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 studies elsewhere in the world and that to understand the ways in which the corporate food regime is contested in Asia may require attending to other forms of social action.
