Food Sovereignty

Historical development

La Vía Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small farmers, landless people, rural women and Indigenous communities, founded in 1993. It introduced the idea at the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, against the push to liberalise trade. The Nyéléni Forum in Mali in 2007 brought hundreds of organisations together and produced the declaration that defines the movement.

Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nepal, Mali and Senegal have since written food sovereignty into their constitutions or laws. It shaped the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (2018), and it has become the political framework for the science of agroecology developed by Miguel Altieri, Peter Rosset and others.

Principal claims

• Food is a right and part of a culture. It is more than a commodity.
• Small agroecological producers feed most of the world, and they do it more sustainably than industrial agriculture.
• Land, seeds, water and knowledge should be held in common or by those who work them. Land reform is central.
• Corporate control of farm inputs, trade and retail has to be resisted, along with the biotechnology and chemical intensification that serve it.
• Peoples and nations have the right to protect their food systems from dumping and from trade rules that undermine them.
• Women produce much of the world’s food. They must have rights to land and a central place in the movement.

Policy implications

Food sovereignty calls for land reform and secure tenure, support for agroecology and local markets, and public buying from small producers. It wants control of seeds kept with farmers, and opposes patents on living things and genetically modified crops. It wants protection from dumping, limits on corporate concentration, public investment in rural infrastructure, and peasants’ rights recognised in international law.

Internal disagreements

Supporters disagree about how far to work with the state and how far to keep the movement independent. They embrace local and fair markets and resist global ones, but where to draw that line is argued over. They weigh national sovereignty against local community control, and differ on how strictly to reject biotechnology and what role urban and consumer movements should play.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics argue that small-scale agroecology cannot feed eight billion people, that framing food in national and local terms can shelter protectionism, that peasant farming is often harder than its portrait suggests, and that rejecting biotechnology gives up real gains. Agricultural economists dispute its claims about productivity.

Supporters cite evidence on how much small farms produce, on the environmental costs of industrial agriculture and on the resilience of diverse farming systems.

Relationships to other traditions

Food sovereignty is the farming programme of the decolonial family and the environmentalism of the poor, close to Buen Vivir, Indigenous environmental sovereignty and ecofeminism. Across the political divide it meets agrarian conservatism on small farms and local economies, and degrowth on scale. It is the opposite of ecomodernism’s intensive farming and land sparing.