Diálogo de saberes in La Vía Campesina: food sovereignty and agroecology

Abstract

The transnational rural social movement La Vía Campesina has been critically sustained and shaped by the encounter and diálogo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North and South; peasant, indigenous, farmer, pastoralist and rural proletarian, etc.) that takes place within it, in the context of the increasingly politicized confrontation with neoliberal reality and agribusiness in the most recent phase of capital expansion. This dialog among the ‘absences’ left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas has produced important ‘emergences’ that range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like the food sovereignty framework – to social methodologies for the spread of agroecology among peasant families.