1. Focuses on Food for People: Food sovereignty puts the right to sufficient, healthy, and culturally appropriate food for all at the center of food, agriculture, livestock, and fishery policies. It rejects the proposition that food is just another commodity or component for international agribusiness.

2. Values Food Providers: Food sovereignty values and supports the contributions and rights of all those who grow, harvest, and process food, including women, peasants and small-scale family farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fisherfolk, forest dwellers, migrants, indigenous peoples, and workers. It rejects policies, actions, and programs that threaten their livelihoods, undervalue them, or seek to eliminate them.

3. Localizes Food Systems: Food sovereignty brings food providers and consumers closer together; puts providers and consumers at the center of decision-making; protects providers from the dumping of food and food aid in local markets; protects consumers from poor quality and unhealthy food, inappropriate food aid, and food tainted with genetically modified organisms; and resists policies and practices that depend on and promote unsustainable and inequitable trade, giving power to remote and unaccountable corporations.

4. Puts Control Locally: Food sovereignty places control over territory, land, grazing, water, seeds, livestock, and fish populations into the hands of local food providers, and asserts their right to use and share these resources in socially and environmentally sustainable ways. Food sovereignty recognizes that local territories often cross geopolitical borders and ensures the rights of local communities to inhabit and use their territories; it promotes positive interaction between geographically diverse food providers to resolve conflict; and it rejects the privatization of natural resources.

5. Builds Knowledge and Skills: Food sovereignty builds on the skills and local knowledge of food providers that conserve, develop, and manage localized food systems; developing appropriate research and passing on this wisdom to future generations; and rejects technologies that undermine, threaten, or contaminate these sources of knowledge.

6. Works with Nature: Food sovereignty promotes diverse, low-input, agroecological production, as well as harvesting methods that maximize the contribution of ecosystems and improve resilience and adaptation, especially in the face of climate change. It rejects methods that harm beneficial ecosystem functions, which depend on energy-intensive monocultures and livestock factories, destructive fishing practices, and other industrialized forms of production.

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(adapted from the Nyéléni 2007 Forum for Food Sovereignty Synthesis Report)