La Vía Campesina coined “food sovereignty” at the 1996 World Food Summit, defining it as the right of peoples and countries “to define their agricultural and food policy” — prioritizing local production first, while still trading for genuine diversity (La Vía Campesina, n.d.-a). Critically, the movement insists this is “not contrary to trade but to the priority given to exports” (La Vía Campesina, n.d.-a) — a distinction often missed. Patel (2009) frames the concept’s deeper significance as a claim to “the right to have rights”: a demand that those who produce and eat food have a voice in how food systems are governed, rather than absorbing decisions made elsewhere. McMichael (2009) situates this within “food regime” theory, describing the shift since the 1980s toward a “corporate food regime” dominated by financial capital and global agribusiness — characterized by standardized, globally-sourced commodities, or “food from nowhere.” Food sovereignty movements represent the political response: advocating “food from somewhere,” production tied to specific communities and ecosystems.
Top-down or bottom-up? Both — with complications
La Vía Campesina works at two levels simultaneously. At the grassroots, ESAFF Uganda launched “Agroecology Clubs” in 2019 after identifying a gap in school curricula — a local organization responding to a local problem, with no need for institutional permission (La Vía Campesina, n.d.-b). At the institutional level, ECVC (the European Coordination Via Campesina) lobbies the EU’s AGRIFISH council, criticizing its support for export-oriented trade agreements and arguing that Common Agricultural Policy conditionality rules are too bureaucratic to support a genuine agroecological transition (La Vía Campesina, n.d.-b).
Both are bottom-up in origin. But Edelman et al. (2014), in a critical special issue on food sovereignty, note that the category “peasant” — which underpins LVC’s claim to a unified global constituency — is itself contested. A Ugandan school club and a Brussels lobbying coalition represent different scales, different relationships to state power, and potentially different interests. The concept’s political strength partly depends on treating these as one movement, which is a simplification worth naming.
Which actors threaten food sovereignty, and how
La Vía Campesina identifies the WTO, IMF, and World Bank as implementing policies shaped by transnational companies and powerful exporting states rather than local food needs (La Vía Campesina, n.d.-a). The central mechanism is dumping: subsidized exports — EU milk into India, US pork into the Caribbean, EU cereals into Africa — sold below production cost, undercutting farmers who cannot compete on price (La Vía Campesina, n.d.-a). LVC organizes annual mobilizations around “Quit WTO Day” each February, citing the WTO’s repeated failure to resolve public food stockholding rules as evidence of institutional bias toward exporters (La Vía Campesina, 2024a). A second mechanism is land: a 2024 GRAIN/LVC report documents a fresh wave of deals in Tanzania converting farmland into export-crop “block farms” for foreign agribusiness, echoing an earlier post-2008 wave that largely collapsed and harmed small farmers (GRAIN & La Vía Campesina, 2024).
Does the evidence hold up?
Two broader claims deserve scrutiny. First, can small-scale agroecological farming feed a world whose population is increasingly urban and non-farming? Bernstein (2014), while sharing food sovereignty’s concerns about corporate agriculture’s consequences, is sceptical that the “peasant way” has a feasible programme for connecting small-farmer production to the food needs of the non-farming majority — a question LVC’s own materials do not seriously address.
Second, is trade liberalization straightforwardly harmful? A systematic review by McCorriston et al. (2013), examining 34 studies on agricultural trade liberalization and food security in developing countries, found no consistent outcome: 13 reported improvements, 10 reported declines, and 11 found mixed results. The relationship is genuinely context-dependent — which complicates both LVC’s dumping narrative and naive free-trade optimism equally.
Conclusion
Food sovereignty’s most defensible claim, following Patel (2009), may not be a specific policy model but a demand for voice: those affected by food systems should participate in governing them. That claim holds even while the empirical questions about scaling and trade remain open. The movement’s specific diagnoses — dumping, land grabs, corporate concentration — are documented and consistent with the food regime literature (McMichael, 2009). Its broader prescriptions are contested (Bernstein, 2014; McCorriston et al., 2013). Holding both positions at once is closer to an honest assessment than either full endorsement or dismissal.
Sources
- Bernstein, H. (2014). Food sovereignty via the ‘peasant way’: a sceptical view. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1031–1063. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.852082
- Edelman, M., Weis, T., Baviskar, A., Borras, S. M. Jr., Holt-Giménez, E., Kandiyoti, D., & Wolford, W. (2014). Introduction: critical perspectives on food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 911–931. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.963568
- GRAIN & La Vía Campesina. (2024, February 2). A new wave of land grabs strikes Tanzania. https://viacampesina.org/en/a-new-wave-of-land-grabs-strikes-tanzania/
- La Vía Campesina. (n.d.-a). Food sovereignty | Explained. Retrieved June 2026, from https://viacampesina.org/en/food-sovereignty/
- La Vía Campesina. (n.d.-b). Who are we? Retrieved June 2026, from https://viacampesina.org/en/who-are-we/
- La Vía Campesina. (2024a, February). La Via Campesina calls for a Week of Mobilization against the WTO. https://viacampesina.org/en/
- McCorriston, S., Hemming, D. J., Lamontagne-Godwin, J. D., Osborn, J., Parr, M. J., & Roberts, P. D. (2013). What is the evidence of the impact of agricultural trade liberalisation on food security in developing countries? A systematic review. EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. ISBN 978-1-907345-49-4.
- McMichael, P. (2009). A food regime genealogy. Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1), 139–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150902820354
- Patel, R. (2009). Food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(3), 663–706. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150903143079
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