Impression of the Dutch delegation at the Nyéléni Europe Forum 2016 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Over 500 people from all over Europe gathered there at the end of October for five days to lay the groundwork to take back, relocalise our food systems and multiply food sovereignty platforms across the continent.

The Committee for World Food Security is a privileged observation point to reflect on how global food governance and social mobilization intersect.

Parallel to the climate conference in Paris, social movements and allies within the ‘Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles’ discuss climate justice and real solutions to the climate crisis.

James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University opens the Yale conference with a skeptical critique of the concept of "food sovereignty," posing challenging questions about nation states, population growth, and dietary habits.

Todd Holmes asks how to go forward from here, how to balance “the politics of the possible” with “the politics of the practical,” and how to historicize our understanding of the global food system and its alternatives.

Phil McMichael, Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell, discusses the attitude towards nature, people, and production that animates many different strains of the food sovereignty movement, in opposition to the current dominant food regime.

Peter Rosset introduces the internal processes within Via Campesina, addressing how it holds together and moves forward as a movement, given the huge diversity of its membership, and emphasizing the significance of dialogue between different kinds of knowledge.

Maryam Rahmanian discusses the significance and the challenges of international alliance-building, presenting examples from the work of the International Planning Committee on Food Security. She asks, what does it mean to build alliances well, and how can we do it?

Mark Bomford attempts to build bridges, connecting the dialogue from the conference to communities of practice, and addressing the opportunity that institutions like Yale provide for the Food Sovereignty movement to engage with global elites.

Marc Edelman offers some provocations, interrogating the origin stories of the term “Food Sovereignty,” questioning the orthodox reading of the relationship between Food Sovereignty and Food Security, and raising concrete questions about what a food sovereign society would look like.

Kathy Ozer, of the National Family Farm Coalition, highlights key initiatives from the Coalition and other groups, and the interaction between national, local, and global movements for Food Sovereignty.

Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at Waterloo, discusses the financialization of food, arguing that financialization has undergone a critical increase in complexity and scale in the last two decades, which has major implications for the Food Sovereignty movement.

Eric Holtz-Gimenez, Director of Food First, the Institute for Development of Food Policy, elaborates the presence of multiple actors in the movement to transform the food system and asks what the future is for academics in the food sovereignty movement.

Bob St Peter, farmer and seasonal farm worker from Maine, and founding member of Food For Maine, discusses the historical inequalities between the country and the city and the role that the Food Sovereignty movement can play in creating a more equitable future.

Henry Bernstein critiques the Food Sovereignty literature’s reliance on “emblematic instances,” interrogating the extent to which these instances actually represent a fundamentally different type of production than entrepreneurial capitalist agriculture.

Academic, author and activist Raj Patel talks about Food Sovereignty as “a signifier on the move” - a concept being continually, dialectically, reinvented.

Jack Kloppenburg, Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison introduces the concept of Seed Sovereignty and the Open Source Seed Initiative, and highlights the role of participatory plant breeding in utilizing the creativity of farmers.

Harriet Friedmann highlights the tension between consumer needs for affordable food and producer needs for sustainable livelihoods, and explores the re-embedding of markets in biosocial context and the transformation of institutions as ways out of this conflict.