Chopra, 2004; Forum for Food Sovereignty, 2007). There is currently no universally agreed public policy and regulatory framework definition for the term food sovereignty (Windfuhr and Jonsén, 2005). However, most definitions share a common reference point, starting from the perspective of those actually facing hunger and rural poverty and developing a rights-based framework that links the right to food with democratic control over local and national food production practices and policies. The concept often focuses on the key role played by small-scale farmers, particularly women, in defining their own agricultural, labor, fishing, food and land policies and practices, in ways that are environmentally sustainable, and ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances (http://www.foodsovereignty .org/new/). Proponents also contend that decentralized, diverse, and locally adapted food and farming systems, based upon democratic and participatory decision-making, can ultimately be more environmentally sustainable and equitable than a globalized food system lacking such features (Cohn et al., 2006).

     Via Campesina, a global farmers' movement developed the concept in the early 1990s, with the objective of encouraging NGOs and CSOs to discuss and promote alternatives to neoliberal policies for achieving food security (Windfuhr and Jonsén, 2005). The concept was publicized as a result of the International Conference of Via Campesina in Tlaxcala, Mexico, in April 1996. At the World Food Summit in 1996, Via Campesina launched a set of principles (Box 2-14) that offered an alternative to the world trade policies to realize the human right to food (Menezes, 2001; Windfuhr and Jonsén, 2005). In August the same year, reacting to the Mexican government's decision to increase maize imports from North America in accordance with the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a large number of Mexican entities organized the Foro Nacional por la Soberania Alimentaria, underscoring the need to preserve the nation's autonomy in terms of defining its food policy (Menezes, 2001). Since then, a number of NGOs, CSOs and social movements have further developed the concept and its institutional implications (Menezes 2001; Windfuhr and Jonsén, 2005).

     The concept of food sovereignty introduced into debates on food security and international trade regulation the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity (particularly of small-scale farmers) to produce food to fulfill its own needs while respecting agroecosystem and cultural diversity (Menezes, 2001) and ensuring sustainable access and availability of food in order to enable people to lead quality lives and exercise democratic freedoms (Rosset et al., 2006; Riches, 1997). Market-oriented globalization of economic activity is an important driver of change in the evolution of agricultural trade and food systems. The development of the right to food based on normative qualities is another driver but with markedly different characteristics. The efforts made over the last fifty years to express in international and national laws a series of universal rights, including the right to food, has been an explicitly moral enterprise that stands in contrast to the economic processes of market-driven globalization. The right to food was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, following Franklin

D. Roosevelt's speech in 1941 that captured the world by proclaiming freedom from want and fear; freedom of speech and faith (Oshaug et al., 1994). The UN Declaration on the Right to Development Act 2 (UN, 1986; General Assembly Resolution 41/128, New York) states that ". . . the human being, being central subject to development, should be the active participant and beneficiary of the right to development." The various human rights instruments brought into force have created expectations and obligations for the behavior of individuals, social groups, and States (Oshaug and Edie, 2003). People are expected to be responsible for satisfying their needs, using their own resources individually or in association with others. States are expected to respect and protect the freedom of the people to make these efforts and the sovereignty over the natural resources around them, and are obliged to meet every individual's right to food and nutritional security.

     Successive efforts have been made to build such rights, expectations, and obligations into national laws and the governance of food systems. Norway has formulated food security and the right to food as the basis of its agricultural policy, strongly driven by consumer concerns. Brazil has extended the concept of cultural heritage under Article 215 of its Constitution to include food cultures. Both these efforts have had an explicit normative quality.

     The concepts of economic, social and environmental sustainability as applied to food systems have been developed in processes of negotiation and intensive discussions that reflect contrasting political priorities and ideologies (Oshaug, 2005). The food sovereignty movement is increasingly challenged to actively develop more autonomous and participatory ways of knowing to produce knowledge that is ecologically literate, socially just and relevant to context. This implies a radical shift from the existing hierarchical and increasingly corporate-controlled research system to an approach that devolves more responsibility and decisionmaking power to farmers, indigenous peoples, food workers, consumers and citizens for the production of social and ecological knowledge (Pimbert, 2006).

     Organic agriculture. The term organic agriculture (OA) has evolved from various initiatives, including biodynamics, regenerative agriculture, nature farming, and permaculture movements, which developed in different countries worldwide from as early as 1924.4 Since the early 1990s, OA has been defined in various ways. The most widely accepted definitions are those developed by IFOAM and the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius (Box 2-15). In response to the incipient marginalization of foods of local origin by supermarket chain developments; those dissatisfied with a globalizing food trade, desiring health foods or foods associated with cultural landscapes opened the way during the late 1950s and early 1960s for expansion of initiatives such as pick-

⁴ Pioneered by German philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who theorized that a human being as part of a cosmic equilibrium has to live in harmony with nature and the environment (Stoll, 2002). Certification of biodynamic farms and processing facilities began in Europe during the 1930s under the auspices of the DEMETER Bund, a trademark chosen in 1927 to protect biodynamic agriculture.