Defending Food Sovereignty: Confronting the Challenges of Small Food Providers

Addressing systemic problems require equally systemic and radical reforms. Various social movements have been pushing for food sovereignty as the alternative to market-oriented and neoliberal models of food production, but it has yet to win the societal support need to influence policy making. One reason for this is the continuing contestation between the concepts of food security and food sovereignty, and that policies and socio-economic structures needed to make food sovereignty a reality have not been fleshed out sufficiently. There is thus a gap between policy and practice which is important to bridge, especially in the present context of deepening neoliberalism and agrarian distress.

This a booklet of the forum–titled “Defending Food Sovereignty: Confronting the Challenges of Small Food Providers”–convened representatives of fisher, indigenous people and peasant organizations and NGOs to push towards Food Sovereignty and to highlight the need to re-prioritize small-holder food production and challenge dominant, market-oriented food systems.