농민권리, 식량주권 그리고 농민헌법

UN’s Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people living in rural areas The Declaration of Farmers’ Rights(2018) systematically arrange the difficulties of farmers and land, humans and nature, and problems of life and the state, and aims to create a society in which peasants are the subjects of their own lives emancipated from the neoliberal agricultural exploitation system. “The food sovereignty” movement is one of its main pillars, proclaiming that “farmers and people living and working in rural areas” be the subject of human rights. It seeks to establish the farmers as active and empowered citizens who can live their own lives with others and/or with nature. At this point, the institutionalization of rights to foods and food sovereignty as well as re-construction of the rights of peasants at the constitutional level becomes the most important constitutional task. Against the reality of Korea’s national policy, which has been treated peasants and others in rural area only as marginal people alienated from the main stream of the national economic policy, it is not a neo-liberal policy of agricultural development, but a system of sustainable national agriculture that we should keep deep in mind when we interpret and/or reform the constitutional law. There is a critical need for a paradigm shift on agriculture and rural community: we have to provide the rights of peasants and the food sovereignty with constitutional protection and support. In this context, this essay analyzed the contents of the UN Declaration on the rights of peasants, and explains the concepts of the right to food and the food sovereignty as well as the multi-functional agriculture. It examines some constitutional clauses of such foreign countries as Ecuador, Bolivia, Swiss and so on, to show how they have instutitionalized these issues on the constitutional and national level. This essay makes its conclusion with some proposals to revise the current constitution accordingly.