Food Sovereignty Tours: Can “alternative tourism” contribute to food sovereignty?

Abstract

When Food First founded its educational travel program Food Sovereignty Tours in 2010, it had already organized dozens of trips to destinations like Cuba and Kerala, India—places that had carried out radical reforms to greatly improve literacy rates, access to healthcare and other socioeconomic indicators. While the Cold War mentality of the 1980s and neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s sought to convince us that there was “no alternative” to corporate-led globalization, Food First’s many publications showed how this model was failing most of humanity… and its delegations brought participants to the frontlines of people’s struggles for democratic, locally-controlled alternatives.