Food sovereignty and breastfeeding: the Global South and rural Brazil

Abstract

This is a theoretical-critical essay based on bibliographic and documentary analysis, using gender coloniality, food sovereignty, and the Global South perspective as analytical categories. Early weaning remains prevalent in peasant communities despite the extensive scientific evidence supporting the benefits of breastfeeding and the existence of a legal framework designed to protect it. This article argues that this phenomenon does not constitute an individual failure but it is rather an expression of structural determinants that intertwine the coloniality of gender, the expropriation of women's time, and the lack of legal recognition of reproductive labor. It analyzes the discrepancy between the Brazilian normative framework for breastfeeding protection — built around an urban model and directed toward formally employed women — and the everyday reality of rural women, marked by a triple burden, agricultural seasonality, economic dependence, and restricted social security access. It demonstrates that maternity leave and benefits marginally reach informal rural workers, whose occupation is culturally framed as family “help”. It contends that breast milk, by bypassing market mediation, constitutes an elementary expression of domestic food sovereignty, making early weaning an indicator of the contradiction between the agro-export project and reproductive rights. It concludes that realizing breastfeeding as a right requires an integrated agenda that recognizes women's rural labor as work, universalizes social security access, expands healthcare in rural territories, and incorporates breastfeeding as a food sovereignty indicator in public policies, overcoming the individualization of responsibility for a collective and structural failure.