Against the grain: radical eco-social work and a global movement for land reform, ‘emancipatory agroecologies’, food sovereignty and climate justice

MotivationGovernments usually see food security in terms of the availability of and access to sufficient, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food. Food justice scholars, however, see food production and provisioning, diet, nutrition, and health, and women's role in all of these aspects, as inherently political, resulting from, and intertwined with, history, politics, and economics. In state policy, these complex dynamics are often siphoned into separate ministerial silos—health, gender, land, environment, trade, etc. Food sovereignty—a concept that addresses unequal power relations within food systems at scales from household to nation—is increasingly being incorporated into national policies, particularly in the global south. Haiti has recently introduced food sovereignty into its policy landscape, but the degree to which this inter‐sectoral approach diverges or coalesces with past policies for food security has not been explored.PurposeHow does food sovereignty shape policy in ways that differ from conventional food security framings? How would a food sovereignty policy address questions of land, gender, health, trade, and agriculture in ways that differ from past policies?Methods and approachWe analyse the content of seven Haitian policies and plans, post‐2010 earthquake, for agricultural development, food trade and tariffs, land and agrarian reform, gender, food preferences and cultures, and health—themes raised by food sovereignty. We explore how well the existing policies and plans correspond to the 2018 National Policy and Strategy for Food Sovereignty, Security and Nutrition in Haiti (Politique et Stratégie Nationales de Souveraineté et Sécurité Alimentaires et de Nutrition en Haïti—PSNSSANH).FindingsHaiti's food sovereignty policy diverges significantly from previous policies and plans in the way it brings together related concerns. Specifically, Haiti's food sovereignty policy, in contrast to sectoral plans, focuses on smallholder farming, encourages the production and consumption of traditional foods, and aims to protect domestic food production from competition by imports. It addresses concerns about food safety, particularly aflatoxins in groundnuts. It recognizes the central role of women as farmers, traders of food (Madanm Sara) and guardians of children's diets. The only significant dimension of food sovereignty that is not fully addressed in the PSNSSANH is that of land and its distribution to those who farm it.Policy implicationsThe PSNSSANH offers a new approach to food, connecting aspects of the Haitian food system that have previously been isolated—tariffs and trade, nutrition and health, production and consumption of traditional foods, peasant land tenure, and women food traders. It represents a radical reframing of issues and policies. Food security frameworks based on food sovereignty that recognize the links between farming, diet, and health can lead to visions of diets, landscapes, cultures, and economies very different to those of neoliberal analyses that focus on sectors with too little account of key interactions within food systems.

“Food sovereignty” is an alternative paradigm for food and agriculture that aims to guarantee and protect people’s space, ability, and right to define their own models of production, distribution, and consumption. It is a response to the deep social, economic, and environmental crises generated by the dominant model of food and agriculture in capitalist, communist, and socialist states. Confronted with hunger, food insecurity, massive de-peasantization, and the commodification of food through the neoliberal transformation of food systems, the food sovereignty movement seeks to reverse inequitable and ecologically destructive industrial farming, fisheries, forestry, and livestock management and to rebuild the social, economic, cultural, political, and spiritual foundations of our agri-food systems. Deeply transformative in its vision and practice, the food sovereignty movement affirms that food is a basic human right—as opposed to a commodity—and should be regarded as an integral part of culture, heritage, and cosmovision. This implies that food providers and consumers should be directly and meaningfully involved in framing policies for food and agriculture. The notion of food sovereignty is perhaps best understood as a transformative process that seeks to re-create the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of relocalized and autonomous agri-food systems. Food system transformation is grounded in agroecological practices based on diversity, decentralization, democracy, and local adaptation within and between territories, with a view to build ecological sustainability and keep life within safe planetary limits. Food sovereignty cannot be achieved without gender and intersectional justice, equity, and economies of care, as it ultimately seeks to achieve peaceful coexistence among peoples and care for the earth. The concept of food sovereignty has rapidly moved from the margins to more center stage in international discussions on food, environment, development, and well-being. Since it was first proposed by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina in 1996, food sovereignty has become a policy framework adopted by some governments and international organizations. In response to advocacy campaigns by peasant organizations and social movements, the United Nations has recently adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which recognizes new human rights to land, water, forests, seeds, and natural resources, and outlines states obligations with regard to human rights–based natural resources governance. The UNDROP itself recognizes food sovereignty as a collective right. As the food sovereignty paradigm is gaining traction, the global food sovereignty movement, best described as a movement of movements, is diversifying. Peasant farmers, indigenous peoples, agricultural workers, nongovernmental organizations, and scholar-activists working on food sovereignty are engaging in dialogues with other social actors. The global food sovereignty movement is calling for the convergence of all antisystemic and anticapitalist movements, including climate and labor justice movements, feminist movements, black movements, degrowth economics, and antiwar movements. Food sovereignty as a concept, as a right, and as a paradigm for food systems transformation is a valuable starting point for the formulation of joint proposals and actions for systemic change in this emerging confluence of movements. Food sovereignty is also an increasingly popular research topic for a wide range of academic disciplines, including anthropology, geography, history, law, philosophy, agronomy, and ecology, as well as transdisciplinary research on agri-food systems. Historical, decolonial, feminist, cross-cultural, transdisciplinary, and critical perspectives are all needed to further understand the origins, development, and politics of food sovereignty in different contexts. Place-based and nuanced explorations of the multilevel processes that enable and constrain systemic change for food sovereignty can help inform policy and practice in different settings. These are important future directions for research on food sovereignty.

