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Maria Polzin
Community Systems Strengthening for Health (CSS)
Cape Town, South Africa

The more I learned about food security this summer, the more I realized that the global prioritization of food security is not the only existing movement that addresses issues of malnutrition and hunger. In fact, there exists a movement that includes many more crucial yet overlooked layers: the demand for food sovereignty. What is the difference between food security and food sovereignty?

According to the United Nations, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” La Via Campesina, or the International Peasant’s Movement that first brought food sovereignty into public debate, defines food sovereignty as “the peoples,’ Countries,’ or State Unions’ RIGHT to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries.” They define it as a right because they believe that the United Nations should adapt the right to food to include autonomy over one’s methods of producing, obtaining, and distributing food, amongst other processes of agriculture and food markets. They recognize that this would require the entire upheaval of existing systems and policies to make space for new democratic-decision making in governments, as well as new forms of local to international market cooperation that prioritize fair prices for farmers and sustainability of land.

Food sovereignty more fully embodies the right to food because it adds a human dimension to food security, acknowledging that one should have a say in their relationship with food. This renders the movement more inclusive of other rights, too, as they prioritize the right to cultural life, rights of women (who are disproportionately affected by the oppression of farm workers), indigenous practices, and environmental rights. Ultimately, food sovereignty does not diminish food security, but adds it as one factor to achieving a just and sustainable world.

I see dynamics between the food security movement and the food sovereignty movement highlighted in my work. For example, grocery stores are increasingly being built in townships around Cape Town as a means of addressing food security. However, there is no proof that these efforts through existing markets are actually making a difference. In fact, there is more evidence that this method is decreasing hunger but exacerbating obesity and incommunicable diseases. This are for multitudes of reasons for this phenomenon: many of the individuals I spoke with do not buy their fruits and vegetables at the grocery store because they are often too expensive; participants expressed that they are not educated to understand the important connection between diet and health; and even if the fruits and vegetables are made cheaper, they will prioritize other expenses with their grant money like school fees for their children or transportation costs to get work.

For all of these reasons and more, there is a growing movement in Cape Town for the implementation of home and community gardens as a means of obtaining fresh and local produce, and in some cases, selling the extra produce to obtain money for other needs. These efforts play into the food sovereignty movement–even if the connection is not explicitly made–because community members are increasingly saying: governments’ and corporations’ methods are not working to address food security in the ways that we need, so we are taking the food system into our own hands. The documentary I made this summer focuses on the projects community members are undertaking to address their own food insecurity and sovereignty. The introduction can be found here.

Maria Polzin
Community Systems Strengthening for Health (CSS)
Cape Town, South Africa

I went to South Africa with the goal of building an oral history archive, consisting of long-form interviews with community members and community stakeholders that are involved in CSS’s networks for the realization of the right to food. These interviews would be beneficial to CSS for improving their training materials and policy recommendations, to the University of Cape Town (UCT) for their research on food security, and they would, hopefully, act as a tool for empowerment as community members claim autonomy over their narratives through storytelling.

However, when I arrived in Cape Town, there was a new project manager for CSS, Lucille. Lucille has a background in grassroots activism and community organizing, and she was tired of researchers entering communities, asking their own questions, and leaving to write papers that the community members would never see. While the oral history archive was a bit more accessible because the end product would be solely their own spoken languages, we were still stuck on the question: what could these activists do with hours of audio files?

Lucille and I bounced ideas back and forth for about a week until we finally landed on the medium of film. With film, community members could have more control over their representation by choosing what locations they want to feature, such as their homes, churches, and community gardens, and they could potentially use the film to obtain funding for their projects in the future. We were working with community members that had undergone training through CSS on food security, food gardening, and nutrition, so many of them utilized the training to start or strengthen their own child feeding initiatives, nutritional education programs, and home and community gardens. Furthermore, the film could still serve as a tool for CSS and researchers to better understand through first-person narratives how to improve training programs and access to food.

These conversations with Lucille brought to light an important topic that would be a running theme throughout the summer and, I expect, in all of my future work: knowledge is a human right, making knowledge dissemination a human rights issues. How can we as researchers ensure that our work is both beneficial and accessible to the community members involved? How can we as researchers, often holding privilege in spaces like universities or formal sectors, center community members’ expertise in a format that still makes sense to them?

These questions are particularly important when working on food rights because sustainable agriculture best emerges through the co-creation of knowledge: combining indigenous practices with an understanding of the land and the communities’ needs. There are many ways to approach the human right to knowledge, but it always involves listening. In the weeks that followed, I would meet with community members, before beginning any filming, to build relationships and really listen to learn what stories they wanted to tell.

Below are some stills from the documentary. 

Maria Polzin
Community Systems Strengthening for Health (CSS)
Cape Town, South Africa

When I was told that CSS trains individuals on food and nutrition, I imagined that the majority of the information would focus on aspects such as what a nutritious diet looks like and food’s connection to noncommunicable diseases. While the programs do touch on these important topics, the bulk of the lessons are actually about how to start and maintain a food garden. This is part of increasing efforts by non-profit organizations and government agencies to promote food gardens as a means of addressing food insecurity. Because of this focus on growing one’s own food, my work largely explored individual’s relationships with food in the context of their home and/or community gardens, which has inevitably required me to ask the question: can food gardens sustainably improve food security and better community health?

