Food Sovereignty and Citizen-oriented Management
Analysis and proposals in order to face starvation and malnutrition issues in the world
Pierre Vuarin’s lecture at the Nanjing administration school on August 27th 2004
That lecture developed:
1) The world situation of peasant farming and the importance of the number of small peasant farmers who work either manually or using animal traction. Three percent of peasant farmers in the world own a tractor.
2) The food situation, highlighting the importance of malnutrition (2 billion people) and of the place of rural areas (3/4 of the people who suffer starvation or malnutrition are rural)
3) The importance of two major proposals axes: food sovereignty, and citizen-oriented management.
Food sovereignty constitutes a common standard for those who, like small peasant farmers, struggle for the right to feed. It is also a way to oppose market liberalisation, which puts completely different food and agricultural systems in competition. It is also a way to claim that food issues should be solved as close to the people as possible, and with them. The concept shows some limits due to its understanding in certain languages. Terms like “divided food sovereignty” or “relative food sovereignty” could be used.
The concept of citizen-oriented management is an attempt to give a name to a certain view of management, focusing on the necessity of relationships between different actors at every level and between the levels (from local to global), and on the place and essential role of civil-society organisations in these processes.
4) Six other, more concrete proposals axes were submitted, and a brief analysis of the advance of those ideas and proposals at international level was done.
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