ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, food sovereignty has captured the imagination of farmers, workers, consumers and citizens, staking out ideological territory of resistance and hope in the face of neoliberal projects for the unrelenting privatization, deregulation, corporatization and financialization of the world’s economies. Much is expected of food sovereignty. Despite its broad political currency (or perhaps because of it), food sovereignty is often taken up as a set of demands, principles, policies, reforms and rights that together will somehow transform the neoliberal food regime, without identifying the profound structural changes needed in the capitalist economy and the liberal state for food sovereignty to feasibly exist. This oversight plagues many of the demands that adhere to food sovereignty (such as ‘food democracy’, ‘food justice’ and the ‘right to food’) with intractable political contradictions. While it is unreasonable for food sovereignty practitioners and scholars to assume the task of charting a global course through late capitalism, none of us can escape the need for political reflection on the particular role of food sovereignty in pushing this transition in a post-capitalist direction.