This article examines the complicated histories of two competing development tropes in postwar Honduras: food security and food sovereignty. Food security emerged as a construct intertwined with land security and national food self-sufficiency soon after the militant, peasant-led movement for national agrarian reform in the 1970s. The transnational coalition, La Vía Campesina, launched their global food sovereignty campaign in the 1990s, in part to counter the global corporate industrial agro-food system. Cultural and political analysis reveals challenges for each trope. Food security resonates with deeply held peasant understandings of seguridad for their continued social reproduction in insecure social and natural conditions. In contrast, the word sovereignty, generally understood as powers of nation states, faces semantic confusion and distance from rural actors' lives. Moreover, Honduras's national peasant unions, weakened by funding cuts and neoliberal assaults on agrarian reform, diverted by their own efforts to help establish the transnational La Vía Campesina, have been unable and, in some cases, unwilling to campaign effectively for food sovereignty. In addition, a parallel network of NGO-supported sustainable agriculture centres has largely embraced the peasant understandings of food security, while remaining skeptical of ‘mismanaged, modernist’ agrarian reform and the food sovereignty campaign. Attention turns to structural analysis of the steady decline of agriculture, economy and social life in the Honduran countryside, while also identifying potentially hopeful local-national solidarities between peasant union and sustainable agriculture leaders within the popular resistance movement to the recent military coup. This article finds that transnational agrarian movements and food campaigns tend to ignore local peasant understandings, needs, and organisations at their own peril.

Food sovereignty issue is integrated with agro ecology, climate and environmental justice, right of food workers, agrarian reform and justice to women and peasants. Despite of the promises of food security by the use of new practices and technologies global hunger has significantly increased. Industrial food production and indiscriminant use of chemical fertilizers pesticides have caused air, water and soil pollution and consequently environment and human health has been seriously impaired. Nepal being a developing economy could hardly endow all her possible resources just to address food security issue, hence the food sovereignty issue remained veiled till 2075B.S. Present study aims to enquire the working status of food sovereignty principal on real grounds in the country. The study is based on secondary data and is quantitative in nature. As pre design it is descriptive and prescriptive both. The study examines efficacy of food sovereignty principal on six pillar of it which are: focus on food for people; Value food providers; localize food system; puts control locally; builds knowledge and skills and work with nature. Examining through facts and figures, it is found that there is food crisis in the country with its quantity and nutritive value. The extended net works of cooperative throughout the country may play significant role in activating food sovereignty principals. Existences of middle man, poorer financial assistance, poorer insurance coverage, limitation of minimum price support policy to fewer crops are some of the major problems. In addition land fragmentation, diminishing wet and dry land area are additional bottlenecks. Indiscriminant use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides pose a crucial problem to practice organic farming. Activities as river bed farming, tharu alu cultivation, Jhol mal preparation, kitchen gardening, community seed bank and use of local biochar are working well with positive outcomes to support food sovereignty efforts.

