Peasants’ Transnational Mobilization for Food Sovereignty in La Vía Campesina

International audienceThe paper deals with how the concept of “food sovereignty” – broadly defined as the right of each nation or people to define their own agricultural and food policies – was introduced for the first time in a public arena in 1996 as an alternate concept to “food security”. From that time forward, it shows how it has become the key motto of La Vía Campesina, a transnational social movement born in May 1993 in Mons (Belgium) to oppose the negative social impacts of neoliberal economic globalization of agriculture. In this paper, I explore how, under the banner of “food sovereignty”, small farmers and landless rural workers have contributed to reframing the debate on world hunger and asserted the democratization of the food system by developing a new mode of agri-food activism at the transnational level. Drawing theoretically on frame analysis developed by David Snow, Robert Benford and their collaborators (1986), and on the available literature on social movements, I show how the concept of food sovereignty provides men and women engaged in small-scale agriculture with possibilities to resist the process of intensified marginalization and impoverishment they have been undergoing since the 1980s and 1990s as a result of structural adjustment programs and bilateral/regional free trade agreements. The paper also shows how the concept serves as a catalyst in bringing them together and sustaining their collective action across borders. It begins by describing how La Vía Campesina activists originally framed the concept of food sovereignty. I show that, through the reshaping of existing human rights language and food security discourse, they gave rise to an interpretative frame which challenged and drew new meanings in the hegemonic discourse of institutions on world hunger and put forward a more comprehensive understanding of the production and distribution of food. In the second section, my analysis focuses on how they challenged the situation of invisibility of the small peasants in the international arena by asserting their status as “food producers”, but also by undertaking direct protest actions against the corporate control of the global food system. The third and last section moves to La Vía Campesina’s commitment to social change. Herein I examine in particular how the movement promotes self-reliant farming based on “seed sovereignty” and agro-ecological practices and how it challenges inequalities of power in the food system through a feminist orientation