Food Sovereignty is the new policy framework proposition for the governance of food and agriculture. It embraces policies not only for localising the control of production and markets, but also for the Right to Food, people's access to and control over land, water and genetic resources, and for promoting the use of environmentally sustainable approaches to production. It addresses the current problems of hunger and malnutrition, as well as rural poverty, that have become a priority challenge for international policy. The latest FAO figures show the number of chronically hungry in developing countries has been increasing over the last decade at a rate of almost 5 million per year - from 800 million to 852 million. Yet the rules that govern food and agriculture at all levels - local, national and international - are designed a priori to facilitate not local production and consumption, but international trade. In this Practical Action Working Paper , Michael Windfuhr shows how the Food Sovereignty policy framework has developed to address this dilemma, what the basic assumptions are, analyses how Food Sovereignty relates to the current problems in rural and agricultural policies and discusses possible policy constraints to its adoption. What emerges is a persuasive and highly political argument for refocusing the control of food production and consumption within democratic processes rooted in localized food systems.
