Food sovereignty means having options beyond the false binary of corporate globalisation or nationalist isolation
In the early 1990s a new term started to circulate in the vocabularies of people trying to end world hunger: “food sovereignty”. It was invented by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, a group of farmers, landless workers and peasants whose membership now exceeds 200-million.
Food sovereignty is “the right to have rights” over the food system, a way of saying that everyone should be able to have a say about how their community, state and country ensures that no-one goes hungry.
Food sovereignty was a response to the Washington Consensus model of the 1990s. The World Bank, and the US government behind it, insisted that what mattered most was “food security”, and that people shouldn’t worry too much about how food security was achieved. If trade liberalisation and local austerity politics fed people — as they insisted it did — then one shouldn’t worry too much about the vulnerabilities and displacements that happened along the way.
A few things have happened since those debates in the 1990s. First, the proponents of food sovereignty have been proven right. Over the past decade the number and proportion of people going hungry has been rising, even though world trade continued apace. Deprivation has become so bad that over 2-billion people are now considered moderately or severely food insecure, and almost half the world’s children — 1.12-billion children — cannot afford a healthy diet.
In the meantime, as buzzwords will, food sovereignty has been appropriated by governments to justify militarism. Italy and France recently unveiled “food sovereignty” policies that in effect direct their militaries to control the supply chains that keep their citizens fed. The only people who have rights to have rights under this vision are the French or Italians. And, of course, Washington has stopped being in consensus with itself or the rest of the world.
Yet the core idea — that democratic control of food systems is the best way to end hunger — has only grown more urgent. Today’s food systems face a perfect storm: climate chaos, pandemic disruptions, corporate concentration and geopolitical fragmentation.
This is a short excerpt from an article written by Raj Patel for Business Day in April 2025. Click here to read the full piece.