Food Sovereignity/Food Citizenship

Food Sovereignty (FSo) is the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity (via Campesina 1996). Food sovereignty can also be seen more generally as the right of local people to control their own food systems, including markets, ecological resources, food cultures, and production mode (https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2011.020106).  

The concept of food sovereignty has been coined and developed by Via Campesina, the international farmers organisation, in 1996. As presented in the 1996 Rome Food Sovereignty Declaration (https://viacampesina.org/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/1996-Rom-en.pdf), food sovereignty redefines the fundamental food system transformation. Built on the food security concept, FSo advocates for the shift from consumer to a food citizen perspective. According to the FSo approach, food crises cannot be defined only as a deficit of food consumption, but rather as a general flawed condition of the system, especially with regard to farmers and food production. FSo is therefore a political programme of social critics aimed at the unjust, exploitive and neo-colonial order of the global food market. This market has been hegemonized by international trade rules of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, imposing neoliberal credit conditions. Under these rules and conditions, small-scale family farmers are marginalised and deprived of any power. With the FSo concept, Via Campesina, a peasants' movement, asserts the rights of farmers and other disadvantaged groups in the food system. FSo is focusing on decision-making concerning food production, land management, diversity and local foodways. It has strong political agenda, as it considers food systems to be the domain of food rights, food justice and democracy rather than the result of market factors. 

In 2007 during the World Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali, over 500 representants of different sectors of society signed the Declaration of Nyéléni as an act of spreading recognition of FSo and giving it a policy priority. The declaration emphasises a wide spectrum of social agents taking part in the FSo movement (peasants/family farmers, artisanal fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers and environmental and urban movements). It refers to diverse and rich, however usually neglected, cultural heritage, social-cultural values, and local people's agricultural knowledge resources and their key role in maintaining healthy, sustainable, and fair food systems. It urges to put local and national people's needs and interests at the very heart of food policies, rather than corporate and global trade interests. It also calls for resisting the neoliberal, global market-based regime by setting up organisations, cooperatives, and other democratic, bottom-up collective bodies to regain autonomy and power with food system (https://nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290). The Nyeleni Declaration widens its aims and programme into critics of other kinds of domination in the food system: patriarchy, imperialism, neo-colonialism etc.  

The Six Pillars of FSo, by Nyeleni: 

Food Sovereignty 

• It focuses on food for the people by: a) placing people's need for food at the centre of policies; and b) insisting that food is more than just a commodity.  
• it values food providers by: a) supporting sustainable livelihoods; and b) respecting the work of all food providers.  
• it localizes food systems by: a) reducing the distance between suppliers and consumers; b) rejecting dumping and inappropriate food aid; and c) resisting dependence on remote and unaccountable corporations.  
• it places control at a local level by: a) placing control in the hands of local food suppliers; b) recognising the need to inhabit and share territories; and c) rejecting the privatization of natural resources.  
• it promotes knowledge and skills by: a) building on traditional knowledge; b) using research to support and pass on this knowledge to future generations; and c) rejecting technologies that undermine local food systems.
• it works with nature by: a) maximizing the contributions of ecosystems; b) improving resilience; and c) rejecting energy intensive, monocultural, industrialized and destructive production methods (https://foodsecurecanada.org/sites/foodsecurecanada.org/files/SixPillars_Nyeleni.pdf ) 

In following years FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and many other international agencies have incorporated the FSo concept within their food system policy strategy, adding it to the Food Security frame as a complementing, more general, right-to-food approach. Via Campesina and FAO have agreed on developing a common institutional platform of collaboration for FSo (https://www.fao.org/partnerships/civil-society/news/news-article/en/c/201834/). However, Nyeleni is still very critical to those actions and considers them to be the continuation of hegemonic food system management and corporate co-optation undermining food democracy (Northern states governments, EU, international NGOs, pro-corporate scientific bodies etc.) (https://nyeleni.org/DOWNLOADS/newsletters/Nyeleni_Newsletter_Num_45_EN.pdf).