Food Sovereignty Prize tonight in NYC!



If you’re an NYC Fair Food activist, don’t miss this big night, with the CIW, three incredible grassroots organizations fighting for food justice, Tom Morello, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and much more — and it’s open to the public!

Tonight is the big night in New York City for the gala Food Sovereignty Award ceremony, and if you live in the city and care about food justice, you’re definitely not going to want to miss it!

This year’s Food Sovereignty Prize Ceremony will be held in New York City on October 10, 2012, at 7 PM in the Diker Pavilion of the National Museum of the American Indian featuring the 2012 Honorees and other special guests. The event is free and open to the public.

You can find more on the event here. And you can click here to register to attend.

Grist.org has a great story about this year’s prize, entitled “These grassroots heroes are fighting for food democracy”. Here’s an excerpt:

“The award originated at the grassroots just like the groups it honors. Siena Chrisman of WhyHunger, the organization hosting the prize, explains that the idea for it came about in 2009 when the nonprofit Community Food Security Coalition held its annual meeting (a gathering that draws several hundred people from around the progressive food world) in Des Moines, Iowa. It just so happened that the World Food Prize was being awarded in Des Moines the same weekend. The World Food Prize, Chrisman explains, “really focuses on the industrial agriculture model” – rewarding individuals who have made technological innovations in line with Norman Borlaug’s “green revolution,” which introduced the type of high-yield, disease-resistant crops often credited with both alleviating third-world hunger on a mass scale and ushering in the era of pesticide-reliant monocrops.

“We felt like we needed to have some kind of response,” Chrisman says. “The Food Sovereignty Prize is very focused on organizations and communities. We believe solutions to community problems come from the ground up.”

The CIW is one of this year’s four honorees, which include top honoree the Korean Women’s Peasant Association, as well as the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement of Sri Lanka and the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguan Region in Honduras. It should be quite the night, so check it out if you are lucky enough to live in NYC!