Emerging research suggests that decolonizing the international view of seal products and shifting the ontology around the definitio of sustainability would be a step toward increasing food security and correspondingly, food sovereignty for the Inuit . The Nyéléni Declaration and La Vía Campesina imply, but fall short of, explicitly advocating for local control and resource ownership. This is likely because the movements inclusively advocate on behalf of tenant farmers, landless people, and other marginalized populations. However, local governance and ownership over resources and supply chains, including processing and distribution channels, are critical to upholding the right to food and to ensuring that future agricultural production is sustainable over time . Local control over resources, including the supply chain, facilitates local harvesting and access to fresh food that might otherwise be viewed as valuable export commodities. In North America, the gradual transition of returning land and resources to Indigenous populations is expected to gain momentum in years to come. There is opportunity to “relearn” the cycles of nature that have sustained Indigenous civilization over time. However, there is also growing awareness that boreal environments are dynamic; climate change presents uncertain impacts on future food harvesting practices. Moreover, resource transitions and co-governance with Indigenous communities has not necessarily been particularly smooth, as the Atlantic lobster fishery and building of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam have shown.Food sovereignty is often interpreted to entail necessary conditions of local food consumption and distribution. Practices of and returns on trade directly would support food sovereign practices through commodity supply chains that closely connect farms and consumers, reducing the involvement of third-party intermediaries,flood tray particularly when profits are not locally reinvested. Food sovereignty advocates for small farms to hold providence over all aspects of their crop production, distribution and consumption.

This creates paradoxical tension with gains from comparative advantage and international trade, where the value of maintaining sovereignty typically isn’t reflected in food prices. Reconciliating food sovereignty and agricultural trade, especially at an international scale, is a difficult endeavor . As Edelman writes, “‘food sovereignty’ advocates rarely consider what sort of regulatory apparatus would be needed to manage questions of firm and farm size, product and technology mixes, and long-distance and international trade.” As discussed throughout this article, local food system disruptions accentuate differences between those who “have” and “have not.” In order to shift to a system that supports food sovereignty, the right to food, and local supply chains, regulatory support will be necessary. Regulation may be necessary to ensure that food from locally owned food processing and distribution centers remains available to local communities . One suggestion is to foster community-level ownership and regulatory mechanisms that involve equity and joint ownership. Returning to the Newfoundland and Labrador study region, in 1967 the Fogo Island Co-operative and Shorefast Foundation embraced these principles to “rebuild” the local fishing and harvesting processes into a community-owned enterprise, in a manner that has been dubbed the “Fogo Process” . The Fogo Island Co-op was initially established as an alternative to federal and provincial initiatives to relocate residents to the mainland. Rather than relocate to mainland, like most communities, local inshore fishers and processing plant workers instead took control over the fisheries and supply chain. It provides the quintessential and perhaps most renowned example of food sovereignty stemming from the residents’ awareness of the need to maintain local control over resources. Providing each citizen with a universal basic income has gained appeal as a policy tool for addressing food insecurity . As the economic impacts of universal income supports are being evaluated, it’s worth evaluating whether a universal income might provide much needed income to cultivate local agricultural supply chains. In sum, the scales required to attain food sovereignty may initially seem daunting. However, if agricultural production is introduced in a stepwise manner, there is opportunity to slowly foster supply chains at small scales or in pilot programs that can eventually be replicated. My research team and I conducted a scoping review on food sovereignty and international trade to demonstrate that the vast majority of literature focuses on either food as a basic human right, or food production models, but that there is little intersectionality between the two.

Research in this area is necessary in order to identify models of success, and policies, that can be replicated elsewhere. To investigate the co-occurrence between research on food sovereignty and international trade and gaps in the literature, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and MetaAnalyses guidelines were used as a methodological and analytical framework . The Binimelis et al. framework was used to guide the scoping review. The framework consists of five axes or evaluative categories delineated from the Nyéléni Declaration: access to resources, production model, transformation and commercialization, food consumption and right to food, and agricultural policy and civil and social organizations. A stepwise search covered all journals indexed by OVID journal databases, accessed through the University of Toronto’s Gerstein Library research portal. The stepwise search of the terms [“international trade” and “food sovereignty”] yielded 213 net results. A second search was conducted via the ProQuest portal of the 3,236 publications indexed by the Social Sciences Combined Databases using the search terms [“trade” or “import” and “food sovereignty”] for a total of 645 results, and a combined total of 858 articles. After sorting for duplicates and other criteria, 34 articles were retained from the first literature search and 29 articles from the second search, yielding 63 articles for further semantic analysis of paragraphs. Nearly all of 63 articles on food sovereignty focused on either the production model, or the right to food model, but there was little co-occurrence between the two categories. This builds upon observations made by Edelman and others that food sovereignty remains an elusive term that is aspirational in principle, but difficult to implement. This scoping review fortifies the observation that two aspects of the food sovereignty movement, the “right to food” and “international trade” involve a tricky balance, which will be challenging inregions where imports and exports have been a legacy and a necessity. In summary, upholding the basic right to food, a central tenant of the food sovereignty movement, provides promise for regions of the world whose food systems have paradoxically been full of abundance and scarcity. Freshwater scarcity is a global problem with local solutions.

