Umm, this is a great opportunity to show the curiosity and intelligence of this team and this is the first time for me to be member of this kind of responsible projects as well. Briefly saying, this team tries to do best to wrestle with this problem.

We need to stop depending on corporations and big agribusiness for our food. The pandemic has made it clear why.

Today, food security in countries around the world is increasingly tied to big industrial food production. Singapore, for example, imports some 90 percent of its food; Iraq, which used to be the breadbasket of the Middle East, also gets more than 80 percent of its food from abroad.

The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing many to recognise the importance and urgency of food sovereignty - the right of people to determine their own food and agricultural systems and their right to produce and consume healthy and culturally appropriate food.

Countries like Nepal, Mali, Venezuela and several others have already recognised food sovereignty as a constitutional right of their people. Other states should follow suit. Food sovereignty of the people is the best defence against any economic shock.

It addresses the most urgent and pressing need of the people, which is to have healthy, nutritious and climatically appropriate food, grown in a locality or a neighbourhood, where they most likely know the people who produce it. Agroecological and localised peasant production of food respects and co-exists with our natural surroundings. It keeps away from harmful pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

Any order that promotes life over profits must become the bedrock of human civilisation. We are not living in such a world now, but we surely can.

As the world reels under the fallout of a pandemic, now is the time to start building an equal, just and liberal society that embraces food sovereignty and solidarity.

https://www.aljazeera.com/profile/jeongyeol-kim.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/profile/pramesh-pokharel.html