Food sovereignty for climate justice

Social and environmental movements from around the world gather at the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum this week, as the need for food sovereignty could not be more urgent. 

Environmental injustice and climate chaos accelerate daily, driven by a global neoliberal economic structure rooted in patriarchy and colonialism. 

Agribusiness and fossil fuel corporations deepen hunger, destroy biodiversity, displace peoples and poison communities - all while profiting from the crisis they created. 

Roots

Against this destruction, food sovereignty offers not only resistance but a real pathway to survival with dignity. It is foundational to climate justice.

Food sovereignty was first articulated in 1996 by La Vía Campesina, the global movement of peasants and rural peoples. Since then, it has been embraced by thousands of organisations and social movements worldwide. 

The Nyéléni Declaration of 2007 defines it as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through socially just, ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their collective right to define their own policies, strategies and systems for food production, distribution and consumption.”

In practice, food sovereignty goes well beyond food security. It is a political movement and a living pathway toward transforming the broken food system. 

It asserts food as a human right, not a commodity, and centres solidarity, justice and life over profit. It defends land, seeds and biodiversity, recognises women’s central role in food production, and demands that peasants, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolk and smallholder farmers control the decisions shaping their livelihoods and territories. 

Agribusiness

Understanding why food sovereignty is essential to climate justice means first confronting the role of agribusiness in driving the climate crisis. 

The global food system, dominated by agribusiness, is today responsible for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. 

This model is built on agrocommodities: soy for factory farms, palm oil for processed foods and biofuels, and industrial meat for global supply chains. Its logic is clear: maximise profit through monocultures, chemical inputs and land grabs. 

The consequences are equally clear: forests razed, soils destroyed, rivers polluted, biodiversity lost, communities poisoned, workers exploited, and Indigenous Peoples displaced.

Agribusiness is not a broken system. It is functioning exactly as designed, to turn life into profit. 

Systems

The results are devastating: over two billion people experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity despite record production, up to 40 per cent of food lost or wasted, and ongoing dispossession and violence toward rural communities at the hands of agribusiness corporations. 

All of which pushes communities further toward the frontlines of the climate crisis. Food has become a site of accumulation for corporations, rather than a source of life for people. 

The fossil fuel industry behaves similarly, born out of the same extractive and exploitative system that disregards life.

Food sovereignty, however, offers a systemic alternative. By re-localising food systems, supply chains are shortened and emissions reduced. 

By centering peasants and Indigenous Peoples as knowledge holders, it protects seeds, forests and water bodies. 

Solidarity

By rejecting the financialisation of nature, it defends the commons from speculative markets. And this is already being practised by the smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and women who provide between 70 and 80 per cent of the world’s food. 

Yet these communities are systemically excluded from policymaking and markets. Decades of neoliberal policies have concentrated power in the hands of a few transnational corporations, so the power imbalance is stark. 

Rural workers face informal, precarious labour with little social protection, as the Covid-19 pandemic so brutally exposed. Land defenders are criminalised, threatened and murdered. 

And while corporations greenwash their destruction with talk of “sustainability”, they push forward false solutions to the climate crisis like geo-engineering, carbon markets and “climate-smart agriculture.”

As sister movements, the food sovereignty and climate justice movements insist we dismantle this corporate power. That means integral land reform, debt relief and reparations for historical damage. 

Intersectionality

It means rejecting a “green transition” that keeps the inequalities intact, simply swapping fossil fuels for renewables while leaving millions without energy access and maintaining the food system under the control of corporations. Climate justice demands not only technical change but systemic transformation. 

As the United Nations climate negotiations (COP30) approach in Belém, Brazil, the stakes could not be higher. Official negotiations remain dominated by several governments unwilling to confront corporate power and by corporations eager to greenwash. 

In parallel, however, the Peoples’ Summit organised with nearly 900 social and environmental movements and organisations will centre and amplify grassroots voices and real solutions. 

At Nyéléni, movements will deepen the framework for food sovereignty, highlighting the intersectionality of the movement, tackling false solutions, opposing the use of food and hunger as a weapon of war and more. 

Choice

The real leaders of these movements are on the frontlines. They are Indigenous Peoples and communities resisting oil and mining projects that threaten their health, well-being and lands. 

They are peasants and fisherfolk defending land and seas from extraction. They are grassroots feminists building economies of care. Across movements, their struggles are visionary.

Food sovereignty teaches us that climate justice cannot be delivered from the top down but built from the bottom up. It is the name we give to resistance against dispossession and the demand for life over profit. 

From Nyéléni to COP30 and the Peoples’ Summit, the choice is stark: either elites and corporations dictate our future, or we continue to build across movements, against the current system, a world where food sovereignty and climate justice are realities.

Cover photo:  Food sovereignty is foundational to climate justice and must be built from the ground up.