The current state of food in Latin America and the Caribbean is shaped by historical inequalities, geopolitical disputes, and processes of economic restructuring that redefine what is produced, who decides what is produced, and under what conditions food circulates and is consumed. The region combines enormous biodiversity with persistent forms of dependency that limit its capacity to guarantee food sovereignty. As anticipated by analyses of Dependency Theory and various critical studies from the Global South, the region's peripheral integration into the world economy continues to organize the material life of food: territories, bodies, and resources remain geared toward supplying external markets while food insecurity and internal inequalities grow, disproportionately affecting children, the elderly, and Indigenous peoples.

This dependency operates simultaneously in two directions. On the one hand, territories and their workforce are organized according to the international demand for commodities, reinforcing extractive practices that re-primarize economies and erode ecosystems and rural communities. On the other hand, the expansion of agribusiness has generated a structural paradox: countries that historically could feed their own populations now depend on imports of cheap, ultra-processed foods to sustain increasingly impoverished sectors. The region produces for the world, but not always for its own inhabitants. This imbalance reveals the persistence of center-periphery relations that structure a "geopolitics of hunger," where the food problem appears reduced to issues of supply or exclusively nutritional parameters.

The concentration of land, agricultural income, and marketing channels (both land-based and navigable) constitutes a form of extractivism that transforms territories into productive enclaves disconnected from local needs. The expansion of monoculture—the “green desert”—intensifies processes of expulsion and dispossession that displace peasants, family farmers, and small producers to urban peripheries characterized by precariousness, loss of social ties, and increased dependence on food of low nutritional quality. Those who manage to remain in their territories face growing difficulties in sustaining agroecological practices and community-based forms of production, affecting identities, culinary traditions, and relationships with non-human life.

The widespread adoption of homogeneous technological packages—GMOs, agrochemicals, mechanization, and intensive irrigation—consolidates a model that maximizes economic returns at the expense of productive diversity, health, and food rights. These processes strengthen an agri-food system dominated by a handful of corporations that control inputs, seeds, logistics, and processing. The GMO-UPF-UPF triangle encapsulates this dynamic: genetically modified crops (GMOs) become the material basis of the ultra-processed foods (UPFs) that flood the region's markets, shaping diets, consumption patterns, and subjectivities structured by market logic (UPFs) rather than by community ties.

In parallel, the implementation of top-down public policies by national governments and international organizations reproduces a partial approach to the problem of hunger. While conditional cash transfers have led to some reduction in moderate and severe food insecurity in Latin America, they do not address the systemic nature of hunger in the region. It is also possible to identify a supply-side perspective that tends to evaluate food solely based on its nutritional composition, without examining the structural processes that produce exclusion: corporate concentration, territorial inequalities, global supply chains, and the economic vulnerability of households in the Global South. These policies contribute to the perpetuation of agri-food models that prioritize low prices over nutritional quality, the environment, and human rights.

However, the region is not only a space marked by inequalities: it is also a territory where practices and knowledge emerge that challenge established meanings and produce concrete alternatives. Peasant federations and cooperatives, community kitchens, territorial organizations, regional economies, small and medium-sized agro-industries, short supply chains, and social and solidarity economy enterprises constitute experiences that recover local knowledge, produce food using non-extractive methods, and recreate links between production, labor, cooking, and community. These experiences reveal that hunger is not only a food deficit, but also an expression of structural inequalities that can be confronted through collective processes of organization and territorial development.

South-South cooperation takes on particular relevance in this context. It allows for the sharing of situated learning, the comparison of experiences, and the development of assessments that strengthen local capacities to address food inequality and social exclusion. This exchange of knowledge—which integrates academic, technical, territorial, and community expertise—deepens a critical perspective on food systems and provides input for building strategies that do not reproduce the top-down logic of policies or the limitations of bottom-up approaches focused solely on isolated local initiatives.

From a situated perspective, Latin America and the Caribbean not only suffer the effects of global agri-food restructuring, but also produce knowledge, practices, and alternatives that allow us to envision structural transformations. Recognizing the value of these experiences implies understanding that food sovereignty in the Global South is a contested process that combines critical analysis, grassroots work, and collective construction. The proposed Working Group aims to reflect, from diverse trajectories, territories, and experiences, on:

a. the ways in which food inequalities are linked in rural and urban territories, affecting small producers, peasant communities, soup kitchens and households with restricted access to nutritious food in a differentiated way;

b. the ways in which the expansion of extractive logics in the rural world transforms local practices of production, distribution, preparation and consumption, deepening processes of dependence and loss of food sovereignty;

c. the role of community kitchens that address daily access to food and can become an important actor in generating local strategies to combat food insecurity;

d. responses driven from territories and local governments, including experiences of participatory co-design, supply policies, short circuits, community infrastructures and strategies for defending the right to adequate food through sovereign practices;

e. the possibilities of building situated epistemologies and methodologies, capable of strengthening collective action, expanding decision-making margins on food and challenging the hegemonic meanings that guide agri-food systems in the Global South.

In summary, this perspective constitutes the starting point for articulating proposals that recognize the complexity of the food problem and provide a basis for participatory co-design and the action strategies that are developed in the following section.

