ABSTRACT
Introduction Food sovereignty is a concept very much for our times. Emerging publicly in the context of universal liberalization of farm sectors across the state system in the 1990s, ‘food sovereignty’ has inspired the largest social movement in the world (Desmarais 2007; Mann 2014), appeared in the constitutions of several states – notably Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia (Rose 2012; McKay et al. 2014; Giunta 2014), helped to frame a growing civil society presence in the United Nations (UN) (McKeon 2009 and 2015), and stimulated a mushrooming of local food system politics (Wittman et al. 2011; Andreé et al. 2014). Perhaps most of all, food sovereignty’s arrival marks a threshold moment in humanity’s relationship to Earth, given the centrality of agriculture to the health of both humans and the environment.
