Contesting the corporate food regime in South And Southeast Asia

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship argues that farmers around the world are resisting a corporate-dominated, neoliberal food regime through discourses of ‘food sovereignty’. Food sovereignty emphasises the right of rural communities to constitute their own food systems, particularly through agroecology and localised marketing. This chapter shows, however, that in South and Southeast Asia food sovereignty and agroecology remain relatively marginal concepts: most food sovereignty initiatives in the region have either been highly localised or articulated by non-government organisations, rather than rural communities. This suggests that scholarship on food sovereignty has been too reliant on case stu..