"Food sovereignty" represents a new international politics concerned with stemming the unsustainable displacement of small farmers from the land across the world, and an unsustainable deepening of food dependency. It has significant movements in Brazil, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, France, Canada, and the United States, and represents a rethinking of the large-scale industrial model of agriculture and the need to reduce "food miles" in an age of severe ecological limits (climate change).

The problem of "dumping` of surplus agricultural products from Europe and the United States, at the expense of rural communities and their food self-reliance in the developing world. My program contributes to the debate in the WTO Ministerials over agricultural trade (I was invited to address a conference of NGOs in Geneva prior to the Hong Kong Ministerial, 2005). Farming populations, and slum populations across the world are affected. These are the people who care most directly because their livelihoods and survival and identity are at stake, in addition to the environment.

My invitation to present a keynote speech to a conference of NGOs and representatives of farmer organizations involved in the debate over agricultural trade and food sovereignty in the WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong (2005) established the international significance of my research. I am only one of an international network of researchers and advocates for an international politics of `food sovereignty,` which is making its mark now in the FAO, especially as the WTO is paralysed over the question of agricultural trade.

At this point, changes are largely in public discourse, which finds its way into policy eventually.

Harriet Friedmann (University of Toronto)