Food Autonomy within Food Sovereignty: Evidence from a Structural Model

Abstract

Food sovereignty as a model to solve food problems is being used in political, economic, and agricultural thought, but academic literature does not offer insight into its impact and the dimension of food autonomy. We have chosen to study Ecuador, given that, in 2008, the country reformed its constitution and adopted the concept of food sovereignty as a right of the Ecuadorian people, being the first country to do so. In this article, we apply the multiple indicators and multiple causes model to uncover scientific findings with the observable data available, and estimate the phenomenon of food sovereignty, which will be called the latent variable. The article aims to determine the main indicators associated with a synthetic index of food sovereignty and one that integrates a measurement model. In order to meet the goal of this research, eight hypotheses are raised, of which four are confirmatory and four are exploratory. The exploratory hypotheses are given because the theoretical foundations contradict themselves in favor of and against the latent variable. The findings of the statistical model relate to inflation, cereal yield, agricultural-value added, prevalence of malnutrition, food export, and food import as causes and indicators that are part of food sovereignty.