These trends have allowed US activists to increasingly identify with international calls for food sovereignty.Food sovereignty, which has largely been an international movement, is just now, post-global financial crisis, gaining popularity in the US. Food sovereignty contains an explicit critique of neoliberalism, not just for the wealth inequality it creates but also for the lack of control that communities have over the production of their food system. La Via Campesina has been an international leader in promoting the movement particularly in the context of peasant farmers in the southern hemisphere. Scholars and activists argue that a large part of the power of this movement stems from the southern origins of the ideas coming from groups like La Via Campesina, the MST , and others . Despite its basis in peasant struggles, the framework of this movement is being adopted in the US. Through a study of urban food movements in New York City, Schiavoni found the discourse of food sovereignty to be prominent as activists demanded that control of the food system be put in the hands of the people. In June 2010, the second US Social Forum brought together over 20,000 individuals in the wake of the largest economic depression the nation had faced in generations. At the forum the US Peoples Movement Assembly on Food Justice and Sovereignty drew around 150 individuals representing between 70-90 organizations to discuss the impacts of the global financial crisis and continued development of capitalist-industrial agriculture on farming and other communities in the US and world. At the Assembly, the US Food Sovereignty Alliance was born out of the former US Food Crisis Working Group, and a declaration was made claiming “It is our time to make salt”. La Via Campesina characterizes food sovereignty as a right to define agricultural and food policy from below and as a movement that goes beyond questions of policy to promote democratic control over the resources and processes involved in the food system . Advocacy does not stop with conscious consumerism but instead entails demanding control over productive and political resources to control the right to food.

The movement has been highly critical of international financial institutions, historical inequities in land distribution,25 liter plant pot and the commodification of food . Food sovereignty advocates argue neoliberal policy and institutions have largely perpetuated and frequently caused contemporary food crises, persistent food insecurity and lack of stability in rural areas of the Global South . Starting in the 1980s the liberalization of agricultural trade and development of structural adjustment programs sought to remove perceived barriers to economic progress through the dismantling of farmer subsidy programs, halting of agrarian reform processes, and opening of Global South markets to cheap agricultural imports from the North . Pressure from economic institutions such as the World Bank have promoted industrialized forms of agriculture designed to maximize production and in which peasantry is seen as an obstacle in need of modernization . Food sovereignty advocates dispute the need for the growth of capitalist industrial agriculture, claiming small farmers still feed the majority of the world’s population . Trade liberalization and state adoption and enforcement of these socio-economic policies are seen as primary catalysts in farmer displacement as well as an absolute barrier to local economic development and the promotion of food sovereignty . As such, food sovereignty activists are not just concerned with encouraging state institutions to make better decisions, but also with the redistribution of power in agrarian societies.Land access is a key issue for the international food sovereignty movement, which has impacted urban garden activism in the US. Land grabs, or “large scale land acquisitions” as financial institutions have termed them, have become a normal occurrence worldwide . Agricultural land is an important commodity for financial investors and state entities that see the need for continued enclosure and privatization in order to capture more of this $8.4 trillion land market . But land grabs and neoliberal dismantling of decades of agrarian reform in the Global South has been met with fierce resistance in many places. The MST, Zapatistas, and others have fought to reclaim, occupy, and put lands to community uses. Food sovereignty advocates have highlighted the absolute need for access to and control over landed resources .

Recently the US Food Sovereignty Alliance has launched a campaign to build awareness of the problems of land sovereignty for US food movements and promote resistance. I will explore this work in a later chapter. Food sovereignty advocates have critiqued the contemporary dominant global food system for its emphasis on the commodification of food . Hunger is seen as a direct result of this commodification. Commodity trading markets and the speculation by investors in food commodities have had significant roles in the dramatic rise in food prices in 2007 and 2008 . Commodification is seen as undermining communities’ abilities to value food for nutritional and cultural purposes as well as undermining the autonomy of these communities . Food sovereignty activism has challenged the place of food in commodity markets and sought to “defetishize” the commodity by increasing global understanding of the production processes behind global food. Alkon and Mares argued that food sovereignty is translocal and multiscalar. Food sovereignty as an international movement of peasants and advocates mirrors what Wekerle understood to be the translocal politics of food justice . While food sovereignty activists advocate for community-based economies and local bottom-up food and agricultural policy, local efforts are not seen in isolation from broader collective development. Postcolonial or decolonial work has highlighted the importance of valuing subaltern identities that may be place-based. In Wekerle’s analysis of food justice activism in Toronto, she cites Escobar’s research, which suggested that local and transnational social movements may be deeply connected. Acting through transnational networks, movements may choose, strategically, to utilize place-based identities . Escobar did not see the defense of local as simplistic communitarian politics. Instead he observed “subaltern strategies of localization” working through both place-based practices of connection to territory and culture and more globally oriented strategies that promote a politics from below . As such, food sovereignty holds a place in international social movements oriented against global capitalism. Movement gatherings, such as the World Social Forum and US Social Forum, align activists from diverse local commitments to discuss, debate, and articulate strategies and politics “from below”. Many activists advocate for a focus on deconsolidating power and decision-making paired with the development of democratically governed networks that may work at multiple scales . For food sovereignty advocates, these networks are envisioned similarly as places where self-reliance, autonomy and mutual aid are expressed between individuals and communities .

