Food Sovereignty: Indigenous input

 The article “Whose Justice Is It Anyway?” explores a central tension in contemporary food debates: whether food security and food sovereignty represent opposing paradigms or whether they can be productively integrated. According the paper, food security as traditionally framed prioritizes distributive justice, ensuring individuals have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food through market-based and governmental distribution systems. In contrast, food sovereignty movements emphasize the right of communities to self-determine food production, agricultural policies, and cultural food practices, challenging the limited justice framework implicit in dominant food security approaches. Their argument reframes food sovereignty not as antagonistic to food security but as a broader justice framework that encompasses and informs the rights claims necessary for equitable food systems.

This philosophical framing resonates strongly with themes in an article I found on Indigenous food systems. The article states that for American Indian and Alaska Native communities, food security defined solely in terms of access and availability fails to capture Indigenous values, which include cultural foods, reciprocal relationships with land and more-than-human relatives, and community sharing systems. It argues that Indigenous Food Sovereignty (IFS) embodies a holistic food system grounded in relationality, reciprocity, and cultural values, suggesting that conventional food security measures are insufficient and sometimes inappropriate for capturing Indigenous food realities.

Taken together, these works support a critical point: food security is necessary but incomplete. Noll and Murdock’s justice-based critique parallels the article’s decolonial critique of dominant food security concepts. Both suggest that expanding our understanding of justice in food systems, whether through community agency and self-determination (food sovereignty) or through Indigenous worldviews that include environmental, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, offers a richer, more equitable basis for addressing hunger and inequity than access-focused frameworks alone.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11938391