Food Sovereignty: A new societal paradigm for the 21st century?

Abstract

Agricultural systems and rural communities have of course been the objects and subjects of agrarian change for a long time, with the establishment and spread of capitalism as the dominant global political economic system from the 16th century onwards and the consequent dynamics of industrialisation and urbanisation, which have rapidly gathered pace in recent decades. The period from 1980 to the present time, commonly known as the neoliberal era, also saw the rapid globalisation of food and agricultural systems driven by the intersecting processes of debt crises, structural adjustment loan conditionalities, the turn to trade liberalisation, and the growing corporate control, to the extent of duopolies and oligopolies, of key sectors of the global food system. This is the context in which food so vereignty emerged in the mid-1990s, as the response articulated by small, peasant and family farmers in many countries around the world under the umbrella of La Via Campesina (the farmers’ way). Originally developed as a counter-poise to what was perceived as a corporate led agenda of food security via industrialised, globalised and corporate-controlled agriculture and food systems, food sovereignty has since generated a substantive literature and accumulated body of practice around the world. As a result of the successful political advocacy of peasant organisations and heir allies, food sovereignty has also been institutionalised in a number of countries at the constitutional, legislative and regulatory level.