Why did Belgian farmers take to the streets en masse last January? How do our eating habits have a major impact on the lives of farmers on the other side of the world? We tackle these questions at our annual Uni4Coop activity: ‘DJESA’, or Half-Day Exchanges on Food Sovereignty.
In collaboration with Vétérinaires Sans Frontières and Humundi, this year we had the opportunity to organise the ‘DJESA’ activity for all the Bac 2 bioengineering students at UCLouvain. It provides a fresh, cross-disciplinary look at food sovereignty issues in Belgium and internationally. The aim is to provide a space for reflection and debate on the major societal issues linked to changes in our food systems.
To introduce the debate, Brigitte Grisar and Jacques Esnault's ‘Faim de vie’ (Hungry for Life), a combination of theatre and lecture, asks: ‘How can thousands of people in 21st century Belgium not get enough to eat? How, throughout the world, is humanitarian food aid still a reality? But if hunger is not an inescapable reality, who is responsible for it? What can we do to change this state of affairs?
The students are then divided into in-depth thematic workshops, combining participative facilitation techniques with the expertise of our guests. Faced with the social and environmental challenges posed by the dominant agricultural model, the Sytra (Centre de recherche et études stratégiques sur les systèmes agroalimentaires) research team presented the various agricultural alternatives for the 21st century. FIAN, an international organisation that fights for the right to adequate food and nutrition for all, addressed the issue of access to land, a challenge for farmers around the world, but also ways of taking action at political and citizen level. Lastly, the NGO Humundi examined the problems associated with the globalisation of agricultural trade through two illustrative cases: Wallonia's dependence on international trade and the impact of European exports on the incomes of livestock farmers in West Africa.
