Participatory Action Partnerships in Ghana for Global Food Sovereignty
Northrop Frye Centre (VC 102)
91 Charles St West Toronto, ON M5S1K5
The NFC is pleased to invite you to a talk from Siera Vercillo, an Assistant Professor of Food Studies at the Culinaria Research Centre.
The unprecedented state of global hunger is exposing the fragility of food systems, which are the political economic processes and infrastructures that feed people. This fragility is caused by systems that privilege the commodification of food and profit over ecological sustainability and equity. For decades, scholarship has demonstrated how the agricultural development approaches of the Green Revolution focused on intensifying yields across the Global South, generally degrade soil, decrease biodiversity and increase debt burdens, trapping smallholders in poverty. This trapping inhibits smallholders’ household food security and adaptive capacity to climate change. A donor evaluation recently demonstrated that food insecurity has intensified across the African countries currently targeted for the Green Revolution like Ghana, which is inciting resistance across the continent. Major alternatives to the African Green Revolution generally advocate for food sovereignty, which is the right of people to define their own food systems instead of corporations, so that healthy, diverse, delicious and culturally appropriate food is more accessible. In this presentation, I will illustrate how we as scholars are supporting Ghanaian partner organizations’ efforts towards food sovereignty using grounded, participatory action and interdisciplinary research into agroecology and disappearing indigenous culinary ingredients as alternatives to the African Green Revolution. Learning from food sovereignty movements such as these partners’ efforts has the power to transform notions of who holds expertise and how change can happen. Preserving and promoting local food production and culinary knowledge and practices for climate change adaptation and resistance to unjust political economic power dynamics can provide more sustainable incomes than those that privilege productivity.
Siera Vercillo is an Assistant Professor of Food Studies (teaching stream) at the University of Toronto, Scarborough and Coordinator of the Sustainable Food and Farming Futures Research Cluster. She pursues participatory action research in the fields of feminist geography, political ecology and critical development studies. Her work focuses on linking the literature on agrarian and nutrition transitions, smallholder livelihood development, rural-to-urban food systems, and household food security in northern Ghana where she has been working within communities for over a decade. Siera's scholarship also mobilizes research for advocacy coalitions, donors, NGOs and government policy and practice to advocate for agroecology and food sovereignty. She holds bylines in Aljazeera and publishes in scholarly journals like Ambio and Third World Quarterly.