The Food Autonomy Festival (FAF) is about presenting and celebrating alternatives and resistance to the state and corporate-controlled industrial food system.
What is the Food Autonomy Festival and for whom is it organized?
The Food Autonomy Festival is a place where activists, farmers, young academics, food-lovers -among many others who fight together for social and ecological justice- are brought together. It is a place for everyone who is interested in the topics we are discussing, those who know about these topics already, and those who want to learn more. Collectively we will take engagement with food beyond procurement and make it a site of resistance, solidarity and autonomy.
Why is food autonomy important?
We believe food autonomy is important because it cares for the earth, for the people, and challenges structural inequalities. It also aims to guarantee and protect people’s space, ability, and right to define their own models of production, food distribution, and consumption patterns. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of locally controlled food systems to sustain people and nature in a diversity of rural and urban contexts as well as aims to regenerate a diversity of autonomous food systems based on equity, social justice, and ecological sustainability.
Why is the Food Autonomy Festival important?
Talking about the importance of food autonomy, let’s also discuss why the festival itself is important. The FAF presents and celebrates alternatives and resistance to the food and climate crisis as well as the capitalist, hierarchical systems that fail to create a socially and ecoloogically just world. At the festival, various food-autonomous initiatives are brought together to learn from each other. Together we aim to put food at the center of social, economic, political and climatic issues. The FAF is an example of how gathering for place-based causes and collective discussions on local problems becomes an occasion for all to learn about grassroots movements and local resistance, which can be carried on in different contexts and within larger international actions.
Connecting the Food Autonomy Festival to the broader context
The FAF is a place where we can connect with each other in our struggles in the fight for a sustainable and just food system.
We believe that a just food system can only be created if different levels of oppression and inequalities are fought simultaneously. Today, the food system reflects society where capitalism is the director, patriarchy the writer and colonialism the producer (among other oppressive systems). To fight for a just food system, therefore, means taking an anticapitalist, decolonial, intersectional stance, paying attention to the different oppressions that are keeping these systems running.
The FAF is connected to different struggles based on the goals that we are all fighting for. We believe that getting together to talk about Food Autonomy allows for conversations about autonomy in many ways, how to achieve this and which oppressive systems need to be destroyed on the way there. That is, food autonomy can only be achieved if the climate crisis is fought, the patriarchy is smashed, ableism deconstrudted, capitalism is destroyed, colonialism demolished… and so on. This is why we want the FAF to be a place where we can fight for agricultural justice, climate justice, food autonomy and overall systemic justice. In doing so, strive in both our perspectives and practices, to challenge racism, sexism, coloniality, and oppression in all its forms.
Previous editions:
Food Autonomy Festival #1 (May 2017)
Food Autonomy Festival #2 (May 2018)
Food Autonomy Festival #3 (May/June 2019)
Food Autonomy Festival #4 (June 2020)
Food Autonomy Festival #5 (June 2021)
Food Autonomy Festival #6 (May 2022)
Food Autonomy Festival #7 (June 2023)
Posters from the previous editions: