Agrifood Brief: From food sovereignty to food security

 Last week saw France’s agriculture minister, Julien Denormandie, step back from politics altogether after being snubbed for the role of prime minister.

His shoes were quickly filled by Marc Fesneau, who is, despite having a relatively low public profile, well respected in the field of agriculture and received strong backing from the sector.

And, interestingly, alongside a shiny new minister came a shiny new title.

‘Alimentation’ (‘food’) has been officially dropped from the minister’s title in favour of introducing the term ‘food sovereignty’.

And although the change may seem fairly innocuous, its addition and the justifications behind it say a lot about the future direction of France’s – and the EU’s – agriculture sector.

A term coined by the agroecological movement of the 1990s, food sovereignty is defined by the global peasant movement La Via Campesina as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” (...)