The connections between water supply, demand, and quality must be carefully examined at a local scale to understand and respond to water shortages. Balanced solutions that require the cooperation of water managers and users can address deficits that threaten households, major economies, and endangered ecosystems. The culminating effects of global climate change and variability, such as changes in precipitation, drought persistence, and shrinking rivers, impact both surface and groundwater systems . Furthermore, population growth, urbanization, economic development, and the industrialization of food production have intensified water management challenges worldwide . These challenges are well illustrated in California, where the water landscape has been manipulated to meet human demand; wetlands were drained, land use was modified, rivers were re-engineered, and entire ecosystems were endangered . The complex network of water reservoirs, aqueducts, and transfers have allowed for the state’s expansive growth of the industry, agriculture, and population . California’s water demand continues to grow due to the agriculture’s expansion and shift from annual to perennial crops, although supply has become less reliable, in quantity and quality, due to climate change, droughts, and environmental demands. At the same time, there is a new focus on the state’s natural river systems, and in stream flow requirements are being established to protect and restore riparian ecosystems. While less water enters the hydrologic system as snow and precipitation, and a larger amount of water is allocated to environmental flows, irrigated agriculture continues to expand . Insufficient surface water supplies have led to the exploitation of groundwater throughout the state to meet urban and agricultural demands.This industry produces half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, including many high-value crops, and accounts for the largest source of freshwater demand . Currently, over 400 crops grow on almost 4 million ha of mostly irrigated cropland . This industry was able to flourish in arid parts of the state due to skillfully engineered water transfers from the north and unregulated groundwater pumping statewide.Groundwater is valued highly for irrigation because of its superior quality,ebb and flow tray ease of accessibility, and reliability. However, sustainable and continual reliance on groundwater depends on management activities and local practices.Demand for high quality groundwater was exacerbated by the most recent multiyear drought that depleted surface water supplies throughout the state. As farmers in California increase their reliance on groundwater, the natural infiltration of rainfall, stream flow, and percolation of irrigation water can become insufficient to maintain supplies. Furthermore, groundwater basins are being stressed as a result of disproportionate water withdrawal. This ongoing imbalance has severe consequences, namely basin depletion, which can cause loss of storage or seawater intrusion on the coast, both of which produce an unreliable water supply . The culmination of climate change increased demands, and mostly unregulated groundwater use has led to severe water shortages in California. The state legislature addressed these concerns with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014. SGMA mandates the implementation of sustainable groundwater management plans in critically over drafted basins by 2020, defined by the California Department of Water Resources .

Agriculture is a central point of discussion on how to improve groundwater management because of its future hinges on sustainable groundwater management, which requires mitigation of overdraft. Agricultural water management research is necessary to address the needs of current and future farmers and water users. The goal of this case study is to identify the sustainable carrying capacity of a single groundwater basin in California that maximizes the agricultural profit in the region to address both environmental and social sustainability. For this study, sustainable carrying capacity refers to the land use that will result in the maximum amount of water that can be withdrawn without over drafting the aquifer. First, a groundwater box model was built and calibrated, in comparison to results of the simulation model used by water managers in the Pajaro Valley to represent hydrology, water use, and groundwater storage . Second, an optimization model was built to determine crop acreages that maximized agricultural profit given water and land use constraints. Third, results from the optimization model were used as inputs into the groundwater box model to calculate the aquifer storage and assess the sustainable carrying capacity of the Pajaro Valley groundwater basin. Even though the location of the case of study is in California, this methodology can be applied to any ground water dependent agricultural region. This study shows a practical and innovative approach for the sustainable management of agricultural groundwater basins that emphasizes the interdependence of water and land use planning.Pajaro Valley is located within the central coast region of California and comprises southern Santa Cruz, northern Monterey, and a small part of San Benito counties. Watsonville is the principal city where residential, industrial, and commercial land uses predominate. The Pajaro Valley groundwater basin is bounded to the San Andreas Fault to the east and connected to Monterey Bay in the west, covering a surface area of 311 km2 and with a total storage capacity of 9,584 million m3 . The basin recharges through rainfall, irrigation water, and stream flow seepage from Pajaro River and its tributaries, and it includes unconfined and confined aquifers and semi-confined transition zones. This region is an ideal case study location because of its unique and threatened water supply, historical use of water management strategies, and the lucrative agricultural industry. Water supplies for the area include 2,700 groundwater wells, recycled water supplied by the Central Distribution System , and in a small portion, water from Pajaro River. Over 90% of agricultural and municipal water demands are met with groundwater resources because surface water supplies are insufficient and the area is not connected to the federal or state water projects. Reliance on groundwater has repercussions, including the lowering of the groundwater levels that has caused saltwater intrusion from the adjacent Monterey Bay since the 1950s .