Critiques of food sovereignty (#journal)

The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism, dispossession and agroecology

This article reviews recent critiques of the food sovereignty framework. It identifies tendencies in food sovereignty approaches to assume a food regime crisis, to emphasize accumulation by dispossession and to overlook expanded reproduction, and to espouse a romantic optimism about farmer-driven agroecological knowledge, devoid of modern science. Alternatives to current modernization trajectories cannot simply return to the peasant past. Instead, they need to recognize the desires of farmers to be incorporated into larger commodity networks, the importance of industrialization for feeding the world, and the support of state and science for realizing a food sovereign alternative.