I’ll start with what I found to be the positives of food gardening:

• Empowerment:  Almost every participant with whom I spoke said that gardening made them feel good––feel happy. Many individuals stated that working in their garden gives them peace of mind and that they feel satisfaction and joy when they harvest their own food.
• Cost reduction:  Every participant said that gardening has helped them reduce costs because the money they save from decreased spendings on groceries far outweighs the money they have to spend on seeds and the occasional supplies.
• Form of income:  For some participants, their gardens have become a means of income because they can sell their excess fruits and vegetables to their community, and in some cases, to formal farmers markets and grocery stores. This is especially true for those that are retired or unemployed and have time to invest in the health and expansion of their gardens.
• Strengthening community:  Almost every participant expressed that gardening has brought them closer to their communities. When individuals are not selling their excess food, many choose to give it for free to their neighbors, local children, and soup kitchens. 
• Education:  All of the community members learned more about health and nutrition, and the majority of those interviewed said that having their own garden and understanding where their food comes from has actually changed their diets for the better. Many have or intend to spread this education to the youth in their community. 
• Health:  Education has led to an improvement of diets, and it is safe to assume this has led to an increase in health, as all of the participants are also trained on food’s connection to noncommunicable diseases. Furthermore, most participants expressed excitement about their food being organic and believe that eating organically will have a direct positive impact on their health.

Food gardening does, however, have its limitations:

• Sustainability:  Cape Town recently experienced a severe drought, and all of the CSS participants were negatively impacted, with many having to shut down their gardens all together. Without funding to access boreholes and other technology that help farmers/gardeners withstand natural disasters, food gardens are not a sustainable solution to food security, especially for poor people. This factor does not necessarily outweigh all of the benefits food gardening presents, but it points to a need for better funding of these individuals’ initiatives.
• Not a panacea:  It would be dangerous to consider food gardening the sole solution to hunger, obesity, and malnutrition. These issues are too rampant to be solved through small gardens, so there simultaneously needs to be more efforts to strengthen smallholder farmers, increase household incomes, and educate people on nutrition and health.
• Not only for poor people:  Food gardens should not be understood as an activity for poor people. When something is stigmatized as such, it de-incentivizes people to get involved because they do not want to be seen as poor, due to social and cultural norms. Rather, food gardening should be seen as an exciting opportunity for everyone from all classes to form a better relationship with their food and create a more healthy and sustainable community at large.

Based on these observations, I conclude that food gardening is a viable option to better realize the right to food, and by allowing individuals more autonomy over their food and food systems, gardening strengthens minds and communities in ways that cannot be numericized. However, food gardening should not be seen as a panacea to food insecurity, and in order for gardens to be sustainable, they need to receive more support from non-profit organizations and government agencies.

Below are screenshots from my documentary featuring the garden of an individual who has received extensive assistance from Cape Town’s Department of Agriculture, as well as a group of community members that just started their own garden with a little bit of assistance from a non-profit organization.

Maria Polzin
Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) Project (University of Cape Town)
Cape Town, South Africa

My name is Maria Polzin, and I am a rising senior in Gallatin studying how emotions are politicized along the intersections of race, gender, and environmental studies. I have interned at the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault, the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, and I run an ongoing project entitled Survivors, which uses the arts to empower survivors of sexual assault. While much of my work has focused on combating violence, I believe no social justice issue can be divorced from the environment. I am interested in learning more about how certain relationships with the environment are formed, politicized, and amplified or ignored in political discourse. Food insecurity, particularly, exemplifies viable grounds to explore such intersections between people, politics, and the environment.

As I began to explore food insecurity in America, I noticed much of the contemporary dialogue focuses on the absence of grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods. This approach can be effective in terms of mapping food deserts; however, too much of a focus on supermarkets risks overlooking the nuanced ways people obtain and produce food outside of the formal economy. Furthermore, there are many instances when supermarkets cannot effectively address food insecurity. For example, community members may lack time or money, or they may have cultural preferences regarding what they eat and from whom they purchase food.

A human rights approach to food insecurity can begin to frame the right to food within these larger contexts through the understanding that all rights are interconnected. How does realizing the right to food limit or promote one’s right to participate in the cultural life of community, the right to environmental security, amongst others? Centering the voices of individuals most affected by food insecurity throughout the exploration of such intersections has the potential to illuminate sustainable solutions to food insecurity because community members know best when and where certain rights should be prioritized.

I am thankful for the opportunity to go to South Africa in May, where I will be interning with the Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) for Health Project at the University of Cape Town. CSS is a three-year project that aims to model how strengthening community networking and capacity, particularly with a leadership role played by health committees, can sustainably address some of the threats to health in three specific communities, with a vision of rolling out the model to other sites beyond the life of the project. South Africa provides a unique context for CSS because South Africa has one of the few constitutions in the world that includes extensive socio-economic rights, such as the right to access food and health systems. CSS calls on these rights to both foster community engagement and demand policy reform.

In efforts to support the project in centering the voices of community members, I will be compiling an oral history archive that explores community members’ and community stakeholders’ engagement with food and food security. Employing what I learn through the interviews, I will begin drafting workshop outlines that trained community volunteers can make use of to initiate dialogues around the democratization of food systems. Throughout this process, I will volunteer to assist community activists with work on food gardens and food security advocacy.

While I have been preparing for this research through my academic studies, I understand I am entering these spaces as an outsider, so I have few concerns regarding what community members will say or what relationships they may or may not want to have with me. By keeping an open mind, I seek to act as a facilitator of dialogue rather than a teacher so that the community members can be the experts in their own lives.