Introduction
Over the past 50 years, our food system has become both more globalised and more heavily dependent on cheap raw materials, chemical inputs and mechanisation. Big business has moved in, with control of our food increasingly concentrated in a handful of multinational corporations operatingthroughout the food chain. The social and environmental impacts of this system are devastating: small scale farmers and food companies worldwide are driven out of business; obesity and food poverty are rife; while taxpayers and citizens foot the bill as one food crisis follows another.
Meanwhile, as consumers, we find it more and more difficult to know what we are buying, who it has been made by, and where it comes from. Yet there are alternatives. Innovative projects seeking to reconnect producers and consumers by
promoting short food supply chains and food produced in a sustainable way can be found in most European countries. These include short supply chains, alternative food networks, local farming systems and urban gardening.
Friends of the Earth Europe and other movements and organisations believe that control of food and farming needs to be put in the hands of local people and farmers, shifting to agro ecological systems that work within environmental and equitable limits to achieve food sovereignty in Europe and the rest of the world.
