Food sovereignty as multiple resistances: the Honduran movement in global context

Food sovereignty reconciles the local and global in its creative political imaginary of the meaning of sovereignty that justifies “multiple resistances.” This research explores this reconciliation of local and global through the case study of the food sovereignty project being advanced by campesino organizations in the Aguán Valley, Honduras, as situated within the dynamic nexus of local and global discourses, movements, and material realities. I argue that food sovereignty reconceives sovereignty as multiple, fixed and relational. The food sovereignty project invokes state sovereignty as a tool of resistance against the global corporate food regime, while also pushing to open new spaces for multiple sovereignties in both form and jurisdiction. As a collective rights framework, food sovereignty movements mobilize human rights frames to address immediate needs while continuing a long-term struggle for communal rights rooted in “alternative” peasant ways of living and working. This case study also raises questions about the relationship between different political and agroecological expressions of food sovereignty. While local and global food sovereignty discourses and practices are largely congruent, it is important to also consider how other tensions exists within and across different movement spaces. Food sovereignty holds great creative potential but also faces considerable challenges to the realization of its emancipatory project.