La Via Campesina is the largest planetary movement of peasant organisations. It has been talking about the food sovereignty concept for decades and launches a new call for a food sovereignty of the peoples against the multinationals. The food crisis raging in the world is unprecedented in its intensity and frequency, generating more than one and a half billion climate refugees, in addition to wars and other disasters that are anything but natural. La Via Campesina shared this year its analysis of the situation and its proposals in a declaration entitled ‘Food sovereignty is the only solution and the only way forward’ (La soberanía alimentaria es la única solución y camino a seguir).

The actual food crisis is unprecedented because it is taking place in a more difficult global context than the 2008 food and fuel crisis. The intensity and frequency of climate impacts have more than doubled since the first decade of this century. In the last 10 years, some 1.7 billion people have been affected by climate-related disasters, almost 90 per cent of whom have become climate refugees. Hunger, malnutrition and poverty are more difficult to overcome due to ongoing wars, conflicts and natural disasters. This hampers every aspect of a food system, from the collection, processing and transport of food to its sale, availability and consumption.

However, the problem is not production or supply - more than enough food is produced for the entire world population - but access to food, which is hampered by an industrial food chain controlled by multinational corporations. Corporations control big data, farmland, ocean resources, seeds and agrochemicals, while they appropriate 80 per cent of the food produced by family farmers and bend governments and international organisations to protect their interests.

At the same time, they are pushing for less and less control by governments and international organisations. The UN Summit on Food Systems, held in 2021, largely promoted by multinationals, had as one of its objectives to weaken the few mechanisms of public governance on food systems (see Secuestro corporativo de los sistemas alimentarios and Un Summit sotto assedio).

La Via Campesina denounces also the worldwide tendency to reduce spaces for civil action, as well as the increase in human rights violations, oppression and criminalisation of people and organisations defending the land. There is more repression by states, using military and security forces, while the legitimacy of the public sector declines, both because it is co-opted by multinational corporations and because of a developmentalist narrative that assigns a leading role to private sector investment.

Despite this, the paper emphasises how 'the last three decades have witnessed the growth of an increasingly robust, diverse and articulate network of small and small-scale food producers, workers and other social actors - despite the corporate-led globalised food system harming them -, who advocate a radical transformation of food and agricultural systems based on food sovereignty.

These movements are resolutely committed to defending and building devices that provide ecologically and socially sustainable and locally rooted food, movements that are wrongly called 'alternative', even though they produce up to 70 per cent of the food consumed in the world. Rethinking agricultural policies as a matter of economic and national security must be a priority'.

To this end, La Via Campesina's document proposes, among other measures, "the cessation of food speculation and the suspension of the marketing of food products on stock exchanges"; "the exclusion of food production from free trade agreements and the World Trade Organisation"; "the prohibition of the use of agricultural products to produce biofuels or energy".

The La Via Campesina's document strongly calls for a radical change in food policies at the national and international level, including a new global framework based on food sovereignty not trade, to strengthen local and national peasant agriculture, to provide a stable base for relocated food production and support for markets led by local and national farmers, and to provide a fair international trading system based on cooperation and solidarity.

Finally, it calls for "a radical shift towards agro-ecology to produce healthy food for the world. We must take up the challenge of producing enough quality food, while reactivating biodiversity and drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions” that cause climate change.

Indeed, true food sovereignty from and with peasant and indigenous communities is the only solution to tackle hunger, climate change, environmental and social destruction, and health crises.

See: Soberanía alimentaria: el camino a seguir