Abstract
Community food security and environmental justice are parallel social movements interested in equity and justice and system-wide factors. They share a concern for issues of daily life and the need to establish community empowerment strategies. Both movements have also begun to reshape the discourse of sustainable agriculture, environmentalism and social welfare advocacy. However, community food security and environmental justice remain separate movements, indicating an incomplete process in reshaping agendas and discourse. Joining these movements through a common language of empowerment and systems analysis would strongly enhance the development of a more powerful, integrated approach. That opportunity can be located in the efforts to incorporate community food security and environmental justice approaches in current Farm Bill legislation; in particular, provisions addressing community food production, direct marketing, community development, and community food planning.
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Additional information
Robert Gottlieb is the coordinator of the Environmental Analysis and Policy Area of the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books on environmental and resource policy, includingForcing The Spring: The Transformation of The American Environmental Movement (Island Press: Washington, DC, 1993).
Andrew Fisher is the coordinator of the national Community Food Security Coalition, the organization that initiated the Community Food Security Empowerment Act. He is a coauthorOf Seeds Of Change: Strategies For Food Security For The Inner City (UCLA Department of Urban Planning, 1993), a policy consultant for the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition, and a member of the steering committee of the California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group.
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Gottlieb, R., Fisher, A. Community food security and environmental justice: Searching for a common discourse. Agric Hum Values 13, 23–32 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01538224
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01538224