State–peasant movement relations and the politics of food sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

Abstract

This contribution argues that the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures – the class characteristics of their mass bases, their leaderships and the modes of interaction between the two – is critical for determining the nature of contemporary struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. It will show that that counter-hegemonic demands are not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice; rather than struggling to replace the neoliberal food regime, many peasant organizations employ the food sovereignty discourse as a political tool in their negotiations with the state in order to access resources from within the prevailing neoliberal model, not to transform it.