices, for the poor and marginalized.
5. The promotion of monopoly by food manufacturing corporations like Nestle and the resulting monocultures created by monopoly food retailers like Coca cola and Macdonalds erode food sovereignty and must be stopped. So must their strategy to use international trade in services and investment agreements to secure control over every aspect of the food system.

DEVELOP PEOPLE-BASED BIODIVERSITY-BASED FOOD PRODUCTION SYSTEMS OVER CORPORATE INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

1. Implement genuine agrarian, fisheries, forestry and rangeland reform premised on the free distribution of land and other key productive resources to the tillers, effective access to marine, forestry and pastureland resources, and ensuring comprehensive and integral distribution of production resources, and the strengthening and development of their production through cooperation and technology development.

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