Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty

Global Agrarian Transformations, Volume 2

Marc Edelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138122765
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317424512
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This volume is a pioneering contribution to the study of food politics and critical agrarian studies, where food sovereignty has emerged as a pivotal concept over the past few decades, with a wide variety of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, and policy innovations flying under its broad banner. Despite its large and growing popularity, the history, theoretical foundations, and political program of food sovereignty have only occasionally received in-depth analysis and critical scrutiny. This collection brings together both longstanding scholars in critical agrarian studies, such as Philip McMichael, Bina Agarwal, Henry Bernstein, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, and Marc Edelman, as well as a dynamic roster of early- and mid-career researchers. The ultimate aim is to advance this important frontier of research and organizing, and put food sovereignty on stronger footing as a mobilizing frame, a policy objective, and a plan of action for the human future.

This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Introduction: critical perspectives on food sovereignty

Marc Edelman, Tony Weis, Amita Baviskar, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Eric Holt-Giménez, Deniz Kandiyoti and Wendy Wolford

Visions of food sovereignty have been extremely important in helping to galvanize broad-based and diverse movements around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Yet while food sovereignty has thrived as a ‘dynamic process’, until recently there has been insufficient attention to many thorny questions, such as its origins, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. This essay contributes to food sovereignty praxis by pushing the process of critical self-reflection forward and considering its relation to critical agrarian studies – and vice versa.

Over the course of more than two decades, visions of ‘food sovereignty’ have inspired (and been inspired by) a wellspring of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, policy innovations and – increasingly – heated debates. Even though proponents insist that food sovereignty is a ‘dynamic process’ rather than a set of fixed principles, until recently there had been little sustained interest in grappling with thorny questions of its origins, what its practical and conceptual limitations might be and what it would take to implement it now and in the future in economically, politically and ecologically diverse contexts. That reticence was perhaps rooted in the adoption of food sovereignty by transnational agrarian movements, such as La Vía Campesina (LVC), and the foot-dragging of sympathetic activists and researchers who were disinclined to challenge organizations representing peasants and leading figures within them.

Two conferences – at Yale University in New Haven in September 2013 and at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague in January 2014 – widened and deepened growing debates.1 Questions that scholar-activists had raised in off-the-record interviews with food sovereignty advocates and peasant leaders, or in hushed conversations in university corridors, exploded in fiery polemics – and received in-depth analytical attention in some 90 papers, 15 of which are represented in this collection.2 The active participation of numerous food sovereignty and peasant activists at these events and in authoring many of the papers made these much more than typical, run-of-the-mill academic conferences. What began as a dialogue in which academics asked ‘Does food sovereignty have a future in critical agrarian studies?’ was playfully flipped the other way by practitioners to ask ‘Do critical agrarian studies have a future in food sovereignty?’ Indeed, though diverse ideological standpoints led to some intense debates, a striking feature of these ‘critical dialogues’ was the enthusiasm that participants of every provenance and professional position displayed for engaging with each other’s ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation. Readers of this collection will find that food sovereignty is a dynamic process after all, and one that increasingly intensifies its praxis and includes a much more profound process of self-reflection and a broad interrogation of key premises and heretofore unexamined assumptions.

Much of the early literature on food sovereignty involved a considerable dose of idealistic righteousness – and rightfully so, since the concept had contributed beyond anybody’s initial expectations to galvanizing a broad-based and diverse movement around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Self-congratulatory celebrations of food sovereignty, however, too often went hand-in-hand with a certain inattention to underlying premises, policy implications and even the history of the idea itself. The critical dialogue in the pages below cranks up the intensity of the debates, leaving behind this oddly complacent past practice and raising difficult questions – including some for which there may be no immediate answers. While unable to capture the full breadth of the growing debate on the significance of food sovereignty as a mobilizing frame, policy objective and plan of action, this collection seeks to put academics, activists and of course activist-academics on a more solid footing as they engage and work with both agrarian studies and social movements struggling towards food sovereignty.

Challenging questions

To frame this introduction, we consider some of the most challenging questions:

(1) What are the origins of the concept of ‘food sovereignty’? How does it relate to more conventional notions of ‘food security’? What characterized the context in which food sovereignty emerged as a demand of social movements?

(2) How does long-distance or foreign trade fit into the food sovereignty paradigm, if at all? Is it possible to incorporate the millions of small farmers that produce commodities for export into a food sovereignty model and, if so, under what terms?

(3) What role as a mobilizing concept can food sovereignty play in helping food-deficit nations move towards greater food self-sufficiency? And is this always possible or desirable?

(4) The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that urban agriculture helps to feed up to 800 million city dwellers – mostly in the poorest quintile (FAO 2002; Zezza and Tasciotti 2010). From 30 to 70 percent of urban families in poor countries engage in urban agriculture, so there is no question that it makes a significant contribution to the aggregate food supply (FAO 2010). What do the growing material and strategic importance of urban agriculture mean for the construction of food sovereignty? How can food sovereignty help bridge the land, resource, market and policy struggles of rural and urban producers?

(5) What will be required to administer food sovereignty and who will do it? Who is the sovereign in food sovereignty? What kinds of limitations or regulations on particular kinds of production or trade, if any, does food sovereignty imply?

