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No Time to Lose Common Ground: Why land matters in nutrition debates

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Abstract

Although food supply chains are global, and urban populations have ballooned, human beings nonetheless remain inextricably linked to the land by the food they eat. However, the ways in which links between land and human nutrition are articulated and maintained today are complex. This article seeks to explore this complexity, in light of current policy debates, including those related to the Second International Conference on Nutrition.

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Notes

  1. Javier Chocobar, Ely Sandra Juarez, Roberto Lopez, Mario Lopez, Mártires Lopez, Cristian Ferreyra, Miguel Galván, Celestina Jara, Lila Coyipé, Imer Flores and Juan Diaz Asijak.

  2. Understood as the ability to benefit from that land (Ribot and Peluso, 2003).

  3. NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement among Canada, Mexico and the United States, which came into force on 1 January 1994. The DR-CAFTA is the Dominican Republic, Central America and US Free Trade Agreement, enforced from 2005 on.

  4. See GRAIN’s 2008 report, and their ongoing news and analysis at www.farmlandgrab.org, also Edelman et al., (2013); Scoones et al., (2013): Rulli et al., (2013); Rulli and D’Odorico (2013); Fairhead et al., (2012); Borras et al., (2013); Margulis et al., (2013); Mehta et al., (2012); Borras et al., (2012); two international conferences on land-grabbing (2011, 2012). For working paper series, see: www.iss.nl/ldpi. N.B.: We adhere to Borras et al.’s (2012) understanding of land grabbing as ‘capturing control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms that involve large-scale capital that often shifts resource use orientation into extractive character, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperatives, and demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital’ (851, stress added).

  5. Food sovereignty, based on the Nyéléni Declaration of 2007 (www.nyeleni.org/IMG/pdf/DeclNyeleni-en.pdf), is broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’. For a critical discussion on the food sovereignty vision, see the three forthcoming special issues on food sovereignty in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Globalizations and Third World Quarterly.

  6. See http://www.fian.org/fileadmin/media/publications/CSO_Statement_OEWG_-_Final_Version_-_22_Sep_14.pdf.

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Explores the complex nexus between land and nutrition in light of current policy debates, including those related for the Second International Conference on Nutrition

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Brent, Z., Schiavoni, C. & Alonso-Fradejas, A. No Time to Lose Common Ground: Why land matters in nutrition debates. Development 57, 218–225 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2014.72

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