Portal:Food Sovereignty/Intro

The Food Rights Network (FRN) is a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy project of the Center for Media and Democracy. FRN supports food sovereignty.

Family Farm Defenders activist and Wisconsin dairy farmer Jim Goodman speaks to Occupy Wall Street 12/4/11

Food Sovereignty is defined as:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets, and; to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.

- "Statement on People’s Food Sovereignty” by Via Campesina et. al.

Raw milk is milk that comes directly from cows, goats and sheep. It is not modified by processes such as pasteurization and homogenization. Farmers’ practices, such as how those animals are fed, milked, and treated, along with how the raw milk is stored and transported, are critical to the quality of that milk. FRN supports the policies and practices in dairy farming that make it possible to have appropriately sized herds and pasture for grazing that will help ensure good quality milk. FRN supports practices in storage and transportation of raw milk that have made this a safe and healthy product for generations. FRN supports the farmer’s right to sell raw milk to individuals and commercial enterprises both on and off the farm. FRN supports the milk drinker's right to purchase raw milk both on and off the farm.

FRN also opposes the sewage sludge scam of the PR rebranding of industrial and human sewage sludge as "biosolids" and of dumping toxic sewage sludge on farms and gardens. It is FRN's position that no food should be grown in toxic sludge.