This study scrutinizes the dynamics of land and agricultural policies in Indonesia, particularly Joko Widodo’s agrarian reform and food sovereignty (2014–2024). Drawing on historical materialist policy analysis, it identifies the context, actors, and processes that shape the trajectories of current practices. It shows how structural conditions and social contradictions of agrarian change in the past conditions how different hegemony projects contest each other to occupy a hegemonic position. Illustration from the agrarian reform and food sovereignty policymaking challenges the orthodox policy analysis in Indonesia, which has been dominant since the Suharto regime. Agrarian reform and food sovereignty in the country are not an isolated product of the ‘rational’ state apparatus in taking care of public affairs, as orthodox policy analysis often suggests. They are, rather, the product of an unstable compromise among social forces formulated by the state apparatus. Hence, relying on ‘government political will,’ demanding the state apparatus to be ‘rational’ and use more ‘knowledge’ to create effective land and agricultural policies, as orthodox policy analysts often insist, is neither desirable nor realistic. It is only by rebalancing the power of hegemony projects that a more genuine paradigm of agrarian reform and food sovereignty may be introduced.

Food sovereignty, as a critical alternative to the concept of food security, is broadly defined as the right of local peoples to control their own food systems, including markets, ecological resources, food cultures, and production modes. This article reviews the origins of the concept of food sovereignty and its theoretical and methodological development as an alternative approach to food security, building on a growing interdisciplinary literature on food sovereignty in the social and agroecological sciences. Specific elements of food sovereignty examined include food regimes, rights-based and citizenship approaches to food and food sovereignty, and the substantive concerns of advocates for this alternative paradigm, including a new trade regime, agrarian reform, a shift to agroecological production practices, attention to gender relations and equity, and the protection of intellectual and indigenous property rights. The article concludes with an evaluation of community-based perspectives and suggestions for future research on food sovereignty.

Agroecology, organic agriculture, and food sovereignty are often regarded as well-intentioned but unrealistic niches that are ultimately unable to transform food systems. As a result, they are discounted as unfeasible options for meeting global food demand for a growing population in the face of climate change. Yet wide-scale support for agroecology and supporting structures for food and seed sovereignty have rarely, if ever, been implemented. Rather, practitioners of agroecology, organic farming, and food sovereignty are marginalized through strict regulations and free trade agreements, as well as ongoing trends towards technological fixes, unjust subsidies for large-scale conventional commodity production, and the financialization of agriculture. In this paper I extrapolate what we might learn from how small farmers in small countries have adapted to global changes for how we may move towards more environmentally sound, socially just, and climate resilient ways of feeding the world. Drawing upon experiences working with organic farmers in Latvia and Costa Rica for over a decade, particularly surrounding issues of agrobiodiversity conservation and seed sovereignty, I argue that adaptation of our food systems to climate change must happen through nested and mutually interdependent networks across scales. This will require supportive rather than restrictive governance structures that recognize and build upon farmer knowledge systems, connections to place, and networks of diversity, while forging spaces where innovative practices and transformative values may restructure productive activities, markets, and supply chains. Lack of attention to these elements creates a set of injustices across scales that result in frustrated and fractured movements and restricted farmer, community, and state sovereignties. The current interlinked global crises will require the involvement of nested actors, knowledge systems, and networks of organic sovereignties working across scales to connect agroecology, food sovereignty, and climate justice.

