Slow Food President Carlo Petrini spoke today, Monday May 14, 2012, at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the first guest speaker to be invited in its ten-year history. He gave the following speech as part of the half-day discussion on the right of indigenous people to food and food sovereignty.
I am honored to be here with you today and to take part in this discussion on the rights of indigenous peoples to food and food sovereignty. I wish to thank Doctor Mirna Cunningham, president of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and all the various indigenous partners for inviting the Slow Food movement.
For twenty-five years now, Slow Food has sought to preserve agricultural and food biodiversity as a tool for ensuring a future for our planet and humanity as a whole. Combined with climate change, the progressive loss of diversity of plant and animal species could prove a terrible scourge in the years to come.
It is necessary to point out, though, that it would be senseless to defend biodiversity without also defending the cultural diversity of peoples and their right to govern their own territories. The right of peoples to have control over their land, to grow food, to hunt, fish and gather according to their own needs and decisions, is inalienable. This diversity is the greatest creative force on earth, the only condition possible for the maintenance and transmission of an outstanding heritage of knowledge to future generations.
Slow Food has based its existence on these principles and to maintain them it has built a network of food communities that has now spread to over 170 countries. The network, which is called Terra Madre, came into being in 2004. Since then it has captured attention and consensus in thousands of communities of farmers, fishers, shepherds and artisans in every corner of the planet. Terra Madre is neither a party nor a union. It is simply a network, a movement of people who, with mutual respect for each other’s diversities, seek dialogue, cultural exchange and solidarity. It all centers round the right to food.
If it is to be shared, food should be: good, insofar as it is a pleasure to eat for all; clean, insofar as it does not destroy the environment and resources of Mother Earth; fair, insofar as it respects workers of land, sea, pasture and forest, who by procuring our sustenance give us life itself.
All peoples should have access to good, clean and fair food. All peoples must have adequate food from their own natural...
