Michel Pimbert
At its heart, food sovereignty is a people-led response to the existential threats and multiple crises facing agri-food systems. Led by peasant farmers and agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, and fishers, as well as citizens, activist scholars, women, and youth, these proliferating social movements and citizen networks are seeking to fundamentally transform agri-food systems in terms of conviviality, equity, ecological sustainability, resilience, and justice. Emphasising the need to rebuild food governance from the local to global, Michel Pimbert argues that food sovereignty cannot be achieved without participatory direct democracy, economies of care, gender and intersectional justice, and diverse regenerative agroecologies.
Origins and principles of food sovereignty
Since it was first proposed by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) in 1996, the concept of food sovereignty has rapidly moved from the margins to the center stage in international discussions on food, environment, and well-being. The food sovereignty movement affirms that food is a basic human right—as opposed to a commodity. Whilst affirming the importance of the right to food, LVC also argues in favor of a more radical, multicultural, and less-statist conceptualization of human rights than that embedded in United Nations human rights instruments. LVC also demands and defends new and collective human rights such as rights to land, seeds, water, and biodiversity, the right to produce food, and the right to food sovereignty, thus creating links with the human rights movement while expanding its boundaries.
The principles of Food sovereignty have been articulated through LVC’s alliance-building with other social movements. LVC was, for instance, one of the seven organizations that planned and facilitated the 2007 Forum for Food Sovereignty in Nyéléni, Mali, where over six hundred participants from eighty countries further developed the political, economic, social, and ecological dimensions of this alternative policy framework. Across different economic, social, and cultural contexts, peasants and other food providers united in a global movement to denounce the negative impacts of trade liberalization, structural adjustment programs, and agricultural modernization, which were leading to massive de-peasantization (i.e., the transformation and gradual disappearance of the peasantry) in both the Global North and Global South. One of the key outcomes of the forum was the articulation of six pillars of food sovereignty (Box 1), as well as the definition of food sovereignty as “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” (La Via Campesina 2007).
The organizers of Nyéléni 2007 successfully expanded the food sovereignty debate beyond groups of peasant farmers to include indigenous peoples, fishers, pastoralists, consumer groups, urban poor, NGOs, and workers’ trade unions, as well as youth and women. Dialogues between different groups enriched the food sovereignty paradigm and generated more comprehensive statements over time. For example, indigenous peoples in North America have deepened the sacred and spiritual dimensions of food in the Nyéléni 2007 framework for food sovereignty.
Towards systemic transformation
Today more than ever, the global food sovereignty movement emphasizes the need for system-wide transformation – rather than piecemeal reforms – to achieve the right to food, ecological sustainability, and global justice. This involves the creation of a new vision for, and fundamental reinvention of, whole systems. Crucially, several mutually reinforcing changes are needed in many different domains of transformation (see Box 1).
Box 1. Principles and Pillars of Food Sovereignty
| Food Sovereignty: Seven Principles for a Future Without Hunger (1996) | Food Sovereignty: The Six Pillars of Nyéléni (2007) | Food Sovereignty: An Agenda for System Transformation (eight domains) |
| 1. Food—a basic human right Everyone must have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain a healthy life with full human dignity. 2. Agrarian reform A genuine agrarian reform is necessary that gives landless and farming people—especially women —ownership and control of the land they work and returns territories to indigenous peoples. The right to land must be free of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, race, social class, or ideology; the land belongs to those who work it. 3. Protecting natural resources Food sovereignty entails the sustainable care and use of natural resources, especially land, water, seeds, and breeds. Long-term sustainability demands a shift away from dependence on chemical inputs and on cash- crop monocultures and intensive, industrialized production models. Balanced and diversified natural systems are required. 4. Reorganizing food trade Food imports must not displace local production nor depress prices. This means that export dumping or subsidized exports must cease. 5. Ending the globalization of hunger Food sovereignty is undermined by multilateral institutions and by speculative capital. Regulation and taxation of speculative capital and a strictly enforced code of conduct for transnational corporations is therefore needed. 6. Social peace Everyone has the right to be free from violence. Food must not be used as a weapon. The ongoing displacement, forced urbanization, repression, and increasing incidence of racism of smallholder farmers cannot be tolerated. 