Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: Laura Lyrio Gonçalves

POPULAR PEASANT FEMINIST VOICES IN PEOPLE’S FOOD SOVEREIGNTY: 

Women in social movements and food policies in Brazil and Argentina.

Food sovereingty; Feminisms; Social movements; Human right to food and nutrition; Public Policy; Latin American Critical Thought.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary and historical-comparative social research with the theme of people's food sovereignty from the perspective of popular peasent feminism, understood as a social struggle undertaken by women organized in peasent social movements, contributing to the construction of public policies for the human right to adequate and healthy food and nutrition, for food and nutritional security and for access to land and agroecology, in Brazil and Argentina. It is problematic that, during the first decades of the 21st century, these countries achieved low rates of undernourishment and food insecurity, however, there is a reversal in this scenario, impacting, above all, the health of rural women and worsening during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, this research aims to interpret, based on the women´s life experiences and political constructions, the structural trends that influenced this event in the region. A quantitative analysis is undertaken to identify, in each of the countries, the periods of increase and reduction in undernourishment and food insecurity rates and their correlation with periods of greater intensity in the creation of new legal frameworks in the trajectory of public policies related to food and agriculture, based on reports and databases from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Subsequently, a qualitative approach is developed with the content analysis of sixteen interviews carried out using a semi-structured questionnaire, involving eight women in Brazil and eight women in Argentina, which participate in actions in the political field of the Latin American Coordinator of Rural Organizations (CLOC) and La Vía Campesina (LVC) in the countries studied - taking into account the leading roles of these articulations in the political construction of people´s food sovereignty in all dimensions: local/community, national, and international. Finally, this thesis seeks to contribute to new theories and practices in Latin American Critical Thought and in Social Sciences, pointing to the existence of an internationalist dimension in popular peasant feminist voices in the social struggle for people's food sovereignty, cultivating new social relations and new international relations in which life has centrality, facing the expansion of inequalities in capitalist sociability.