Health Inequities and the Shifting Paradigms of Food Security, Food Insecurity, and Food Sovereignty

Global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition are on the rise, partly resulting in furthering health inequities between classes and groups of peoples among and within countries. A systematic understanding of the links between inequities in food politics and health issues is a challenge, and it is partly complicated by the presence of 3 contending and shifting paradigms in food politics, namely, food security, food insecurity, and food sovereignty. These paradigms suggest competing views as to the causes of and solutions to hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. We argue that food sovereignty offers a better alternative for understanding and responding to food issues in relation to the challenge of tackling health inequities. However, the ways in which and the degree to which the issues of health inequities are incorporated in the current narratives and practices of food sovereignty is rather thin, and vice versa. Our concluding argument is that an interactive dialogue in research and social actions between food sovereignty, on the one hand, and health inequity, on the other hand, can mutually enrich and strengthen both fields of research and spheres of social actions.