8. Democratic control Smallholder farmers must have direct input into formulating agricultural policies at all levels. Rural women, in particular, must be granted direct and active decision making on food and rural issues. | 1. Focuses on food for people Puts people’s need for food at the center of policies—insists that food is more than just a commodity 2. Values food providers Supports sustainable livelihoods— respects the work of all food providers 3. Localizes food systems Reduces distance between food providers and consumers— rejects dumping and inappropriate food aid Resists dependency on remote and unaccountable corporations 4. Puts control locally Places control in the hands of local food providers Recognizes the need to inhabit and to share territories Rejects the privatization of “natural resources” 5. Builds knowledge and skills Builds on traditional knowledge Uses research to support and pass this knowledge to future generations Rejects technologies that undermine or contaminate local food systems. 7. Works with Nature Maximizes the contributions of ecosystems Improves resilience Rejects energy- intensive, monocultural, industrialized, destructive methods | 1. Reinventing modernity Reject the idea of development as an ever-expanding process of commodification of nature and social relations. Adopt pluralistic definitions of “the good life” and modernity (e.g., Buen Vivir). 2. Guaranteeing rights to lands, seeds, and natural resources and control over the means of production Promote and protect individual and collective rights to land, water, seeds, and natural resources. Democratize natural resources governance. Redistribute land through agrarian reforms and regulate land-based investment. 3. Healing the metabolic rift (i.e., the delinking of agriculture and nature) Transform food systems through agroecology to regenerate biodiversity, soils, and water. Re-localize agri-food systems based on short food chains and circular models and move away from globalized, fossil-fuel intensive, linear supply chains. 4. Decolonizing knowledge and research Transform knowledge production through power- equalizing research based on cognitive and intersectional justice. Democratize, transform, and fund public research to serve the common good. 5. Supporting local organizations and networks and the convergence of struggles Build networks of local organizations to strengthen the voice and agency of small- scale producers through the use of critical pedagogy and popular education methods. 6. Achieving gender and intersectional justice Eliminate all forms of gender-based violence and construct new gender relations free of oppressions. Tackle the multiple, overlapping, and intertwined structures of oppression, using an intersectional lens. Ensure gender equitable participation in food governance. 7. Rethinking economics Reimagine economics outside capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. Holistically integrate productive labor with the reproductive labor of care of both women and of nature through an economics of care. 8. Democratizing governance Enable peoples’ participation in the coproduction of knowledge and policies. Decentralize and redistribute power in polycentric and horizontal governance webs, both in and between territories. Address the corporate capture of agri-food system governance and the conflicts of interests inherent to multi-stakeholder governance |
| Source: La Via Campesina, www.viacampesina.org <http:// www.viacampesina.org> | Source: Nyéléni 2007 (full report, https:// nyeleni.org/en/synthesis- report/ <https:// nyeleni.org/en/ synthesis-report/ >) | Source: Developed by Pimbert and Claeys, 2024 |
Deepening democracy
Food sovereignty is transformative because it seeks to re-create the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of re-localized and autonomous agri-food systems. This implies that food providers and consumers are directly involved in making institutional choices and framing policies for food and agriculture in each territory. Expanding economic and political democracy are key for change.
Toward Economies of Care, Solidarity, and Degrowth
The dominant model of economic development works well for industrial food and farming. Free trade and other economic innovations favored by transnational corporations and financial investors continue to fuel historically unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power by a tiny minority of hyper-rich individuals. The hyper-rich comprise fewer than one hundred people who own and control more wealth than 50 percent of the world’s population. Collectively, their strategic priority is to ensure that economic rules do not constrain their activity in any way, and allow instead for continued private accumulation as well as the externalization of social and environmental costs.
A fundamentally different economics is needed for widespread transitions to food sovereignty. Self-determining and self-managing communities of producers and citizen-consumers need their own distinct forms of economic exchange that minimize the need to participate in global commodity markets. Degrowth in overproduction and excess consumption of energy and materials, as well as re-localized economies, are essential for food sovereignty. This is largely because a violent tendency of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2004) is built into the very fabric of industrial agri-food systems and the world economy. Evidence from all continents shows that as commodity frontiers for the extraction of oil, metals, and other materials expand to new sites, local communities are displaced and impoverished. Rates of environmental destruction also increase.
Diverse communities thus require alternative forms of economic organization that provide degrowth opportunities and local autonomous spaces for the generation of convivial use values rather than exchange values alone. Last but not least, a transformed economics for food sovereignty would aim to holistically integrate productive labor with the reproductive labor of care of both women and of nature. The challenge is to reimagine economics outside the realms of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.
