State–peasant movement relations and the politics of food sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

Abstract

This contribution argues that the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures–the class characteristics of their mass bases, their leaderships and the modes of interaction between the two–is critical for determining the nature of contemporary struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. It will show that that counter-hegemonic demands are not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice; rather than struggling to replace the neoliberal food regime, many peasant organizations employ the food sovereignty discourse as a political tool in their negotiations with the state in order to access resources from within the prevailing neoliberal model, not to transform it.