Abstract
The first lecture will examine the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the concept of food sovereignty. Driven by the transnational peasant movement La Via Campesina in the early 1990s, the idea of food sovereignty was put forward to offer an alternative to the global agricultural competition heralded by the adoption of the Agreement on Agriculture as part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements.
Indeed, it was as the Punta del Este round of trade negotiations within the GATT (1986–1994)—which would lead to the establishment of the WTO in 1995—was drawing to a close that the farmers’ movement expressed its opposition to subjecting the development of agriculture to the demands of international trade, and instead proposed that priority be given to food production that meets the needs of local communities, relegating international trade (and export-oriented agriculture) to a secondary role. This debate between the gradual liberalization of trade in agricultural products, on the one hand, and food sovereignty, on the other, extends beyond the scope of the WTO alone. It also encompasses agronomic, health, and geopolitical issues, as well as democratic ones: behind the demand for food sovereignty, in fact, there is also a demand for autonomy and the democratic reclaiming of food systems, in order to prevent agricultural and food policy choices from being dictated by the need for competitiveness—and thus by the pursuit of economies of scale—which leads to the subordination of small-scale farming to the expectations of large agribusinesses and global value chains.
This contrast between two models of agricultural and food system development has shaped debates on food system reform since 1990 and has led to the gradual replacement of the paradigm of agricultural trade liberalization with that of food sovereignty: the adoption by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in December 2018 of a Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which includes the concept of food sovereignty, marks the culmination of this shift.
