Food sovereignty is a slogan for representation of the rights of non-industrial farmers.[1] The relationship between humans and food that evolved over millenia[2] but is under increasing pressures.[3]
Food sovereignty is a slogan for representation of the rights of non-industrial farmers.[1] The relationship between humans and food that evolved over millenia[2] but is under increasing pressures.[3]
Food sovereignty is such an important concept that it may warrant independent development on Appropedia where most readers concur on the principles of sustainability and may have a higher tolerance for technical discussion than the general readership of Wikipedia. As a base point, the below article is imported from Wikipedia as of July 10, 2011; please feel free to edit it as you believe suitable for Appropedia. Usable sections need to be "dewikified" largely by correcting the redlinks. (Attribution history, in full, is at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Food_sovereignty&limit=500&action=history and also on the talk page of this Appropedia article.)
Food sovereignty as covered on Wikipedia:
"Food sovereignty" is a term coined by members of Via Campesina in 1996[4] to refer to a policy framework advocated by a number of farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, women, rural youth and environmental organizations, namely the claimed "right" of peoples to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems, in contrast to having food largely subject to international market forces.
Via Campesina's seven principles of food sovereignty include:
Food sovereignty was born in response to growing disillusion among certain sectors with food security, the dominant global discourse on food provisioning and policy. The latter emphasises access to adequate nutrition for all. In the name of efficiency and enhanced productivity, it has therefore served to promote what has been termed the "corporate food regime"[5] : large-scale, industrialised corporate farming based on specialised production, land concentration and trade liberalisation. Food security's inattention to the political economy of the corporate food regime blinds it to the adverse effects of that regime, notably the widespread dispossession of small producers and global ecological degradation. For instance, a food security agenda that simply provides surplus grain to hungry people would probably be strongly criticised by food sovereignty advocates as just another form of commodity dumping, facilitating corporate penetration of foreign markets, undermining local food production, and possibly leading to irreversible biotech contamination of indigenous crops with patented varieties. U.S. taxpayer subsidized exports of Bt corn to Mexico since the passage of NAFTA is a case in point.
At the Forum for Food Sovereignty in Sélingué, Mali, 27 February 2007, about 500 delegates from more than 80 countries adopted the Declaration of Nyéléni,[6] which says in part:
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers. Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all peoples and the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations.
Writing in Food First's Backgrounder, fall 2003, Peter Rosset argues that "Food sovereignty goes beyond the concept of food security… [Food security] means that… [everyone] must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day[,] … but says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced." Food sovereignty includes support for smallholders and for collectively owned farms, fisheries, etc., rather than industrializing these sectors in a minimally regulated global economy. In another publication, Food First describes "food sovereignty" as "a platform for rural revitalization at a global level based on equitable distribution of farmland and water, farmer control over seeds, and productive small-scale farms supplying consumers with healthy, locally grown food."[4]The preface to the ITDG publishing / FIAN paper on food sovereignty says: "The Food Sovereignty policy framework starts by placing the perspective and needs of the majority at the heart of the global food policy agenda and embraces not only the control of production and markets, but also the Right to Food, people's access to and control over land, water and genetic resources, and the use of environmentally sustainable approaches to production. What emerges is a persuasive and highly political argument for refocusing the control of food production and consumption within democratic processes rooted in localized food systems."[7]
In April 2008 the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), an intergovernmental panel under the sponsorship of the United Nations and the Worldbank, adopted the following definition: "Food sovereignty is defined as the right of peoples and sovereign states to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies."[8]
In September 2008, Ecuador became the first country to enshrine food sovereignty in its constitution. As of late 2008, a law is in the draft stages that is expected to expand upon this constitutional provision by banning genetically modified organisms, protecting many areas of the country from extraction of non-renewable resources, and to discourage monoculture. The law as drafted will also protect biodiversity as collective intellectual property and recognize the Rights of Nature.[9]
On March 8, 2011, the Maine town of Sedgwick passed a Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance which nullified existing federal and state laws over food and agriculture, including the power of federal inspection of locally-grown agricultural goods. On April 8, the Maine town of Blue Hill passed a similar bill.
"Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets; and to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production."
It is in its capacity as a social movement that food regime analysts are interested in food sovereignty. With its Marxist influences, food regime theorists are interested in how moments of crisis within a particular food regime are expressive of the dialectical tension that animates movement between such configurations (i.e. periods of transition). According to leading theorist Philip McMichael, food regimes are always characterised by contradictory forces. Consolidation of a regime does not so much resolve as it does contain, or else strategically accommodate, these tensions; meanwhile, their intensification, often via the mobilisations of social movements, often signals a period of transition.
According to McMichael, a "world agriculture" under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture ("food from nowhere") represents one pole of the "central contradiction" of the present regime. He is interested in the food sovereignty movement's potential to escalate the tension between this and its opposing pole, the agroecology-based localism ("food from somewhere") advocated by various grassroots food movements[10] . Offering slightly different conclusions, recent work by Harriet Friedmann suggests that "food from somewhere" is already being recuperated under an emergent "corporate-environmental" regime[11] (see also Campbell (2009)[12] ).
There is a lack of clear vision within the food sovereignty movement regarding the political or jurisdictional community at which its calls for democratisation and renewed "agrarian citizenship" (see Wittman (2009)[13] ) are directed. In public statements, the food sovereignty movement urges for strong sovereign powers for both national governments and local communities (in the vein of the indigenous rights movement, Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) and the like) (elsewhere it has also appealed to global civil society to act a check against abuses by national and supranational governing bodies).
Those who take a radically critical view on state sovereignty would argue against the possibility that national sovereignty can be reconciled with that of local communities[14] (see also the debate about multiculturalism and indigenous autonomy in Mexico[15][16][17] ). On the other hand, Raj Patel is more favourable towards this prospect: for Patel, an adapted version of Seyla Benhabib's Kantian-inspired cosmopolitan federalism – involving multiple, layered geographies of democratic attachment and jurisdiction – could offer a promising vehicle for the realisation of food sovereignty on a large-scale. Patel's important proviso here is that a stronger version of Benhabib's accompanying principle of moral universalism is also pursued. By Patel's assessment, the food sovereignty movement is showing promising signs of moving towards the radical egalitarianism and democratic praxis that such a model entails.
In its strong reassertion of rural and peasant identities and forms of social reproduction, the food sovereignty movement has been read as a sharp challenge to modernist narratives of inexorable urbanisation, industrialisation of agriculture and de-peasantisation. However, as part of ongoing debates over the contemporary relevance of the "agrarian question" in classical Marxism[18][19] , Henry Bernstein is critical of these largely celebratory accounts. Specifically, levels Bernstein, such analyses tend to present the agrarian population as a unified, singular and world-historical social category. Therefore, they fail to account, in any more than a gestural manner, for:
In so doing, these accounts cannot escape a certain agrarian populism (or agrarianism) according to Bernstein (for a response to Bernstein, see McMichael (2009)[22]).
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| Cite as | GeoBard (2011–2025). "Food sovereignty". Appropedia. Retrieved October 3, 2026. |