Food Sovereignty

Distinguished from food security

Food sovereignty was advanced in 1996 by La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement. Its starting point was the existing concept of food security, which takes access to sufficient food as its objective but does not ask by whom and in what manner that food is produced or who controls the conditions of production. If access is secured through imports, security counts as satisfied.

Food sovereignty adds those questions: peoples have a right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced by ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and a right to define their own food and agriculture systems. Joining the question of control to the question of access is the core of the concept.

Formalization

The Nyéléni forum held at Sélingué in Mali in 2007 formalized the definition. Attended by delegates from more than eighty countries, it adopted six principles: food as a right of peoples, respect for food providers, localizing food systems, placing control at the local level, building knowledge and skills, and working with nature.

These principles led to concrete policy demands: opposition to liberalization of agricultural trade, farmers' rights over seed, land reform, transition to agroecological production, and improvement in the position of women farmers. Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nepal, Senegal, and Egypt have written food sovereignty into their constitutions.

Debate

Objections run in three directions. First, the question of scale: whether localized small-scale production can feed urban populations. Second, the question of trade: in countries dependent on food imports, reducing trade could worsen access rather than improve it. Third, the question of who holds sovereignty: if the unit named as a people is unclear as between the state and the community, policy design is difficult.

Defenders answer that the concept does not demand self-sufficiency but the authority to set the terms of trade. Recent discussion reassesses the concept's force in addressing the control structure of food systems, on the grounds of harvest variability under climate change, concentration in grain markets, and the sharp rise in food prices after 2022.