Food Sovereignty Quotes

A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises.

With China’s 1.4 billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to compete with U. S. consumers for the U. S. grain harvest, cheap food seen by many as an American birthright, may be coming to an end.

When the Nobel Peace Prize Committee designated me the recipient of the 1970 award for my contribution to the 'green revolution,' they were in effect, I believe, selecting an individual to symbolize the vital role of agriculture and food production in a world that is hungry, both for bread and for peace.

You know what the problem is with world hunger? We've been sending them food.

The brutal fact is that which foods are available in your grocery store is determined by trade wars, agriculture policy, and the outsized power wielded by large corporations.

I think the only real knowledge I had before I went to Iowa was what I learned from 'Food Inc'. But once I got there and developed these extensive relationships with the farmers, I realized that we're basically made of corn.

The Safe and Affordable Food Labeling Act aims to address unnecessary impediments to feeding the world.

There are 6 million people in the world. With organic farming, we will only be able to feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion will volunteer to die?

Hunger has no ideology. It does not respond to party or to rant. Hunger, in short, is not a red state/blue state problem.

Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as indigenous peoples and a way, one of the most surefooted ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us.

When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food.

The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country - or, for that matter, a region - to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people's ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?

In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the common good.

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.

My grandmother taught me the seasonality of food. She lived with the rhythms of nature. That's the way we should live. Why do we need raspberries in January flown from Chile?

The UN special envoy on food called it a 'crime against humanity' to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol when almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion human who are living in dire poverty?

The first thing I feel like we have the potential to do is to deliver to consumers more roots to their home.

A safe, affordable and plentiful supply of food is a national security issue.

When there is enough food to feed everyone, why are 870 million people going hungry? We must learn to share what we have; no one race or nation has a greater right to life than another.

My politics are food-related - food banks, the living wage, zero hour contracts - and my food is political.

I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And we should label them because there's absolutely nothing to hide.

Famine, it turns out, is not caused by a failure to produce food. It is caused by a failure to distribute food correctly — because the ruler is not accountable to the starving.

Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days.

Food isn't like anything else. It's something precious. It's not a commodity.

The industrial food system ships in high-calorie, low-nutrient, processed food from thousands of miles away. It leaves us disconnected from our food and the people who grow it.