Peasant Understanding of Food Sovereignty: Indonesian Peasants in a Transnational Agrarian Movement

Abstract

La Via Campesina (LVC) is a transnational agrarian movement that actively promotes food sovereignty as an alternative approach to the global food crisis. Communication among local, national, and global members of this movement is needed to spread it further and support food sovereignty. This study focused examines the dynamics of local-global communication in a food-sovereignty movement by comparing peasants' statements in the relevant communicative spaces and official texts produced by LVC. The method of ethnography of communication (EO) is used to determine peasants' understanding of food sovereignty and the context that influences it. Based on a multi-site strategy of ethnography for gathering data, we observed seven relevant communicative spaces and interviewed 22 peasants from 15 Indonesian regions. We also gathered secondary data to analyze LVC's official publications. We found a convergence between local and global in understanding food sovereignty, suggesting that the dynamics of local-global communication are influenced by the following: (1) the existence of communicative spaces on the local, national, and global levels; (2) the importance of the participation of local peasants in these communicative spaces; and (3) location-specific issues.