Fortunately, “more-than-capitalist economies” (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020) persist across the world. In fact, much of the world’s economy is informal, cooperative, hidden, community-based, and unwaged. Empirical examples from anthropology and economic geography show how diverse economies can also include more-than-human labor and human and nonhuman interdependence. Although they are ignored, devalued, and undermined by mainstream economic theory, these forms of economic organization offer relevant models for food sovereignty. The following mutually reinforcing processes are key in enabling a progressive shift to an economics of care, degrowth, social inclusion, solidarity, and freedom:
- Strengthening diverse forms of economic exchange that combine market activities with non-monetary forms of exchange based on reciprocity, gift relations, care, barter, and solidarity—complementary forms of local economic exchange that offer alternatives to markets predicated solely on money
- A guaranteed and unconditional minimum income for all men, women, and other genders that reflects a clear commitment to gender and intersectional justice
- A significant drop in time spent in wage-work and a fairer sharing of jobs and free time between genders
- Wealth redistribution measures—taxing the hyper-rich and corporations as well as financial speculations to free up resources for poorer social groups and to also regenerate local ecologies and economies
- The use of alternative local currencies to retain wealth in re-territorialized economies
- Supporting economic exchanges based on the principle of “from each according to his/her means, to each according to his/her needs”
- Economic indicators that reflect and reinforce new definitions of well-being such as conviviality, mutual care, and frugal abundance
It is noteworthy that these proposals for economic democracy do not exclude trade and exchanges between different parts of the world. For instance, practical plans to harness trade for food sovereignty include managing supply to ensure that public support does not lead to overproduction and dumping, which can lower prices below the cost of production and harm farmers in the Global North and Global South; creating regional common agricultural markets that include countries with similar levels of agricultural productivity—for example, North Africa and the Middle East, West Africa, Central Africa, South Asia, and Eastern Europe; and protecting these regional common agricultural markets using quotas and tariffs to guarantee fair and stable prices to marginalized small-scale producers, food processors, and small food enterprises. More generally, the emphasis is on reorienting the end goals of trade rules so that they contribute to the building of local economies and local control instead of fostering international competitiveness, financial speculation, and unequal exchange.
Expanding political democracy
Decisions on how, why, where, and for whom agri-food systems are designed and managed are critical for the future well-being of people and planet. As such, control over governance—the set of political, social, and economic rules, processes, and systems that determine the way decisions are taken and implemented for the design and management of agri-food systems—is a key battleground for the transformation of food and agriculture, be it at the global, regional, national, or local level.
Actors promoting industrial food and agriculture have an explicit agenda to “reset” global governance in the tradition of “stakeholder capitalism,” which deepens the concentration of agro-industrial power and sidelines multilateral structures of accountability. A recent example is the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit, which adopted a model of multi-stakeholder governance backed by powerful corporate actors, bypassing the multilateral spaces where states already come together to make decisions. The development of unaccountable multi-stakeholder platforms in food systems is further pushed by some of the biggest champions of 4IR agriculture1—the World Economic Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the global nonprofit EAT, market-friendly NGOs like the World Wide Fund for Nature, and corporations including Unilever, Nestlé, Tyson, and Bayer.
In contrast, actors in the global food sovereignty movement defend an inclusive and human rights–based vision of governance. The emphasis on inclusiveness in governance is based on the recognition that marginalized groups have been systematically excluded from decision making in the food arena, – especially peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, landless, workers, women, youth, and indigenous peoples.
Rebuilding food governance from the local to the global
There is an urgent need to rebuild food governance for radical democracy from the bottom up—local to global. Citizens and social movements committed to food sovereignty generally seek to reverse the democratic deficit by promoting an expansion of “direct” democracy in decision making in order to complement, or replace, models of representative democracy in policy making and governance. This view is consistent with the principle that people—rather than governments of nation-states—have the fundamental right to decide their own food and agricultural policies. Ideas of decentralized, democratic, and distributed governance also echo peasant farmers’ and indigenous peoples’ views that food systems are (or should be) regenerative, redistributive, nonhierarchical, and governed on the basis of reciprocal rights and relations.
However, a transition to large-scale direct democracy poses major challenges for social movements. First, deepening democracy assumes that every person is competent to participate in democratic politics and demands a shift in mindset and behavior from that of passive taxpayers and voters. Second, active citizenship and participation in decision making are rights that have to be claimed mainly through the agency and actions of people themselves; they are seldom granted by the state or the market. Despite its aims to radically alter existing power relations, the food sovereignty movement has a contradictory relationship with the state. On the one hand, the movement is very critical of the negative impacts of state policy (e.g., repression, eviction, liberalization) and, on the other hand, its theories and proposals for change often rely on state interventions and support (e.g., demand for credit, extension services). This contradiction is not fully resolved as different approaches to claiming rights to decision making partially reflect distinct ideologies in the food sovereignty movement (anarchism, state focused-reformism, etc).