Food Sovereignty in Canada: Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems. Edited by Hanna Wittman, Annette Aurelie Desmarais, & Nettie Wiebe. Halifax, NS, and Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood, 2011. 219 pp. ISBN 9781552664438What kind of food system does Canada have? Is it just and sustainable? Is an alternative food system possible? The answers drawn from reading this collection are sobering and distressing on the first two counts, but hopeful on the last. This volume, along with an earlier collection by the same editors (Wittman, Desmarais, & Wiebe, 2010), grew out of a conference on "Food Sovereignty" held at the University of Saskatchewan in 2008. Many of the contributors are members of the National Farmers Union (NFU), a founding member of a transnational peasant and farmers' movement called La Via Campesina. This movement embraces a vision of food sovereignty in conscious opposition to the prevailing "neoliberal industrialized food system." Its ultimate aim is to "put the control of productive resources... in the hands of those who produce food" (p. 5)."Food sovereignty" embodies an alternative moral idea of what our food systems ought to be for: sustaining livelihoods, ecosystems, and lives. These social ends-which are economic ends-ought to be given precedence over profit-maximization. Achieving food sovereignty requires shifting our food systems away from linear profit-driven "food chains" towards multi-dimensional just and sustainable "food webs" (pp. 16-17). While there is little sustained theoretical analysis of the nature of capitalist profit-oriented agriculture, the readers of this journal will find that the idea of "food sovereignty" offers fertile ground for studying and mapping out the size and structure of the social economy and non-profit sectors in Canadian agriculture.The opening chapter by Weibe and Wipf outlines the recent history of the food sovereignty movement and the challenges, obstacles, and promise this holds for Canada. This movement emerged as a response to the impact of neoliberal globalization on agriculture and trade across the world in the 1980s. While its practical meaning might vary, the concept of food sovereignty can be broadly understood "as the right of nations and peoples to control their own food systems, including their own markets, production modes, food cultures and environment" (p. 4). Food security is rooted in power relations, and is thus fundamentally political. A paradigm shifttowards a food system based on food sovereignty depends on seeing how "sustainable food production and genuine food security are a function of community-based control over the food system" (p. 5).In chapter two, Qualman examines Canada's neoliberal food system and argues that any objective consideration of its effects makes the "strongest possible case for food sovereignty-based policies" (p. 21).Farmers increasingly rely on off-farm income, agricultural support programs, and debt-financed industrial expansion. One of the more alarming observations he makes is that while our agricultural system has generated three-quarters of a trillion dollars worth of agricultural goods since 1985, the net market income of farmers (excluding state transfers) was zero over the same period (p. 20). The state of our agricultural system is symptomatic of a classic staples trap that is ultimately turning farmers into sharecroppers and serfs who are increasingly vulnerable to being dispossessed of their land (p. 35).In chapter three, Beingessner's interview of Terry Boehm and Hilary Moore (former NFU president and current president of NFU Local 310 - Lanark County) provides insight into the practical meaning of the statistical realities that Qualman identifies for small- and medium-sized farmers and rural communities. Much of the discussion here (and throughout the book) revolves around the hard choices farmers face between adapting to the requirements of "capitalist agriculture" and using food sovereignty as the basis of constructing an alternative "mode of production. …

Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform reveals the human drama behind the radical agrarian reform that unfolded in Peru during the final three decades of the twentieth century. That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas. Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.

We examine the role of living labs as ethical spaces in driving sustainability transitions in food systems through participatory experimentation, stakeholder engagement, and knowledge exchange. We conceptualise living labs as dynamic environments that integrate diverse actors, including policymakers, researchers, farmers, and consumers, into co-creative processes that foster inclusive governance. While ethical spaces have traditionally been associated with Indigenous worldviews, which emphasise respect, reciprocity, and dialogue, living labs differ in their proactive approach to innovation and systemic change. Living labs facilitate collaborative problem-solving to address food sovereignty between real-world experimentation and social innovation, contributing to food sovereignty and social justice. We argue that ethical governance within food systems requires frameworks that balance economic efficiency with social equity, mitigating power imbalances that often favour corporate-dominated models. We analyse living labs’ contributions to sustainability transitions and highlight the potential of experimental governance in fostering resilient food systems and innovation. We advocate for the need for policy mechanisms that support community-led food initiatives rooted in knowledge exchange and experimentation while ensuring equitable access to resources and decision-making power. Living labs, if structured inclusively, can serve as transformative ethical spaces that bridge the gap between scientific knowledge, grassroots innovations for new product development, and policy frameworks, ultimately fostering just and sustainable food futures.

There is a debate in the literature about whether one can address food system problems with mar­ket-based approaches while seeking food justice or food sovereignty. However, as part of a team of researchers and community leaders, we have found that this debate is less relevant in practice. The concepts are interrelated within real-world food systems. As such, we were motivated to ask, how do social enterprises (SEs) interact with food jus­tice and food sovereignty movements and their visions in order to realize more democratic and equitable local food systems in communities? To answer this question, we conducted a systematic review at the intersection of SE, food sovereignty, and food justice literature. Analyzing nine articles, which included 17 food-related SEs, we found evi­dence of potential interactions between food SEs, food justice, and food sovereignty that are compat­ible (e.g., create employment) and incompatible (e.g., limited ability to address issues like commu­nity employability and green gentrification). The lit­erature includes at least three important character­istics that inform how food-related SEs may interact with food justice and sovereignty, includ­ing employee and ownership demographics, the enterprise business model, and aspects of the food system targeted by the enterprise via market activi­ties. If we consider a systems perspective, we can envision the ways in which the aspects are embed­ded and interdependent in a neoliberal society. SEs, as market-based agents for social change, exist in the same system as justice and sovereignty.