Food sovereignty has been a key component in many descriptions of solidarity economics, community economics, and other socio-economic models of respect and care. Commitment to the local as embedded in a better global raises the question of egalitarian universals. Patel described a core value of food sovereignty: “There is, at the heart of food sovereignty, a radical egalitarianism in the call for a multifaceted series of “democratic attachments” . Patel observed commitments to feminist, anticolonial, and other food sovereignty-based efforts challenging deep inequities in power. He argued a radical “moral universalism”, that of egalitarianism, may be necessary as a precursor to the kind of formal “cosmopolitan federalism” supported by food sovereignty advocates. While Patel viewed this position as potentially dangerous within the movements because it is promotion of universals as opposed to a completely bottom-up approach to values and practice, he argued this egalitarian commitment is already there. From this standpoint food sovereignty activists argue not just for culturally appropriate foods, but food produced, exchanged, and consumed in networks that value the cultural identities of peoples engaged . In the US and Canada decolonizing food projects have been gaining popularity in many cities. In Oakland, two History of Consciousness PhD program graduates and local professors run the Decolonize Your Diet Project which links spiritual healing and political resistance through reclaiming cultural ways of eating and knowing . Other Oakland organizations and groups like Planting Justice, Phat Beets, and Occupy the Farm host events and conversations with title like “Decolonizing Permaculture” or “Decolonize your Diet” where participants connect questions of cultural identity, racialized histories of place, the consumption and production of food,black plastic plant pots and the transnational movement for food sovereignty. The alternative food movement in the US has been concerned with environmental protection as a core value since its inception . Community food security and food justice activists in the US frequently have added ‘produced by ecologically sustainable means’ to definitions of alternative food systems. And many debates have occurred as to the meaning and practices of sustainability. Within agroecology as a field, an increasing emphasis has been placed on agroecology as engaged with questions of food systems, not just plot based questions of ecology and questions of social movements, not just individual behaviors of farmers or plants. Steve Gliessman, Miguel Altiere, John Vandermeer, and Ivette Perfecto, along with many other agroecological scholars, have led this charge since the 1970s. Food sovereignty, as a peasant-based movement, has had close connections to the field of agroecology as it has developed. Smallholder, traditional agriculture has provided both the socio-cultural and ecological basis of study for the field . Agroecological knowledge production and sharing has frequently, though by no means exclusively, focused on farmer-based approaches and farmer-to-farmer network development . Gliessman traced the roots of agroecology in Mexico to resistance to practices of the Green Revolution, which were seen as harmful to rural agriculture and communities. Gliessman cited the first example of the use of the term agroecology by Bensin in 1930 as one already framing a field of resistance to the overuse and over marketing of agrichemicals . In Mexico, agroecología developed with an emphasis on traditional knowledges of farming system practices, adaptation, and change.

For Gliessman, the example of agroecology’s history in Mexico pointed to this as a field concerned with a goal greater than just developing more environmentally sustainable agricultural production. Agroecology is “a social movement with a strong ecological grounding that fosters justice, relationship, access, resilience, resistance, and sustainability.” . Agroecology has developed with farmer movements that emphasize the importance of traditional and local agriculture . Altieri and Toledo have taken this a step further to argue that an “agroecological revolution” is unfolding in Latin America where epistemological, technical and social changes are occurring which prompt the development of selfreliant, low-input, agro-biodiverse agroecosystems that produce healthy food and empower peasant organizing efforts. This agroecological revolution has been framed as resistant to agribusiness and to neoliberal modernization and trade liberalization. This rapid spread of the agroecological revolution is in part thanks to the diálogos de saberes of La Vía Campasina where connective space is created for dialog between different knowledges, experiences, and ways of both knowing and practicing . Where agroecology, as a field and as practices engaged in by networks of farmers, comes together with agrarian struggles for food sovereignty, it may build significant power for socio-ecological change, as in the case of Ecuador’s food sovereignty law . Similarly, Rosset and Martinez-Torres found an increased adoption of agroecology by agrarian movements in recent years as both adopting agroecology-as-practice and agroecology-as-framing. Agroecology-as-practice has allowed some small farmers to ‘re-peasantize’ by returning to traditional farming practices or rejecting agribusiness. Agroecology-as-framing has given farmer organizations a critical tool in defending existing peasant territories and the repeasantizing of lands in public opinion. For many agroecologists the two struggles are inextricably entangled just as it is for urban political ecologists. Agriculture is a result of complex and constant interactions between social/economic and ecological factors . As documented above, agroecology and rural social movements have changed together, co-constituting each other in the socio-natural processes for better food systems. Justice for food sovereignty activists has multiple and complex meanings. Advocates are not solely concerned with access to adequate food resources or freedom from discriminatory social processes. Food sovereignty engages critiques of colonial/imperialist, capitalist, liberal statist, and anti-ecological socio-economic processes that dominate the contemporary world system. It is a movement that best engages the call for a reflexive approach to food politics . Theorists like DuPuis et al. have conceptualized justices that retain aspects of community autonomy and difference while foregrounding concerns of equity through reflexivity or dialectics .