ED. Notes- When we first met Christina, we all were all new to WhyHunger. We served on the board and well Christina's duties might be described as being the person you went to get something done. She was a dynamo then and continues to be a person whose life is dedicated to bringing change about. We are still getting used to referring to her as Dr. Schavoni, but still admire her dedication to bring social justice to this world.

PEOPLE WHO INSPIRE

MEET Christina Schiavoni

INTERVIEW #13

Let's start with where you are from and your background

I grew up in a real community – in Boston’s Little Italy, the North End. Everyone knew each other. I couldn’t get away with anything! I’d be running late to school, and one neighbor would stop me to zip up my coat and another would make me tie my shoes. It was like being surrounded by grandparents, as most of my neighbors were elders. My next-door neighbors were the Ciampa sisters – three older women named Lena, Evelyn and Josie Ciampa. They were amazing cooks and would often have us gathered around their kitchen table. The Ciampa sisters were true community stewards, and they were into urban agriculture long before it was cool, with a fire escape garden. Growing and preparing food was a skill passed on to them by their immigrant mother, who had gotten them through the Great Depression on her own, thanks in part to a garden plot that fed them. They explained that even though they had very little, their mom would always share whatever they had with others, a practice that clearly lived on through them. Many of my childhood memories revolve around food, as the connective tissue of our community.

What interested you in hunger and education?

I’m sure I was influenced by my upbringing in the North End, and I think also by visits to farms with my parents, because from a young age I said I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. This raised a few eyebrows coming from a city girl! Then in high school, I realized that food was a nexus of many of the issues I cared about, from hunger to animal rights to the environment. When I went to university, I enrolled in an international agriculture program. The program was largely geared for development practitioners to provide technical support to farmers in the Global South, but I soon realized that farmers didn’t need me to come “teach” them anything. They knew what they were doing, but were up against policies and systems that were keeping them in poverty. It remains a maddening fact to this day that the majority of the world’s hungry are food producers and food chain workers. This speaks to a fundamentally unjust global food system that we are all connected to. I decided this was the angle where I could contribute the most – working with others to expose the injustices of the food system and to try to change them.

What issues do you work on and why?

My main focus is contributing to the global movement for food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is a powerful concept coming from the small-scale food producers and others most impacted by the inequities of the global food system. It’s about people – all over the world – taking back control of food systems from large corporations and other powers that be, and collectively building more just and sustainable food systems. Food sovereignty is about more than food, though. It’s about changing relationships of consumption and production, and our relationships to each other and to the Earth. It’s based on the conviction that another world is possible, necessary and within our reach. And it offers concrete tools for getting there.

After a decade of working on food sovereignty organizing in the US and in global spaces, I opted to focus more closely on food sovereignty efforts in Venezuela, which I had been following since 2006. Venezuela was one of the first countries to adopt food sovereignty into official policy, through a bottom-up process led by social movements. I felt there was so much to learn from this experience, including for our movements in the US, yet Venezuela was being little talked about in the circles I was in. Or when it was, it was often vastly misrepresented. The mainstream media has done us a huge disservice on Venezuela, as with many other issues. It has disparaged the country’s political process since 1999, the Bolivarian Revolution, when in fact it’s about the communities who have been most marginalized – the poor, Afro-Indigenous majority – claiming political space and working towards building new political and economic systems based on innovative forms of citizen organizing. It’s actually extremely exciting from the perspective of social justice, and indeed has served as a reference point for social movements worldwide. And I have no doubt that that’s precisely why it’s been so vilified.

So in 2012 I went to grad school in order to focus on food sovereignty efforts in Venezuela, as the focus of my masters and then PhD studies. I had the privilege of living in Venezuela from 2016 to 2018 and partnering with some incredibly inspiring movements there. Since this was an especially intense and difficult moment there, I worked with others to try to shed light on what was going on, and why. As economic sanctions imposed by the US government continue to prevent food, medicines and agricultural supplies from entering the country, Venezuela today is a vivid example of the use of food as a political weapon and why food sovereignty is such an imperative.

Since completing my PhD last year, I’ve continued to work with food sovereignty movements in Venezuela, and I’m now also back to working at the global level, including supporting efforts to transform global governance of food and agriculture.

What are the biggest challenges for the issues that you care most about today?
What drives you?

Among the of biggest challenges are the false narratives we’re up against. This applies not only to Venezuela, as I just mentioned, but also to global food issues. As Frances Moore Lappé first wrote about 50 years ago, there are powerful myths that help to perpetuate hunger. Chief among these is that the main impediment to ending hunger is production – that there is not enough food on the planet or soon won’t be – when in fact there are more than enough calories to go around. About a third of food produced globally is lost or wasted. Yes, we need to produce and consume differently, in ways that are much more sustainable and ethical, but there is more than enough food on this planet for all to be fed. Despite this well-documented fact, vast amounts of resources are poured into perpetuating the myth that we must produce our way out of hunger – and that we need corporations like Monsanto (now Bayer), Cargill, etc. to do so for us.

This myth is perverse on too many levels to get into here, but one of the issues is that it’s disempowering. We forfeit the task of ending hunger to the very entities that are in fact perpetuating it (e.g., depressing crop prices, plundering communities of their land, water and genetic resources, etc.), when in reality we, the people, have tremendous power and potential to feed ourselves and our communities, and to do so sustainably. There are countless examples of people doing so in every corner of the globe. But there is enormous profit to be made in maintaining our fundamentally broken food system. And these narratives are needed to maintain this system. That’s one of the reasons why the work of KIDS is so important: to foster a generation that understands the root causes – and thus also the real solutions – to hunger, and a generation of critical thinkers and doers.

In terms of what drives me, it’s a combination of sheer urgency – the devastating amount of suffering from poverty, war and, increasingly, climate-induced disasters – at the same time that people are resisting. There are powerful examples of resistance all over the world, and often it’s those with the fewest resources who are doing the most. We all have a responsibility to speak up and do our part to effect change.

In conclusion, what message do you want to deliver to our readers? What do you think your legacy should be?

This is a critical moment for action, and acting differently. And in the midst of the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have a unique opportunity to forge a new path forward. Unprecedented numbers of people are planting their own food gardens, getting involved in Community Supported Agriculture projects, etc. Food movements can and absolutely must build upon this critical momentum. But how to do so in a way that builds equity? This pandemic has exposed the inequities built into our system as clearly as the light of day. Transforming the food system is not only about growing more of our own food, but ensuring protections for the most vulnerable, such as the undocumented, uninsured, imprisoned, etc. It’s time to take down the giants that are accruing massive amounts of wealth for the few while paying workers poverty wages. One concrete step we could take is to boycott Amazon, for a start. Corporate meat and dairy firms are another important target, as they are abysmal for workers, food producers, animals, the environment and human health all at once.

An important lesson that I’ve learned from Venezuela is that we must simultaneously work both to build the new and dismantle the old – and now is an incredibly ripe time for both. Speaking of Venezuela, let’s not forget our foreign policy (I say this as a US citizen especially), which is directly driving hunger in various parts of the world. Let’s pause for a moment to think about how contrary to basic respect for life are economic sanctions that prevent countries from accessing food and medicines. These are crimes against humanity that we can and must put an end to once and for all.

I know that many of us, in many parts of the world, are discouraged with our political systems right now, but we have more power than we think when we actually organize. And I think the question of system change vs. personal change is a false dichotomy. We absolutely need system change. And, as part of that, especially if we’re trying to create something new, we need to change ourselves in order to live differently and better. So, internal work, interpersonal work, community work and system change – they’re all interconnected and all necessary – more so now than ever.