Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty?

In 1996, La Ví a Campesina raised the call for food sovereignty, the right of peoples to determine and control their own food systems. Food sovereignty challenged the concept of ‘food security’ and the privatization of land, seeds and water and advanced an array of environmentally sustainable and socially equitable alternatives to the destructive practices of the corporate food regime. The call became a global movement that today includes several hundred million small and medium food producers and hundreds of thousands of consumers. Food sovereignty is one of the pillars of the global counter-movements to neoliberalism. The rejection of both industrial agriculture and of neoliberalism’s tendency towards corporate privatization has led many food sovereignty advocates to embrace complementary concepts, like agroecology and the Right to Food. Parallel and overlapping notions have also emerged, like ‘food justice,’ the ‘good food’ movement, ‘Slow Food’ and ‘food democracy’. These are often associated (or confused) with food sovereignty. Recently, some Right-to-Food scholars have introduced the notion of a ‘food as a commons,’ in which the commons is used both as a noun (shared resources) and as a verb (i.e., ‘commoning’ in which food is a common good) (Ferrando and Vivero-Pol, 2017). At first glance, food sovereignty and the food commons have, well, much in common. Both are a rejection of the corporate food regime’s tendency to manufacture food scarcity and both revive the histories and traditions of the Commons. Both reject the commodification of food and uphold food as a human right. Both propose transformative models for equitable and sustainable food systems as a basis for a new society. But the etymologies of food sovereignty and food as a commons are not congruent. Food sovereignty is a call for resource equity emerging from the organized demands of peasants, pastoralists and fishers, while the food commons is a call for equal food access, emerging primarily from the professional community for human rights (mostly urban). The former has structural proposals addressing production (agrarian reform and farm parity, fair wages and decent working conditions for farm and food workers, the exemption of agriculture from free trade agreements and the dismantling of corporate power), while the latter focuses much more on normative valuations, distributive consumption and alternative nodes of governance. La Ví a Campesina, whose 164 peasant organizations serve 200 million farmers around the world, is the social and 20 CAN FOOD AS A COMMONS ADVANCE FOOD SOVEREIGNTY?