BIG REVOLUTION, LITTLE REVOLUTION

Last weekend in The Hague, Monsanto (often as a metonym for the assemblage of industrial agriculture) was accused of crimes against humanity and nature at a citizens tribunal. Keep an eye out for our ethnographic report on the event, coming soon!

The Monsanto Tribunal may have comprised disparate and sometimes contradictory parties, but it does demonstrate that there is a global movement (as Marion Nestle questioned last week) coalescing around food sovereignty. This year’s Food Sovereignty Prize winners were announced on Saturday – to the Farmworker Association of Florida (domestic) and the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (international). The prize presents an alternative to the World Food Prize, also presented last week and won by a group of plant scientists for biofortified sweet potato.

If you prefer your anti-GMO revolution in the form of processed snacks, check out the new Our Little Rebellion line of “triangular corn-based food” from BFY Brands. It might be hard to reconcile such enterprises with the militant anti-capitalism on display at the Tribunal, but it raises legitimate questions about how to define the scope of the movement. In what other small ways are people (and foods themselves) asserting agency? Agricultural Heritage Systems in Italy, tastes of rural nostalgia in Japan, and Food Policy Action’s 2016 scorecard for every US senator and representative, just in time for the election.