ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT

The concept of food sovereignty(1 ) entered the lexicon as a result of the international conference of Vía Campesina in Tlaxcala, Mexico, in 1996. The delegates decided they needed adequate representation at the international technical conference on phytogenetic resources held in Germany in June 1996 and the world food summit in Rome in November of that year, as well as parallel forums held by civil society organizations. The idea behind raising the issue of food sovereignty was to encourage NGOs and other civil society organizations to discuss alternatives to neoliberal proposals for food security. It is an “umbrella term” for approaches to the issues of hunger and malnutrition, as well as rural development, environmental integrity and sustainable lifestyles. This approach is being developed and debated as a counterproposal to the dominant development paradigm, which is based on liberalized international agriculture and industrial agricultural production of food by large-scale producers.