In April 1996 representatives of peasants, small and medium-scale farmers, rural women, indigenous representatives, and farm workers from the global North and global South travelled to Tlaxcala, Mexico to participate in the Second International Conference of La Vía Campesina. For members of La Vía Campesina, the globalization of a neoliberal industrial model of agriculture had created an acute crisis in the countryside around the world that was accompanied by the rural exodus and disempowerment of peasants and small-scale farming families, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation. In refusing to be “disappeared” and struggling for the right to exist as small-scale food producers, they collectively imagined a powerful counter-narrative to large-scale corporate-led agriculture: a socially just, rights-based, ecologically sustainable “future without hunger”, a future based on food sovereignty (Desmarais, 2007; La Vía Campesina, 1996a, 1996b).

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Desmarais, A., (2025), "FS - The gift of food sovereignty", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.115)

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1. food sovereignty
2. La Vía Campesina

Original publication: Desmarais, Annette. "FS - The gift of food sovereignty." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015, pp. 154-163. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.115. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.