IN the discourse of food systems and agricultural production, the term food security has been widely used and has become a cliché.In eradicating hunger and taming poverty to improve community livelihoods and resilience, there was nothing wrong with the use of the overused term food security. Peter Makwanya However, there have been suggestions that food security may not be quite inclusive and sustainable enough, hence the need to explore the term food sovereignty.In this regard, how can food sovereignty be more appropriate yet both terms speak to food sufficiency? Food security continues to be at the epicentre of sustainable livelihoods and is tied to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 1 (end poverty in all its forms everywhere) and 2 (end hunger, achieve food security, improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture). Food security has revolutionise the food system discourse and communication with regard to food crises, recurring droughts and famines, leading to the creation of another term food insecurity. Food security has been widely used to describe global efforts to address the problem of hunger and malnutrition. Food sovereignty has rarely been used yet it is assumed to be the most ideal, inclusive and sustainable. Food sovereignty is seen as, the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, hence the right for communities to define their own food and agricultural systems. Furthermore, placing the needs and livelihoods of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. One wonders if the coining of these two terms (food security and food sovereignty) is pure communication, semantics or global politics of the food systems, because food is food. That is why the terms food security and insecurity have refused to die, while food sovereignty is struggling to gain linguistic prominence. From the assumed definition of food sovereignty, a deeper analysis would reveal that, maybe food security has an ecological gap. While food security is aimed at addressing issues of food insecurity and hunger, through dominant market forces, food sovereignty seeks to build new parameters and address the root causes through a bottom-up grassroot approach. In this regard, it would mean that food sovereignty favours rural innovations for the marginalised and vulnerable which can be pro-poor (for the poor), para-poor (working with the poor) and per-poor (innovation by the poor in their communities). In this regard, food security may be seen as having inherent deficiencies and gaps in addressing problems of pro-poor growth because of being controlled by market forces, including failure to sufficiently address global hunger. Food sovereignty is seen as having the capacity to fight global hunger and malnutrition hence it is deeply rooted in SDGs 1 and 2. Furthermore, food sovereignty is characterised by sustainable development, environmental conservation, genuine agri