From Land Grab to Food Sovereignty

Andreas Exner will give an input at the Cross Border Experience Conference in Ljubljana, october 27th.

The discussion panel is

ENVIRONMENT BETWEEN CAPITAL AND COMMON

Thursday, October 27, 2011
City Museum of Ljubljana, 16.00 – 18.00

Andreas Exner, Social Innovation Network, Austria
Tom Kucharz, Ecologistas in Accion, Spain
Elisabeth Janssen, A Seed of Europe, The Netherlands

Moderator: Živa Gobbo, Focus – Association for Sustainable Development, Slovenia

The input in short:

Since 2008 private investors and states are looking for large swathes of land in order to profit from biofuels, rising meat and milk consumption, land speculation and the ensuing food price surge. EU investors both seek land in Africa and in the European periphery. In Europe, the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania are main targets. Furthermore, investors from the Middle East, Asia and the USA play a major role. Those also invest in European agricultural land. This land grab deprives local producers from access to land and further entrenches a profit-driven, export-oriented, corporate-led food regime with negative consequences for human well-being both socially and ecologically. At the same time, an opposing vision of agriculture gains in popularity: food sovereignty denotes the right of all peoples to define their mode of producing and consuming food by themselves.