Food sovereignty in the Global South is not just a political slogan or a programmatic goal: it is, above all, a daily experience marked by inequalities that permeate territories, bodies, and social relations. In many regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, food systems are shaped by tensions between extractive models and community practices, between the expansion of corporate agriculture and local efforts to sustain alternative ways of producing, cooking, and distributing food. Recent transformations surrounding the environment, nutrition, the mobility of common goods, and the financialization of land reinforce the need to develop critical, situated perspectives capable of engaging with the complexity of these processes.

Within this framework, the critical analysis proposed by the Working Group "Food Sovereignty from the Global South" is structured on three complementary levels that allow for a reconstruction of the problems, tensions, and challenges faced by the actors involved in daily food production and the development of alternatives. This perspective is rooted in a Latin American tradition that has demonstrated that hunger is part of a historical structure of inequalities—from Josué de Castro to contemporary debates on dependency and extractivism—and that it therefore demands analytical and political tools capable of moving beyond the supply-side approach dominant in international organizations.

1) Social actors

The first level focuses on social actors, their knowledge, and their situated practices. This includes peasants, family farmers, and small producers; cooperatives, federations, and grassroots organizations; community and soup kitchens; consumers with totally or partially unmet food needs; and local governments, whose capacity for direct intervention in specific territories makes them key actors in the struggle for food sovereignty. This level begins with detailed mapping to identify practices, knowledge (practical, ancestral, and customary), connections, and lessons learned that allow us to understand how the possibilities of guaranteeing the right to food are constructed—and limited. This first stage seeks to investigate how these actors confront land concentration, rising food prices, biodiversity loss, precarious work, and the advance of agro-industrial models that weaken community structures and collective food systems. By identifying these different practices and strategies, we can value the lessons learned from them to achieve food sovereignty from a perspective specific to the Global South.

2) Theoretical tools and epistemologies of the South

The second level addresses the conceptual tools and both tacit and codified knowledge that allow us to reconstruct the systemic nature of food problems. This working group adopts epistemologies from the Global South as a framework for identifying how knowledge about food is produced, circulated, and legitimized in contexts of structural inequality. The participation of members from diverse territories and backgrounds strengthens this dimension, allowing for the incorporation of nutritional aspects, culinary and preservation infrastructure, economic accessibility, local regulations, and technologies involved in the various stages of the food system. This perspective allows us to critically examine "neutral" or "technical" solutions that have historically reproduced asymmetries between the Global North and South, and paves the way for co-producing solutions that recognize the diversity of experiences, knowledge, and needs of social actors. A methodological strategy that, by incorporating the learning obtained in the first stage, allows us to analyze how these actors create and redefine their food strategies, their identity culinary processes and how they go through the processes of change/permanence of their food matrices over time, according to the heterogeneities within the different groups.

3) Strategic planning for action

The third level focuses on strategic planning for collective action, with a special emphasis on collaboration between organized community actors and local governments. It proposes working with cooperatives, federations, and grassroots organizations to develop assessments and strategies that transcend the limitations of purely bottom-up initiatives. This planning aims to strengthen the transition from food security approaches to food sovereignty, expanding decision-making capacity regarding what to produce, how to produce it, and how to guarantee access to diverse and culturally appropriate foods. Inspired by the Latin American tradition of action research, this approach seeks to promote local policies that acknowledge the complexity of food systems and avoid replicating the top-down approaches of international organizations, which often focus on technical interventions without considering the structural asymmetries faced by different regions.

A cross-cutting element at all three levels is participatory co-design, understood not merely as a methodological tool but as a situated mode of intervention that challenges dominant top-down solutions. Unlike standardized responses, co-design allows for the integration of local knowledge, everyday experiences, empirical data, and institutional capacities to construct diagnoses and alternatives with social legitimacy. It also differs from purely bottom-up approaches by preventing the burden of solutions from falling exclusively on precarious actors and by promoting support structures sustained by local governments. In combination with the analysis of existing public policies—from a critical Latin American perspective of policy analysis—co-design makes it possible to identify gaps, tensions, and opportunities to scale up solutions built from the ground up.

This approach also allows for the recovery of previous South-South cooperation experiences developed by members of the Working Group, both in academic settings (ALAS, ALAHE, Rede NAUS, networks of methodology and anthropology of health), South-South cooperation experiences (Pan African University with Argentine universities), and in community initiatives and local projects. These trajectories strengthen the regional perspective and facilitate the construction of comparable diagnoses of the multiple dimensions of hunger, nutrition, and food inequality.

This proposal not only offers a critical perspective on food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also promotes participatory assessments and the valorization of lessons learned through co-design with diverse social actors. Its dual purpose is to strengthen analytical and methodological tools from the Global South and to work alongside small-scale rural producers, peasant organizations, and community kitchens that sustain alternative production, distribution, and consumption practices in territories marginalized by the dominant agri-food model.

The diverse trajectories of the Working Group "Food Sovereignty from the Global South" allow for the articulation of these scales of analysis and intervention, generating critical and situated inputs. This plurality contributes to expanding the capacities of local governments and territorial organizations to challenge narratives, strengthen collective rights, and broaden the scope of decision-making regarding the food produced and consumed in the Global South.