Advancing Equity in Food Systems: Supporting Food Justice and Food Sovereignty, and Ending Food Apartheid

Food justice, food sovereignty, and food apartheid are broad conceptual frameworks for understanding local food systems. These frameworks overlap, and they share some fundamental commonalities: they all aim to help us envision a just, ethical, and sustainable food future, and focus on the social and political systems that enable or impede this vision. At the same time, each has a unique focus and framing of the issue. Law and policy can work toward or support the goals, values, and visions of these frameworks and build equitable food systems. This section explores each of these frameworks and related policies to consider.

What is FOOD JUSTICE?

Food justice for a community will depend on the shared vision and priorities of community members. As a starting point, some common food justice themes include food access; autonomy to grow food; and equitable community participation in creating, implementing, and evaluating laws and policies that affect these areas. Achieving food justice within a community requires distinct strategies that target causes and conditions of injustice specific to that community.

Food justice policies come in many different varieties and appear across different levels of government. For example, federal, state, local, and Tribal laws and policies can advance food justice by promoting and supporting:

• restoring, supporting, and abiding by Indigenous treaty rights to land, water, hunting, gathering, and fishing
• access to land for farming and food cultivation and preservation of land access for culturally specific foods
• urban agriculture
• farm worker and food industry worker protections and rights
• farm owners of color, including Black farmers
• food reclamation
• community food security
• environmental justice (sample definition)

*The examples above are a few selected examples of related resources and do not represent the full breadth of work on these issues.

What is FOOD SOVEREIGNTY?

Food sovereignty challenges the current power structures in the food system, maintaining that farmers, food producers, fishers, and communities should have control over their food, land, and water. Food sovereignty recognizes the right to healthy and culturally appropriate foods for all and acknowledges that food producers should benefit from the economic value of the food they produce. It pushes back against the corporate food regime which is controlled by a few large agribusiness companies and demands a shift to local food production by small producers, prioritizing a community’s right to produce the food they need to feed themselves.

Importantly, food sovereignty movements in the US center self-determination and liberation into discussions around food justice. For example, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance describes food sovereignty as requiring a drastic change in what is currently an exploitative food system to one that is built with community self-determination at the center. Food sovereignty can only be realized by changing ownership structures across the food system, from land ownership and seed production through food distribution and retail.

Food sovereignty has unique and heightened significance for Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and around the world. The Declaration of Atitlán, Guatemala, drafted at the Indigenous Peoples’ Consultation on the Right to Food, recognizes this significance, affirming “the Right to Food of Indigenous Peoples is a collective right based on our special spiritual relationship with Mother Earth, our lands and territories, environment, and natural resources that provide our traditional nutrition [and] underscoring that the means of subsistence of Indigenous Peoples nourishes our cultures, languages, social life, worldview, and especially our relationship with Mother Earth[.]”

For Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty and Tribal sovereignty are deeply intertwined. Disrupting Indigenous foodways has been a powerful tactic for disrupting Tribal Nations and cultures, and these disruptions continue to operate to this day. Applying Tribal sovereignty has been an effective strategy for Tribes in resisting and repairing these disruptions. Tribes in the United States are exercising their Tribal sovereignty to protect and/or restore traditional foodways by protecting traditional animals and plants, reclaiming land, and strengthening traditional food knowledge, to name just a few. In the foreword to Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States, Winona LaDuke writes, “Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as Indigenous peoples, and a way, one of the most sure-footed ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us.”

What is FOOD APARTHEID?

At their core, food justice and food sovereignty are centered on affirmative rights and building or reinforcing systems to fulfill those rights. The term “food apartheid” focuses on injustice and squarely calls into focus deliberate policy choices that have resulted in geographically linked racial inequities in healthy food access.³ In other words, the term food apartheid helps us visualize the manifestations of structural oppression by “place” and “space.” Further, food apartheid identifies white supremacy as a key driver in the policymaking process and calls attention to how communities of color have been denied the means to afford and eat healthy, culturally meaningful foods.

Food apartheid seeks to diminish community sovereignty and individual autonomy through physical sorting, separation, and barriers. It emphasizes the direct link between public and private policy, chronic community disinvestment, and the racial inequities apparent in access to healthy food. It highlights how longstanding, intentional policy decisions, such as redlining, have denied communities of color the opportunity for social mobility and land access or ownership while also exposing them to harmful environmental toxins. By drawing the direct connection between policy decisions and racial inequities in food access, the term invites conversations and solutions around the root causes of inadequate access to healthy foods and food system agency in these areas and offers transformative solutions beyond attracting more grocery stores.

Karen Washington, an activist and co-founder of Black Urban Growers, began using the term “food apartheid” to highlight the intentional and systemic racial inequities in healthy food access. In her own words:

“I coined the term ‘food apartheid’ to ask us to look at the root causes of inequity in our food system on the basis of race, class, and geography. Let’s face it: healthy, fresh food is accessible in wealthy neighborhoods while unhealthy food abounds in poor neighborhoods. ‘Food apartheid’ underscores that this is the result of decades of discriminatory planning and policy decisions. It begs the question: What are the social inequities that you see, and what are you doing to address them?”

Naming these root causes invites policy, systems, and environmental solutions that address the ongoing impacts of structural racism, including racial residential segregation, redlining, chronic community disinvestment, and entrenched socioeconomic inequities. It also pushes us to move away from victim-blaming arguments that inequitable food access can explained by a community’s lack of initiative. Instead, the term creates an intentional focus on how structural racism and structural inequities are rooted in a long history of slavery, colonialism, land theft, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.