Page "Food security" Paragraph 104

A third approach is known as food sovereignty ; though it overlaps with food justice on several points, the two are not identical.

It views the business practices of multinational corporations as a form of neocolonialism.

It contends that multinational corporations have the financial resources available to buy up the agricultural resources of impoverished nations, particularly in the tropics.

They also have the political clout to convert these resources to the exclusive production of cash crops for sale to industrialized nations outside of the tropics, and in the process to squeeze the poor off of the more productive lands.

Under this view subsistence farmers are left to cultivate only lands that are so marginal in terms of productivity as to be of no interest to the multinational corporations.

Likewise, food sovereignty holds it to be true that communities should be able to define their own means of production and that food is a basic human right.

With several multinational corporations now pushing agricultural technologies on developing countries, technologies that include improved seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, crop production has become an increasingly analyzed and debated issue.

Many communities calling for food sovereignty are protesting the imposition of Western technologies on to their indigenous systems and agency.