Beyond Reform: Food Sovereignty and the Future of Global Food Systems
DATE: Thursday, February 13 2025
TIME: 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm MST
LOCATION: Virtual Event
A Wallace Stegner Center Greenbag
ABOUT THE EVENT:
We live in a deeply destructive food system, and the need for alternatives is clear. Yet state and corporate actors, beholden to an extractive, industrial model of food production, continue to push for incremental reforms instead of transformative action. In response, food sovereignty movements are charting a normative path in international human rights law to secure peasants’ rights and promote more sustainable and just alternatives to our industrial food system. Against the backdrop of the political economy of industrial agriculture, this talk compares mainstream approaches to food systems reform with transformative alternatives rooted in food sovereignty. It explores two key questions: What makes a food practice transformative? And how are social movements and advocates using international law to advance transformative practices and secure peasants’ rights? The talk is based on Professor Smita Narula’s recent article on the subject, which can be found here.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Smita Narula, Haub Distinguished Professor of International Law, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University
Professor Smita Narula is the Haub Distinguished Professor of International Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and Co-Director of the law school’s Global Center for Environmental Legal Studies. She is author of dozens of widely-cited publications on human rights, food systems, and the environment, and has helped formulate policy, legal, and community-led responses to a range of social justice and ecological issues worldwide. In 2008, Professor Narula was appointed legal advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and served in this capacity for the duration of the Rapporteur’s six-year mandate. In 2021, she was inducted as a Fellow into the American College of Environmental Lawyers.
Prior to joining Haub Law School, Professor Narula was Distinguished Lecturer and Interim Director of the Human Rights Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Prior to Hunter, she was Associate Professor of Clinical Law at NYU School of Law and Faculty Director of its Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. From 1997 to 2003, Professor Narula served as India researcher and Senior Researcher for South Asia at Human Rights Watch, and in 2000, she co-founded the International Dalit Solidarity Network, a transnational advocacy network that helps advance the right to equality for 260 million people affected by caste-based discrimination worldwide. Professor Narula graduated with honors from Harvard Law School where she was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal.
For questions about this event, email events@law.utah.edu.
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