Rethinking the right to food: how the Food Sovereignty movement (Via Campesina) challenges the human rights system

The thesis focuses on the Food Sovereignty Movement (FSM), and on its main representative La Via Campesina (LVC) and analyses the attempt to recognize a new human right to food sovereignty and peasants’ rights in the UN human rights system. LVC is a global social movement of peasants created in 1993, which today counts 182 organizations from 81 countries. LVC advocates for an alternative strategy to address hunger and malnutrition, to promote the right to food and food security, to revitalize the agricultural sector and to tackle rural poverty, based on the concept of food sovereignty. The most famous definition is from the Nyéléni Declaration of 2007, according to which, “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems”. Thus, food sovereignty condemns a globalized food system tightly controlled by international institutions, developed countries and transnational corporations. In the early 2000, LVC started campaigning to recognize the right to food sovereignty and peasants’ rights in the UN human rights system. The adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) in 2018, which recognizes peasants’ rights and the right to food sovereignty in international human rights law, certainly represents a major achievement for LVC. However, UNDROP is just the beginning of a longer process to recognize and implement collective human rights in the UN human rights system. The methodology of the thesis is based on theoretical research and, on interviews. For the theoretical research, primary sources are relevant instruments of international human rights law and documents produced by LVC. For secondary sources, I relied on literature on the right to food, food sovereignty, group and third generation rights; while for tertiary sources, on manuals of international human rights law. Another source are the interviews that I conducted with two representatives of Associazione Rurale Italiana (ARI), Italian member organization of LVC: Antonio Onorati and Fabrizio Garbarino. Interviews can be found in the Appendix. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 1 offers a critical overview of the concept of food sovereignty and of the history of LVC. It describes the context in which the idea of food sovereignty emerged, the 2007-2008 global food crisis and its consequences. It analyses the main documents produced by LVC (including UNDROP) and it offers an overview of the main critiques to the FSM. Chapter 2 analyses how the human rights system protects the right to food and other rights related to agriculture by reviewing human rights instruments protecting the right to food, water, land and natural resources, the right to self-determination, the right to development, the rights of indigenous peoples and UN food security strategies. Chapter 3 tries to find a synthesis between the FSM and the human rights discourse. The chapter reviews the food sovereignty paradigm, trying to address some of the critiques presented in Chapter 1. Then, it looks at similarities and differences between the FSM and the human rights system. The chapter also presents the efforts of LVC to recognize in the UN human rights system the right to food sovereignty and peasants’ rights. The conclusion tries to answer the research questions of the thesis: are the new human right to food sovereignty and peasants’ rights necessary to combat hunger and malnutrition, to better protect the right to food, to achieve food security and to revitalize the rural sector? Or, are the existing human rights (presented in Chapter 2), reviewed and expanded according to food sovereignty principles, sufficient? Hence, should we consider the right to food sovereignty as a new human right or as a new conceptualization of the right to food?