Community-based food sovereignty assessments (FSAs): A review

Abstract

Around the world, food security assessments are used by Non-Governmental Organizations and states to assess caloric sufficiency, hunger, and dietary diversity in order to evaluate health and nutrition, orient development programs, including food aid, and offer an early warning of hunger and famine. And yet, scholars tell us that the concept of food security has historically been muddy, and difficult to pin down, resulting in a plethora of assessments, tools and indicators, with significant variability. There is growing scholarly agreement that moving beyond “food security” is essential and that scholars, practitioners, and policymakers would do well to conceptualize agri-food systems as complex, and pay more attention to socio-ecological dynamics, political systems, culture, and health and well-being. Food Sovereignty offers a conceptual framework to bring together these dynamics and in the past decade, there has been an emerging body of Food Sovereignty metrics, assessments and indicators that highlight the complexities of the relationships between food, health, environments, culture, gender relations, and economies through a food sovereignty lens. At the local level, food-sovereignty assessments have gained traction in the past decade, but we know very little about these tools, where they align and diverge, and whether they engage with multi-scalar analysis of food systems. In this paper, I examine these community-based food sovereignty assessments, paying attention to how they align and diverge and illustrating what researchers, communities and policymakers can learn from community-based FSAs to date.