Food Sovereignty: Exploring Debates on Development Alternatives and Women’s Rights

Pamela Caro’s AWID article moves the food debate beyond whether enough food is available to ask who decides how it is produced, distributed, and accessed. Food sovereignty is not another term for supply; it is a political claim about control over land, seeds, water, agricultural knowledge, and locally situated ways of growing and sharing food. Caro places the concept in peasant movements’ response to trade liberalization and industrial food systems. She foregrounds Latin American peasant women’s organizing, which brings rural development and women’s rights into the same debate: food is both a condition of survival and a terrain on which communities and workers seek collective decision-making power.

The article’s important intervention is to bring work often omitted from official accounts back into economic analysis. Women’s seed selection, preservation, processing, cultivation experiments, and food knowledge are not “natural help” outside agriculture; they are part of production, yet are frequently classified as unpaid household labor. Merely making those contributions visible can still fix care, feeding, and subsistence work as women’s duties. Caro therefore asks harder questions: who has access to land, credit, and public resources; who decides crops and prices; how is work redistributed within households and organizations; and can women actually shape the peasant movement’s agenda?

That is why food sovereignty cannot automatically be equated with women’s liberation. A community may resist corporate control while tolerating men’s monopoly over decisions in households, cooperatives, or movements. “Returning to tradition” can praise women’s knowledge as heritage without changing their workload or rights. Caro’s feminist lens does not cast rural women as a uniform group of victims or natural ecological guardians. It presents them as people organizing, debating, and building alternatives. The article was written for discussions around the 2010 CLOC meeting and published in 2011; it is best read as a historically situated conceptual map, not as current statistics on food policy.

For a wider route through the politics of land and ecology, read alongside Vandana Shiva’s Soil Not Oil, which examines fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, and globalization, and Making Peace with the Earth, which links land, water, seeds, and economic order. Their positions are not identical to Caro’s; the contrast is useful. AWID hosts the original: Food Sovereignty: Exploring Debates on Development Alternatives and Women’s Rights (full PDF).