To implement effective ocean governance, development of policies and management strategies needs to incorporate input from communities that will be impacted by the decisions. People engaging in small-scale fisheries and aquaculture mobilize themselves in anticipation of various challenges, for example, food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the right for people to access healthy and culturally appropriate food that is produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. Little attention has been paid to documenting and understanding the struggles and efforts of small-scale fishers to ensure their own food sovereignty. In the Western Indian Ocean region, and Tanzania in particular, there has been a limited number of initiatives among coastal fishers that seek to transform food systems. To better understand these initiatives, this study was designed to examine collective actions undertaken in pursuit of food sovereignty among small pelagic fishers at three landing sites on the coast of Tanzania. Collection of primary data involved a survey of 206 individuals, 25 key informant interviews, 3 focus group discussions and participant observation. Secondary data was also collected from official fisheries records and published materials to supplement the primary data. The study revealed limited current capacity of the small pelagic fisheries to satisfy local demand of fifish for food security and sovereignty purposes due to increased fish trade supplying markets beyond the study sites. The prospects of satisfying an increasing fish demand from existing production systems are limited. Small pelagic fisheries need to be linked to the global food system through appropriate mechanisms to allow them to contribute meaningfully to food security and sovereignty.

“Fixing” hunger in the 21st century: How food sovereignty might turn agriculture “Right-side Up”

Development scholars and practitioners are promoting food security, food sovereignty, and the localization of food systems to prepare for the projected negative impacts of climate change. The implementation of biodiverse homegardens is often seen as a way not only to localize food production but also as a strategy in alignment with a food sovereignty agenda. While much scholarship has characterized and critiqued food security and sovereignty conceptualizations, relatively little research has examined people’s lived experiences in order to test how such theoretical visions play out on the ground in farming communities. Based on a case study of four coffee cooperatives in northern Nicaragua, we examine a non-governmental organization (NGO)-supported project promoting food security and sovereignty through development of homegardens. We ask: To what extent are homegardens an effective strategy to reach food sovereignty? And, why may farmers be resistant to changing their food production and consumption strategies to embrace biodiverse homegardens when they improve food security? We discuss characteristics of agroecological homegardens, the distinctions between food security, food sovereignty and dominant discourses of development, the history of food sovereignty in Nicaragua, and farmer perspectives on homegarden implementation. Despite historic critiques, NGOs are poised to facilitate the transformation of food and agricultural development by employing counter development strategies, a necessary step if homegardens are to be successful in the long term. To conclude, we propose some strategies NGOs and communities might pursue to move forward with homegardens as a food sovereignty strategy. This research suggests that a food sovereignty approach still rooted in mainstream development models faces significant obstacles to moving beyond food security and into a farmer-led food sovereignty agenda.

Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labour and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile's latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende (1964-1973). Heidi Tinsman analyses differences between men's and women's participation in Chile's Agrarian Reform movement, considering how conflicts over gender shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics. Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men, recounting the centrality of women's labour to the pre-Agrarian Reform world of the hacienda during the 1950s and recovering women's critical roles in union struggles and land occupations during the Agrarian Reform itself. Providing a theoretical framework for understanding why the Agrarian Reform ultimately empowered men more than women, Tinsman argues that women were marginalised not because the Agrarian Reform ignored women but because the Agrarian Reform, under both the Frei and Allende governments, promoted the male-headed household as the cornerstone of a new society. Although the Agrarian Reform's emphasis on gender co-operation stressed that men should have more respect for their wives and funnelled unprecedented amounts of resources into women's hands, the reform movement defined men as its protagonists and affirmed their authority over women. This is the first monographic social history of Chile's Agrarian Reform in either English or Spanish, and the first historical work to make sexuality and gender central to the analysis of the reforms.