The Coronavirus pandemic and corporate food patterns
Months before the release of the Right to Food and Nutrition 2020, strongly focused on environment for this year’s edition, a sneak peek of the publication sheds light on the links between the COVID-19 pandemic and the modern food systems.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic has sparked a critical debate about its relationship to ‘food processes’ in the era of capitalism. On the one hand, the pandemic sheds light on the transmission of infectious agents caused by so-called ‘modern food systems’, which have made biodiversity more fragile and promoted cross-species transmission from animals to humans. On the other hand, it demonstrates that the ‘corporate food process’ has already created a favorable environment – in the form of non-communicable chronic diseases – for a fatal outbreak of disease.
Beyond the mainstream scientific response that centers on medication and vaccines, this article sneak peek puts forward an exit strategy to the crisis via six proposals that build on the notion of food agency. This includes doing away with the patriarchal, developmentalist model that underpins corporate food patterns, thereby prioritizing collective care led by women through family and community agroecology, and promoting planetary life in the wider framework of food sovereignty.
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