French version | Ver en español

Food sovereignty – resisting corporate capture of our food systems

The Nyeleni International Movement for Food Sovereignty releases its 45 issue

This year marks 25 years since the paradigm of food sovereignty was launched at the World Food Summit 1996 in Rome as a direct challenge to market-based food security promoted through the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Food sovereignty asserts the autonomy and agency of small-scale food producers and workers in the face of increasing corporate power over the entire realm of food. Since its launch, the food sovereignty movement has grown, diversified, and birthed numerous initiatives to address historical and emerging injustices, inequalities, rights abuses, and oppressions. Today, the movement is at the cutting-edge of real systemic change, with millions of people all over the world engaged in and supporting solidarity economies, agroecology, territorial markets, cooperatives, the defense of land and territories, and the rights of small-scale food producers, workers, migrants, indigenous peoples, women and people living in protracted crises.

Ironically, this year, the United Nations convened a Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that is the polar opposite of food sovereignty. The structure, content, governance and outcomes of the UNFSS are dominated by actors affiliated with the World Economic Forum (WEF), as well as government and UN officials who believe that successfully tackling hunger, unemployment, climate change and biodiversity loss requires the central involvement of corporations since they have capital, technologies and infrastructure that surpass most nations and the entire UN system.

Read more and in the Nyéléni newsletter no 45 here : Food sovereignty – resisting corporate capture of our food systems