Food Sovereignty between Sustainability and the Right to Food: The Venezuelan Constitutional Framework as a Case Study

Global food systems generate a surplus that would be sufficient to feed the world's population, and yet chronic undernourishment persists, a contradiction rooted not in any shortfall of supply but in the way access to food is governed and distributed. Sustainability, understood in its ecological, economic and social dimensions, constitutes the common ground upon which food security, the right to adequate food and food sovereignty are articulated and held in relation to one another. Among these, food sovereignty reaches furthest, in that it moves beyond the distributive dimension to raise a question of governance, namely who holds effective control over resources and the food system as a whole; yet this ambition is accompanied by a marked fragility at the level of implementation, since its incorporation into constitutional frameworks risks remaining a declaration of principle wherever the material and institutional conditions for its application are absent. Venezuela offers one of the clearest illustrations of that fragility, having accorded food sovereignty constitutional rank without ever establishing the conditions such a commitment presupposed: a system financed by petroleum rent secured access through imports while eroding the domestic production it claimed to protect, and it gave way once that rent declined. Beyond the national scale, food sovereignty has spread worldwide without consolidating into a binding international instrument, subsisting in soft-law form and received in markedly different ways: entrenched in Latin American constitutions as a claim of peasant movements, it enters European law through the Common Agricultural Policy and a discourse of strategic autonomy, its substance expressed through the Green Deal, the Farm to Fork strategy and the 2030 Agenda. Across these settings sustainability operates as a principle running through food law, and upon it depends the capacity of the right to food to remain effective over time