We are always in the trenches
I think there is a critical component missing from the way we speak about food. We talk about crisis, we talk about urgency, and yes, both are true. The crisis is here. The urgency is here. In many countries, the backlog is so deep that catching up can feel almost impossible. But I do not think we are working on the right things. We are constantly in the trenches, putting out fires. A global economic crisis, a financial crisis, a pandemic, a war. One after the other, and every time, we become very good at responding to the consequences. But we do not spend enough time building the systems that would reduce those consequences in the first place. That gap is the whole distance between food security and food sovereignty.
The shocks arrive in waves
COVID was remarkable because it touched the entire globe in the most frightening way. It was not just a health crisis. It disrupted labour, logistics, trade, incomes, production, movement, and access to food. Then came the war in Ukraine, and again we saw how a conflict in one part of the world could travel through grain markets, fertilizer markets, energy prices, shipping routes, insurance costs, foreign exchange, and eventually into the price of food in a household market thousands of kilometres away. These shocks arrive in waves: global, continental, regional, national, industrial, household. We keep responding to the wave, but are we building the capacity to withstand the next one?
Food is not a trend
This is where I think our focus has become too narrow. We have built a skill around watching trends, reacting to trends, and designing solutions for the trend of the moment. But food is not a trend. Food is the foundation of human survival. It is nutrition, health, community, family, productivity, and dignity. It is one of the first ways people experience whether an economy is working for them or not. Yet when we think about national resilience, regional resilience, and global resilience, we continue to treat food as an emergency agenda instead of a foundational economic system.
This is not only an agriculture question
And this is not only an agriculture question. It is a macroeconomic question. For countries that depend heavily on imported food, food prices are not determined only by whether food exists somewhere in the world. They are determined by international commodity prices, freight, fuel, fertilizer, exchange rates, access to foreign currency, the cost of finance, and whether food can actually move through the country without being lost, delayed, or made unaffordable. When a currency weakens, a country can become poorer at the market even if global food prices have not moved. When storage is absent, a good harvest can still become a shortage months later. When processing capacity is missing, a country can produce raw commodities and still import food products at higher value.[3] That is why food is not simply a production issue. It is an infrastructure issue, a finance issue, a trade issue, an energy issue, a health issue, and an industrial-policy issue.
Food security, food sufficiency, food sovereignty
These three words get used interchangeably in most rooms I sit in. They are not the same thing, and the difference decides what a country actually builds. Food security is about access. It asks whether people can obtain sufficient, safe and nutritious food, physically and economically, and consistently over time. It says nothing about who controls the supply. Food sufficiency is about production. It asks whether a country grows more of what its population actually eats. It says nothing about whether that production survives contact with a shock. Food sovereignty is about control. It asks whether a country can decide what it produces, processes, stores, trades and imports, and whether it can hold that decision through a disruption without turning it into household hunger. Three different questions. We use one word for all of them, and then we wonder why the answers do not add up.
Food security matters, of course. It means people can access sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, not only in physical terms but also economically and consistently over time.[1] But food security cannot be the ceiling of our ambition. A country can be food secure for a period of time and still be deeply vulnerable because that security is purchased through imports, donor support, subsidies, emergency facilities, or supply chains that it does not control. It can have food in the market today while remaining one geopolitical event, currency shock, climate event, or shipping disruption away from a crisis tomorrow.
Food sufficiency is an important step because it asks whether countries are producing more of what their populations consume. But sovereignty goes further. Food sovereignty is not isolation, and it is not a refusal to trade. No country needs to grow everything, and no serious food system should operate as though trade does not matter. Food sovereignty is the ability to make deliberate decisions: what to produce locally, what to process locally, what to store strategically, what to trade regionally, what to import, and how much external dependence is acceptable. It is the capacity to produce, aggregate, store, process, finance, transport, and distribute food through a shock without immediately turning that shock into household hunger.
A note on where food sovereignty comes from
A note on the term. Food sovereignty entered international policy language through La Via Campesina at the 1996 World Food Summit, where it described the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems, and it carried a sharp critique of industrial agriculture and corporate concentration.[2] I use it in an adjacent but distinct sense: the institutional and economic capacity of a country to make those decisions and hold them. The peasant movement asked who has the right to decide. I am asking whether the state has built the assets that make the decision real. Both questions matter. Neither is answered by importing more food.
We cannot import our way into sovereignty
We give enormous attention to finance and, today, extraordinary attention to technology. Both matter. But what would happen if we gave even a fraction of that same seriousness to food systems? Not just to resolving food insecurity country after country and community after community, but to building the productive assets beneath a resilient food economy: rural roads, irrigation, energy, aggregation systems, warehousing, cold chains, processing facilities, commodity finance, quality infrastructure, market intelligence, and institutions capable of coordinating all of it. We cannot subsidize our way into resilience. We cannot import our way into sovereignty. Emergency response is necessary when people are hungry, but emergency response cannot be the strategy.
This goes well beyond the farm
The implications go well beyond the farm. Better access to safe, quality, affordable, and nutritious food means healthier households and less pressure on healthcare systems. It means children are more able to learn, and workers are more able to work. It means rural areas can become places of production, processing, employment, and industry rather than places from which value is extracted and people are forced to leave. FAO’s analysis of food-price inflation makes this connection clear: when food prices rise, household purchasing power falls, diets deteriorate, and food insecurity and malnutrition increase.[1] A food-price shock is not simply an inflation statistic. It moves through the whole economy.
The world has shown us it can unite
The world has shown us that it can unite around a common cause. We saw it during COVID. We see it in war. We see it whenever the financial system is under pressure. Capital moves. Institutions move. Policy moves. Technology moves. So the question is not whether we can treat food differently. The question is why we have waited so long to make it important enough.
I work at the infrastructure end of this, on aggregation, storage, processing and the corridors that connect them. The pattern I keep meeting is not an absence of food. It is an absence of the systems that let a country hold on to it. In practice, that means treating storage, processing, quality infrastructure and commodity finance as national infrastructure. Planned, budgeted and financed the way roads and power are, not the way relief is. It means measuring a food system by what it can absorb, not only by what it produced last season. And it means asking of every food programme and every food investment a single question: does this leave the country more able to decide, or less?
It is time to move beyond managing food crises as though they are isolated events. It is time to build the economic and institutional capacity for food sovereignty.
Sources
- [1] FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), annual flagship series.
- [2] La Via Campesina, What is Food Sovereignty?, from the 1996 World Food Summit declaration and the Nyéléni forums.
- [3] FAO GIEWS, Food Outlook: Biannual Report on Global Food Markets.