ABSTRACT
The roots of ‘food sovereignty’ are much debated and shrouded in myth, as Edelman points out in this collection, while tracing the concept’s origins to a Mexican government program in the early 1980s. In contrast, several of the other contributions echo versions of the established account that LVC ‘first articulated’ (Desmarais and Wittman) or ‘mooted’ (Agarwal)
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food sovereignty in 1996 at the RomeWorld Food Summit. Still others take a sociology-ofknowledge approach to the origins question, linking the beginnings of food sovereignty to the globalization of the 1970s (Bernstein), the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1986-1994), the predecessor of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Burnett and Murphy) or the rapid concentration of giant seed corporations (Kloppenberg). What is clear amidst this cacophony of views is that visions of food sovereignty have evolved and that no consensus exists, a reality which many activists and scholars see as a virtue, a strength and a reflection and acknowledgment of on-the-ground diversity (as in, for example, Martínez-Torres and Rosset’s celebration of the ‘diálogo de saberes’ within LVC, van der Ploeg’s analysis of the sources of peasant resilience or Desmarais and Wittman’s invocation of the tremendous variety of national, regional and cultural identities that exist in a large country such as Canada). By critically scrutinizing varied interpretations of food sovereignty, as well as efforts to implement it, and by posing challenging and sometimes delicate questions, the contributions in this collection will no doubt contribute to the concept’s further specification and evolution.
