Hundreds of women marched through Lima, Peru. They were shouting in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, dressed in bright-colored skirts and shawls, their long braids swinging across their backs, their arms extended with signs proclaiming "We seek recognition for our contribution to the national economy" and "We the female farmers respect Mother Earth." In the plaza where they gathered, a map of Peru was laid out and adorned with traditional food crops from all the regions: potatoes, purple corn, cacao and quinoa were proudly represented. At the bottom of the map it read in Spanish: "We fight for food sovereignty." One woman held a banner of the International Peasant Movement Vía Campesina.

It was October 16, 2013, the International Day of Food, and these women were marching together to the Congress for the Great Protest and Cultural Act in Favor of the Approval of the Law of Food Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security.

Two years later, the revised Law of Food and Nutritional Security had still not been passed into law. After being debated and approved in December of 2013, the bill was shelved because of a technicality about voting procedure and never advanced along the proper legislative path. It took the activism of civil society and concerned Congresspeople to bring the debate back to the Congress for a successful vote in November of 2015, the week before Lima would host the Latin America and the Caribbean Parliamentary Front Against Hunger.

The flurry of civil society, executive and legislative activity around food in 2013 took place in a context of growing interest for food in Peru since the early 2000s. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the Peruvian pride in national food: nearly every conversation with Peruvians naturally turns to appreciation for their cuisine and this cultural, culinary renaissance has opened the way for food diplomacy to improve the image of Peru around the world, à la Gastón Acurio, Mistura, and the famous quinoa seed. Despite this national and international attention on food in 2013, Peru still did not have national legislation on the right to food, food security or food sovereignty.

And so, at last, in 2015, Peru finally joins its neighbors in passing a bill securing the right to food and food security. The question is, of course, what took so long for a country that prides itself on its cuisine as national heritage, to translate gastronomy into policy?

Latin America is the region with the most countries integrating right to food, food security and/or food sovereignty policy in national frameworks since the early 2000s. The right to food, food security, and food sovereignty are all inter-related concepts. In considering how policy makers and civil society are confronting the perennial problem of hunger in the world, the development of the right to food plays a crucial part in the conceptualization and institutionalization of hunger amelioration strategies. The world community has come together on various occasions to make pronouncements on eradicating hunger, and the right to food framework is one of the most visible results of these efforts. The right to food has been integrated into the human rights framework, international policy, and national Constitutions. While it seems like a basic human right, the implementation of this right is highly contested. Beyond the argument of its unenforceability or the lack of prioritization of economic, social and cultural rights (of which the right to food is a part) lies the greater complexity of how to ensure nutritious, culturally appropriate, economically and ecologically sustainable food, who is responsible for doing so, and how to measure progress. These questions emerge in the literature around the right to food and are addressed in current policy proposals of food security and food sovereignty that grapple with the same problem – but with diverse approaches.

Food security and food sovereignty are often posed as contradictory because of the stakeholders and ideology that each tends to represent. In practice, they are being adopted in combination as complementary terms representing a method (food sovereignty) toward a measurable goal (food security). The provenance and original definition of food sovereignty points to this synergy. At the same 1996 World Food Summit where food security was defined by member nations (“Food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”[1]), the International Peasant's Movement (Vía Campesina) was excluded from participating in the Summit and yet managed to publish a paradigm-shifting declaration of its own concept, food sovereignty: “Food sovereignty is the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity. We have the right to produce our own food in our own territory. Food sovereignty is a precondition to genuine food security.”[2] Since 1996, food sovereignty has become a more nuanced platform for social movement advocacy. It has also been integrated into the national constitutions of Peru's neighbors Bolivia and Ecuador, among others.

The answer to why Peru has lagged behind its neighbors relates, in part, to Peru’s longstanding political economy. Peru has followed a neoliberal policy agenda since the 1990s, opting for free trade agreements, international investment, market-led growth, and decreasing government involvement in social services. Given this reality, the introduction of the term “food sovereignty”, an alternative platform to neoliberalism, threatened the “neoliberal food regime”[3] in Peru, where no institutional, organized challenge to the neoliberal model has emerged either from political office or civil society in the past three decades.

Throughout 2013, two different policies were being developed simultaneously by two different branches of Peruvian government. The executive branch approved a written document in June 2013 called the National Strategy for Food and Nutritional Security. As of June 2013, two commissions of the legislative branch approved the Law of Food Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security, which changed names as it went through the legislative process. The simultaneous activity of two branches of government on related but not collaborative policy inevitably led to tension. This tension was focused on one word: sovereignty. The executive branch officially rejects the use of the term "food sovereignty" because, as they argue, there is not one standard definition or usage of the term the way there is for "food security." In addition, their interpretation sets food sovereignty as antagonistic to free trade and open markets, two elements of the neoliberal food regime that the Peruvian government intends to protect.[4]

The way the tension over the use of the term food sovereignty was resolved, at least preliminarily, was to institutionalize the term food sovereignty with a neoliberalized definition: “the capacity of the State to define its own food, agrarian, and fishing policies in the framework of an open economy and respecting international treaties....”[5] In this Peruvian version, food sovereignty is a proposal that upholds the international free trade agreements and neoliberal political economy.

This compromise did not stick, however. The draft law was revised after debate in the full Congress in December 2013, and the term food sovereignty as well as its definition was removed from the legislation. This is the form of the bill being passed into law, meaning that Peru will not, after all, have a national law on food sovereignty.

Undoubtedly, the residual effects of the polarizing debate around food sovereignty was what led to the delay in the legislative process for nearly two years. Despite these obstacles, civil society and committed Congresspeople succeeded in bringing the bill back into debate and facilitating its approval by majority vote.

Despite the lack of the term food sovereignty in any national documents, its components are integrated throughout, still challenging vested interests in agri-business, export agriculture, and industrialized production. In Peru, in both rhetoric and policy, small-scale family farming is nearly synonymous with the idea of food sovereignty. That this population is highlighted by receiving a special definition and consideration in the law is the mark of strong advocacy from the Congress and civil society organizations that represent the rural majority, who are most in need of the right to food and food security.

And so it is that November of 2015, Peru hosted the Latin America and the Caribbean Parliamentary Front Against Hunger with the pride of a newly passed bill ensuring the right to food and food security, catching up with its neighbors on the institutionalization of these concepts after a long, drawn-out debate. Next it is up to the “Gastronomic Capital of the Americas”[6] to use this law to ameliorate longstanding inequities and injustices suffered predominantly by the rural, agrarian population of this culinarily-endowed Andean country.

- Alexandra Toledo, MPA / MA.

Article updated and revised from the Huffington Post Thesis Project[1] article, “Food Sovereignty in Neoliberal Peru”, published May 2014. Adapted from “Buen Provecho: Strategies of Participation and Construction in Peruvian Food Policy”, M.A Thesis. Indiana University, 2014 (Full text available on ProQuest here). Spanish version available upon request.