Agro-Ecology and Food Sovereignty Movements in Chile: Sociospatial Practices for Alternative Peasant Futures

Abstract

The agro-ecology and food sovereignty movements of southern Chile promote alternatives to the hegemonic agro-export regime that dominates the landscape. We explore these mobilizations and the strategies they employ, with a particular focus on a network of peasant women “seed curators.” The global agri-food complex relies on a flat and universalizing spatiality of land as resource and food as commodity, in which the character and fate of individual places is of little importance. This is paired with a hierarchical monopolization of knowledge, where producers become recipients rather than creators and custodians of agricultural inputs and know-how. In response, peasant movements have given birth to alternative spatial practices based on horizontal networks that join together interdependent producers and places. By sharing traditional and agro-ecological knowledge, cultivating alternate circuits of exchange, and building urban–rural partnerships, these movements seek to reshape the horizons of possibility both for peasant communities and for the broader agri-food system.