This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that 'frame' Food Sovereignty (FS): (i) a comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised agriculture, and its ecological consequences, in the current moment of globalisation; (ii)advocacy of a (the) 'peasant way' as the basis of a sustainable and socially just food system; and (iii) a programme to realise that world-historical goal. While sympathetic to the first of these elements, I am much more skeptical about the second because of how FS conceives 'peasants', and its claim that small producers who practice agroecological farming - understood as low-(external) input and labour intensive - can feed the world. This connects with an argument that FS is incapable of constructing a feasible programme (the third element) to connect the activities of small farmers with the food needs of non-farmers, whose numbers are growing both absolutely and as a proportion of the world's population.
Food sovereignty; Capitalist agriculture; Peasants; Class relations