Peasants’ Transnational Mobilization for Food Sovereignty in La Vía Campesina

Delphine Thivet (1)

1 EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales

This paper examines how small farmers and landless rural workers have developed new modes of food activism at the transnational level. It explores in particular how the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina advocates and seeks to build – through the concept of the “food sovereignty” – an alternative frame for food production and distribution enabling communities and people to determine at the local/national level their own food systems. Based on a multi-sited fieldwork including participant observations and interviews with organizations’ members from three different countries involved in La Vía Campesina (France, Brazil and India), my study analyses the various and unstable definitions of the concept of “food sovereignty” in the movement. It examines the process of adding new meanings to its definition according to its circulation across different scales and specific cultural and geographical contexts, its attempted legal translations, and its local reconfigurations in sometimes nationalistic and protectionist ways. The aim is first to show how the demand for “food sovereignty” has emerged at the international level so as to reframe politically global food relations and compete with a more technical response to world hunger promoted by global institutions - the notion of “food security”. The paper thentraces the various strategies used by La Vía Campesina’s activists to legitimize and promote their cause, trying to make small-scale farmers “visible” – both in international and national public arenas – and recognized as those assuming a leading role in food production throughout the world. Finally, it addresses the way the food sovereignty framework catalyzes social mobilization across borders by constituting transnational interests and provides to marginalized social agents in the countryside a conceptual frame for making sense of the process of dispossession from the means of production they have been undergoing since the early 1980s.

Mots clés: Vía Campesina; Food Sovereignty; Farmers; Food Security; Transnational practices

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Science politique; Sociologie; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Delphine Thivet. Peasants’ Transnational Mobilization for Food Sovereignty in La Vía Campesina. Bloomsbury. Food Activism : Agency, Democracy and Economy, pp.193-209, 2013, 9780857858320. ⟨hal-01135296⟩