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Food prices around the world are surging.  Between July of last year and this January alone, the price of wheat has doubled.  Indeed, the cost of food has now passed the record levels of 2008, when angry citizens staged huge protests in dozens of countries.  Currently, protesters across the Middle East include lowering food prices among their demands.  When prices go up even a bit, millions more people starve.

The local organic farmers with whom we have been spending time in the Philippines and elsewhere are less affected by these price swings precisely because they consume much of what they harvest, and they sell the rest to local markets.  These farmers have achieved at the household level what Frances Moore Lappé terms “food democracy,” and what the small farmer coalition, Via Campesina, calls “food sovereignty” at a national level.

A country has “food sovereignty” when its people consume safe and nutritious food largely grown by their own small farmers.  Significantly fewer countries sustain this sovereignty today than a generation ago.  The reigning development model pushed by World Bank and other experts has left many countries exporting more cash crops like flowers and gourmet vegetables, and importing more of their staple foods.

But there is more to food sovereignty than freedom from imports.  In richer countries, food purchases make up a relatively small percent of household budgets.  Here in the United States, we spend an average of only seven percent of our budgets on food, although that number rises in poor urban neighborhoods.