Food Sovereignty: Global Rallying Cry of Farmer Movements

The author analyses the main pillars of LVC and puts them in contrast with the dominant economic model, demonstrating how the LVC offers solutions to poverty, hunger, unemployment and opportunities for economic development. The current economic model for agriculture claims to be offering solutions to hunger, poverty and opportunities for the economic development and based on these grounds pushes policies that favour monocultures and export-food-economy. LVC offers a different model, starting from the concept of the right to food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is defined as the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant and to restrict the dumping of products in their markets. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically food production. Food sovereignty places the feeding of a nation as a matter of national security, which cannot be granted if a nation’s food supply depends on global economy and superpowers. Food security is not concerned on where the food is produced so that it can be claimed that imports of cheap food that kills local farms and drive farmers of their lands is better than achieving genuine food security for people in rural areas by granting them access to productive lands and receive prices for their crops that allow them for a decent living without having to compete with transnational corporations. According to the via Campesina the only way to eliminate hunger and reduce poverty is to develop local economies especially in rural areas developing local circuits of consumption and production, to make money circulates several times in the local economy, generating town employment and enabling farmers to make a living. In the current system all profits are extracted from the local community and contribute only to distant economic development. The main concern is to give access to local producers to the local market, contrasting with the dominant model, based on agroexports, neoliberal economic policies and free trade. Family farmers become the basis of local economies and national economic development. Moreover, according to the food sovereignty model hunger is the outcome of the substitution of farmland of family smallholders, with intensive and extensive export cropping cultivation. It also insists that family farming is a better way to create new employment. Furthermore, the use of chemical-intensive, large-scale monoculture with OGM crops, destroys the land for future generations, so that farming should be turned into a mixture of traditional knowledge and sustainable, agroecologically based practices. The food sovereignty supporters also demand that agricultural be outside of international trade agreements: out-of-control trade liberalisation is driving farmers off their lands and obstacles local economic development and food sovereignty. Such agreements favour big corporations and their countries of origin, which are hostage to varying degrees of agricultural exporters and transnational agribusiness corporations. Food is seen by them as a commodity, while for the food sovereignty movement it is life itself, culture, health. The food sovereignty movement instead insists on the protection of local markets from big agribusinesses and to subsidise family farmers to keep them on the land and support rural economies, claiming the cost of subsidies depend on the fact that when they are paid to large corporations they lead to dumping and destruction of rural livelihoods. Subsidies also assist soil conservation, transition to sustainable farming practices and direct marketing to local consumers. Farmer gates prices – what they receive- keep on diminishing, even if consumer prices keep on raising. This is because the force determining the prices is the monopolies. Breaking monopolies and implementing antitrust laws is a key to ensure farmers worldwide can earn a living from the land they consume.