SITAC Food Justice

Under various loaded terms – slow food, seed banks, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and others – the discussion on what we eat and who is empowered by it, has gained international urgency due to population explosion, monopoly by multinational food corporations, and environmental crises. Knowledge of local communities, and access and control over local agricultural products and procedures, so far sit squarely against corporate and government interests in large-scale food production. In Mexico, key words are indigenous food autonomy versus transgenic corn; in parts of India, positions are occupied along similar fault lines focusing a wide range of food crops. This day examined and compared strategies for a more just distribution of, and access to, food sources foregrounding art projects that open new thinking on these issues along legal investigations.

The morning was informed by Amar Kanwar’s project The Sovereign Forest, the artist’s long-term engagement with activists and local farming communities in Odisha on India’s East Coast, and the rousing debates over transgenic corn and the defense of native seeds in Mexico that mirror the Indian situation. Reports on the October 2014 Estudio SITAC that brought together Amar Kanwar and activists, artists, and educators in Oaxaca complement the morning session. In the afternoon, the discussion expanded philosophically and legally to reflect on such recent developments as the right to just treatment that has been expanded from human to non-human animals, from natural to corporate persons. Introduced in Bolivia in 2010, the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, for instance, affords human rights to indigenous plants. In the U.S. in 2012, on the other hand, corporations’ right to free speech was reaffirmed.