2012/Sustainable food: a common good?

The diagnosis of the world food situation is very worrying: the FAOestimates that two billion people suffer from hunger or severe dietary deficiencies and, according to statistics from the World Health Organization, about one billion people are obese.

This situation is aggravated by rising food prices and new constraints on farming systems: climate change, financial speculation, competition with biofuels, and so on.

"Sustainable food" would be part of food production and marketing modes that would respect economic and social equity and preserve the environment, health and cultural diversity. However, under the combined influence of changing lifestyles, the concentration and financialization of the agrifood industry and distribution, the mass industrial food model, which is tending dominate, responds less and less to these sustainability criteria. This raises the question of how to make sustainable food a "common good".