Third, empowering indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, and other citizens in the governance of agri-food systems, along with the stewardship of the ecosystems they are embedded in (such as grasslands, forests, and wetlands), demands a number of measures. These include social innovations that create inclusive and safe spaces for peoples’ deliberation and action, such as mini-publics2; the establishment of local organizations, horizontal networks, and federations to enhance peoples’ capacity for voice and agency; moves to strengthen civil society; the promotion of gender and intersectional justice; and the expansion of information democracy and citizen-controlled media (such as community radio and video filmmaking). Other needed innovations promote self-management structures at the workplace and democracy in households, encourage learning from the history of direct democracy, and nurture active citizenship through popular education.
And fourth, people need material security and free time to be “empowered” to think about the policies and institutions they want and how they can develop them. Free time is needed for people to fully engage in, and regularly practice, the art of participatory direct democracy. That demands radical reforms in economic arrangements like those listed above in the “Towards Economies of Care, Solidarity, and Degrowth” section of this blog.
At larger spatial scales, collective action is needed to coordinate local adaptive management and governance across a wide range of agri-food systems and associated landscapes (farmlands, forests, grasslands, peri-urban landscapes, and beyond). So to put people at the center of agri-food systems and to foster autonomy, it is key to redistribute power in polycentric and horizontal webs, both in and between territories. In this form of ‘rhizomatic democracy’, decision-making authority is decentralized to communities rather than centralized in a bureaucracy, ensuring the active and inclusive participation of all members of the community. In this regard, valuable insights can be gained from the Zapatista’s federation of autonomous municipalities in Mexico and the democratic confederalism that enables ecological regeneration, women’s liberation, and democracy in Kurdish Rojava.
Final reflections
Food sovereignty cannot be achieved without participatory direct democracy, economies of care, gender and intersectional justice, and diverse regenerative agroecologies as it ultimately seeks to achieve peaceful coexistence among peoples and the rest of nature as well as care for the Earth.
As the food sovereignty paradigm gains traction, the global food sovereignty movement – best described as a movement of movements – is diversifying. Peasant farmers, indigenous peoples, agricultural workers, civil society organizations, and scholar-activists working on food sovereignty are engaging in dialogues with other social actors. The global food sovereignty movement is calling for the convergence of all anti-systemic and anti-capitalist movements, including climate and labor justice movements, feminist movements, black movements, degrowth economics, and antiwar movements. Food sovereignty as a concept, as a right, and as a paradigm for agri-food systems transformation is a valuable starting point for the formulation of joint proposals and actions for systemic change in this emerging confluence of movements.
Michel Pimbert is Emeritus Professor of Agroecology and Food Politics at Coventry University (UK). His interests include agroecology and food sovereignty; political ecology; participatory action research; decolonizing knowledge; and deliberative democratic processes. Much of his writing focuses on transformations for the well-being of human and non-human nature.
Note: This blog is based on two fully referenced publications:
- Pimbert, M.P. (2009) Towards food sovereignty. Reclaiming autonomous food systems
- Pimbert, M.P. and P. Claeys (2024) Food Sovereignty. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Ed. Mark Aldenderfer. New York: Oxford University Press.
Footnotes
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) for food and agriculture is characterized by a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital, and biological domains. The new 4IR aims to re-engineer agri-food systems by using a package of ‘12 transforming technologies’, – including precision agriculture to “optimize the use of agricultural inputs and water”, genetic editing, internet of things, renewable energies, big data and Artificial Intelligence, robots, and nutrigenetics for personalized nutrition.
↩︎ - Mini-publics are made up of small numbers of citizens, who may be self-selected or randomly selected from a larger population. They include citizens’ assemblies, fora for deliberative polls, citizens’ juries and consensus conferences. Participatory policy processes, institutional choices, risk assessments, and bottom-up decision making can be based on mini-publics and methods for deliberative and inclusive processes. Food governance issues have been deliberated in this way by small and family farmers in citizens’ juries and scenario workshops on food futures in Andhra Pradesh, and by citizens’ assemblies on GMOs and agriculture in Mali, and on the governance and priorities of agricultural research in West Africa.
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