Translating food sovereignty: cultivating justice in an age of transnational governance

Canfield’s book demonstrates how all of these issues only scratch the surface of the challenges affecting poor and particularly Indigenous and peasant communities. In particular, the book’s focus on food sovereignty reveals how even liberal perspectives explaining the availability and affordability of food tend to obscure more urgent reasons why access to affordable nutrition is becoming elusive. It also sheds light on the environmental consequences of large-scale agricultural industries controlled by a handful of massively profitable corporations, also noted by Gunderson (2011). These challenges are too-often obscured in mainstream debates on food. Unless we are academics or reading leftist newspapers or blogs, it is unlikely we will appreciate the consequences that massive agri-business has on indigenous, peasant communities who continue to face the devastating consequences of land-grabbing, let alone the widespread, often corporate-linked executions of environmental activists who expose what is happening (Global Witness 2021)

Refugees: Overview

The United Nations’ 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees attempted to define and, ultimately, protect refugees after World War II. However, government efforts to regulate the entry and reception of refugees and asylum seekers have throughout history been challenged by a variety of political, religious, and cultural pressures. The essays in this chapter reveal, through sometimes personal accounts of individual experiences, the plight of refugees in a number of countries around the globe in obtaining human rights protection and social justice

‘Who Determines Refugee Policy? Promoting The Right of Asylum in South Africa’

South Africa has recently been spared the long-term, large-scale refugee movements seen by other countries on the continent, although its own external and internal history has seen it contribute to displacement in other countries, create refugees out of its own people, and face internal displacement as a result largely of political violence. In recent years, and in common with many other States, South Africa has had to deal with the question of how to deal, procedurally and substantively, with refugees and asylum seekers within its territory. The 1999 Refugees Act is part of the answer to that question, and this article examines the debate which preceded its enactment, and at the role played by a number of local and foreign specialists, service providers and international and local organisations. The substantial number of civil society interventions and the willingness of governments to consider them are a relatively new but welcome phenomenon in South Africa; it remains to be seen how the evolving discourse will help to settle various outstanding issues, as well as the problems of practical implementation likely to emerge