25 Years of People's Food Sovereignty

The year 2021 marks the Silver Jubilee of the Food Sovereignty Movement and members of the largest global peasants movement, La Via Campesina (LVC) are Celebrating it with various programs especially this October. The concept of Food Sovereignty (FS) which was introduced by LVC during the world food summit in 1996 has now become the banner of hundreds of organizations not only limited to food and agriculture but also advocating equity, justice, and fraternity. The concept has been recognized by UN agencies such as IFAD, FAO, UNHCR, etc as a peoples' agenda of addressing global poverty and inequality by ensuring the rights of producers. Therefore, it has become an alternative paradigm of transforming rural areas, building self-reliant economics, localizing production and distribution systems, creating fair market and trade; and creating a just society where resources are accessed and distributed equally.

The 25 years of journey of La Via Campesina (which is the network of around 180 peasant organizations in 82 countries around the globe) on Food Sovereignty started questioning increasing hunger and poverty in the world and rejecting false solutions offered by neoliberal capitalism. While inequality, marginalization, hunger are increasing in the world and capitalism has also resulted in the deepening of other crises including environmental, now Food Sovereignty has been recognized and incorporated in the documents of international organizations, governments, and even the UN agencies. On the basis of the concept of Food Sovereignty, in 2018 the UN General Assembly also adopted the peasants' rights declaration (UNDROP) in the direction of ensuring food sovereignty. It took 25 years for LVC to globalize the struggle for Food Sovereignty. That is how Socialist governments such as Cuba, Venezuela, Mali (Past Government), Nepal (Past Government) adopted this concept in socialist construction of agriculture and peasantry and already incorporated these rights in the constitution of those countries.