There is an international consensus about the unprecedented and pressing challenges that the world is facing in the 21st century, such as hunger and how to feed a growing population, eroding livelihoods of smallscale urban and rural food producers and workers, diet-related diseases, natural resource depletion, environmental degradation and climate change (FAO, 2017). It is also recognized worldwide that these intimately connected consequences of our current agriculture and food systems, and in particular of the dominant agri-business and high-input industrial model of agriculture, are affecting the health of the environment and humans (Gauker, 2010; FAO, 2015c), particularly vulnerable populations. As a consequence, they jeopardize the capacity of millions of small-scale food providers and their communities to produce and access sufficient, diversified and healthy food in a sustainable environment, thus posing serious threats to achieving the human right to adequate food and nutrition as well as to their livelihoods. Indeed, as pointed out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018, for the third year in a row, there has been a rise in world hunger, and without increased efforts, the world will fall far short of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of eradicating hunger by 2030. It has become clear that our world cannot afford a ‘business-as-usual’ approach any longer (IAASTD, 2009); crises cannot be solved by small incremental changes that do not dismantle the structures that caused them. In line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the FAO and its Director General call for a paradigm shift in agricultural and food systems. “The focus on increasing yields promoted by the Green Revolution is […] not sustainable [and] there is an urgent need to promote transformative change in how food is grown, produced, processed, transported, distributed and consumed” (FAO, 2018a). In that sense, agroecology, within the paradigm of food sovereignty, is gaining widespread recognition and is increasingly being promoted by States and international institutions as the indispensable approach to transform agriculture and food systems and address the challenges we face.