Seeds of Sovereignty: Critical Public Health, Radical Sisterhood, and the Fight for Agricultural Justice

Seeds of Sovereignty: Critical Public Health, Radical Sisterhood, and the Fight for Agricultural Justice

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The current structure of the industrialized food system reproduces injustices across food security, access to resources, land ownership, and health outcomes in low-income communities and communities of color. For African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) women--who face unique intersectional barriers to participation in agriculture--these disparities are particularly acute. Despite this, the influence of Black farmers has been built into the very foundations of the US agriculture and food systems--and this contribution is largely erased from mainstream food and farming conversations. Seeds of Sovereignty addresses this gap by telling the story of ACB women farmers and their historical and ongoing reclamation of agency in food production. Drawing on over three years of community-engaged fieldwork, Andrew L. Carter details the work done by a Black woman-led food advocacy collective based in Oklahoma City, with international chapters in Africa and the Caribbean. Carter shows that ACB women farmers' historical lived experiences, identities, political voice, and shared deep-rooted agricultural knowledge function as a politics of resourcefulness that offers an innovative and emancipatory praxis for rethinking public health interventions regarding food-related inequity. To date, many such public health campaigns focus on short-term, symptomatic solutions--like charity programs and food education campaigns--without meaningfully interrogating structural-level root causes, such as prohibitive food and agricultural policies. Seeds of Sovereignty calls for rethinking how we organize food systems and develop public health interventions by centering the experience and knowledge of ACB women farmers. Andrew L. Carter is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at San Jose State University. With 20 years of experience in health, community fitness, and food systems across the US, Caribbean, and Africa, his research focuses on health disparities, critical food studies, and intercultural communication. His work examines culture, power, and resistance in public health discourses, particularly how Black farmers challenge structural inequities in agriculture. Through community-based participatory research, he explores farming as an emancipatory tool to address social, economic, and public health disparities in Black communities while preserving cultural legacies.