Newsletter no 43 - Food Sovereignty in a time of pandemic

Voices from the field
1 - Agricultural and Food Workers
Excerpted from Voices From the Ground pages 8-12 http://www.csm4cfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/EN-COVID_FULL_REPORT-2020.pdf
During the pandemic, government authorities qualified agricultural and food workers as “essential workers”, meaning they had to continue to work in conditions where they were treated as expendable since employers often failed to provide adequate protective measures. The work they do is essential; their (...)

Box 1 : COVID- 19 underlines why corporate-controlled global food supply chains must go
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of the global food supply chains that have increasingly dominated food production and distribution in both the global North and the global South. The chain is already breaking down at one of its most critical links: migrant labor. Workers are falling victim to COVID-19 owing to their being deprived of the most basic protective gear, like facemasks, and (...)

In the spotlight 1
Voices from the ground: Only a radical transformation of the food system can tackle COVID-19
The emergence, spread and devastating impacts of the COVID- 19 pandemic exacerbate existing and avertable systemic injustices. How we build, organize and govern our food systems are key in determining and shaping these injustices. Decades of neoliberal policies, reducing the role of the state and privileging a free market-led food system, have led to the dismantling of public (...)

Editorial
Food Sovereignty in a time of pandemic Illustration: Farm Workers -Vegetable and Fruit Pickers – Essential Worker Portrait #6 by Carolyn Olson, http://carolynolson.net
When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020, few imagined the scale of the devastation that the disease would wreak across the world, or for how long it would last. As COVID-19 swung from country to country on its deadly course, (...)