Paper recommendation: Local food sovereignty for global food security

By Joern Fischer

I’d like to recommend a new paper by my colleagues Julia Leventon and Josefine Laudan.

Leventon, J. and Laudan, J. (2017). Local food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges. Geoforum 85, 23-26. (LINK)

In a nutshell, the paper addresses some largely under-recognised challenges related to food sovereignty. For example, if every location or community is sovereign, then might it not be possible that one locality negatively influences another? And how does the focus on “local” sovereignty relate to national initiatives? Can a series of local initiatives be meaningfully scaled up to nations? And then, might it not be possible that different nations affect one another negatively through their strategies of national sovereignty?

These kinds of questions are tricky, and to some (me included) it feels that the food sovereignty narrative has avoided them a bit to date.

Julia and Josefine, in their new…