FS - The gift of food sovereignty

Abstract

In April 1996 representatives of peasants, small and medium-scale farmers, rural women, indigenous representatives, and farm workers from the global North and global South travelled to Tlaxcala, Mexico to participate in the Second International Conference of La Vía Campesina. For members of La Vía Campesina, the globalization of a neoliberal industrial model of agriculture had created an acute crisis in the countryside around the world that was accompanied by the rural exodus and disempowerment of peasants and small-scale farming families, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation. In refusing to be “disappeared” and struggling for the right to exist as small-scale food producers, they collectively imagined a powerful counter-narrative to large-scale corporate-led agriculture: a socially just, rights-based, ecologically sustainable “future without hunger”, a future based on food sovereignty (Desmarais, 2007; La Vía Campesina, 1996a, 1996b).