(6) How much pluralism is acceptable in a food-sovereign society with respect to models of agricultural production, commerce and consumption? What are the obstacles to scaling up agroecology as a strategy of resistance to industrial agriculture and to centring agroecology as a normative farming style in the future? While individual farmers adopt complex farming styles that include industrial and agroecological practices, the political food sovereignty movement (e.g. La Vía Campesina and transnational, national and regional food sovereignty alliances) has largely adopted agroecology as a normative form of production. How will the centring/decentring of agroecology/industrial practices affect farming styles? What mode of production is under construction with agroecology and food sovereignty?

(7) What kinds of (land) property relations might characterize a food-sovereign society? What combinations of cooperative or collective practices and individual ones are likely to be most effective?

(8) How does food sovereignty address the complex agrarian transitions to modern food systems? How might it serve to stabilize livelihoods and labour flow to build in greater social resilience? What are the roles and realities of food workers, consumers and people in general in the construction of food sovereignty? Will food sovereignty be able to address situations where agriculturalists manifest a desire to enter, remain in or leave agriculture or where young rural people prefer not to become farmers?

(9) If food sovereignty is founded on ‘rights’, how does it relate to the many other rights-oriented food movements that do not necessarily embrace the food sovereignty framework?

(10) What difference does food sovereignty make within broader political-economic transformations? What impacts and implications does food sovereignty hold for transitions to a post-petroleum, post-growth and/or post-capitalist society?

1. Origins of ‘food sovereignty’

The roots of ‘food sovereignty’ are much debated and shrouded in myth, as Edelman points out in this collection, while tracing the concept’s origins to a Mexican government program in the early 1980s. In contrast, several of the other contributions echo versions of the established account that LVC ‘first articulated’ (Desmarais and Wittman) or ‘mooted’ (Agarwal) food sovereignty in 1996 at the Rome World Food Summit. Still others take a sociology-of-knowledge approach to the origins question, linking the beginnings of food sovereignty to the globalization of the 1970s (Bernstein), the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1986–1994), the predecessor of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Burnett and Murphy) or the rapid concentration of giant seed corporations (Kloppenberg). What is clear amidst this cacophony of views is that visions of food sovereignty have evolved and that no consensus exists, a reality which many activists and scholars see as a virtue, a strength and a reflection and acknowledgment of on-the-ground diversity (as in, for example, Martínez-Torres and Rosset’s celebration of the ‘diálogo de saberes’ within LVC, van der Ploeg’s analysis of the sources of peasant resilience or Desmarais and Wittman’s invocation of the tremendous variety of national, regional and cultural identities that exist in a large country such as Canada). By critically scrutinizing varied interpretations of food sovereignty, as well as efforts to implement it, and by posing challenging and sometimes delicate questions, the contributions in this collection will no doubt contribute to the concept’s further specification and evolution.

One area of intense political contention and scholarly debate concerns the distinction between ‘food sovereignty’ and ‘food security’. The latter concept generally connotes simply adequacy of supplies and nutritional content, with the food itself produced and delivered under any conditions, including far-off, chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. This technocratic understanding of ‘food security’, typical of many intergovernmental organizations, has made it a target for food sovereignty activists and sympathetic academics. Indeed, some scholars go so far as to suggest that the food security versus food sovereignty opposition constitutes ‘a global conflict’ (Schanbacher 2010). This view is reflected in several contributions in this collection, including those by Martínez-Torres and Rosset, and McMichael. Bernstein accepts the food security versus food sovereignty dyad but sees it as one element of a broader set of problematical binaries central to agrarian populist discourse (e.g. industrial agriculture versus ‘virtuous peasants’). The contributions by Edelman and Trauger each take a different tack, arguing that many of the numerous definitions of food security overlap significantly with conceptions of food sovereignty (e.g. in emphasizing ‘culturally appropriate’ food) and that in the early actions around food sovereignty activists either used both terms almost interchangeably or asserted that food sovereignty was a prerequisite for attaining genuine food security.

The peasant movements that adopted ‘food sovereignty’ as a rallying cry and political program in the early 1990s faced several common threats. These included: sudden market openings coupled with the evisceration or complete elimination of public-sector support for smallholding agriculturalists (e.g. commodities boards, state development banks and subsidized credit, extension and agronomic research programs); the consolidation of giant seed companies and increasing state efforts to tighten and enforce seed certification and intellectual property laws regarding crop genetic material; the criminalization of protest and of trafficking in prohibited goods (e.g. raw milk in the United States, farmer-grown seeds in Europe); and what Martínez-Torres and Rosset describe as ‘territorial disputes with Capital and agribusiness’ (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2014, 980).

Several opportunities also characterized the context in which food sovereignty emerged as a demand of social movements. The most notable, analysed explicitly or assumed implicitly throughout this collection, is the rise of transnational agrarian movements (TAMs) and the coalitions that these formed with advocacy and donor non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Europe and elsewhere. The presence of LVC and other TAMs at the 1996 Rome Food Summit and the creation of the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty, for example, were made possible by these alliances and were first steps in opening up spaces where peasants’ voices could be heard in global governance institutions. Debates continue to roil the food sovereignty community about the ultimate usefulness of this engagement, but the food sovereignty idea would doubtless have had less traction without it.

2. Does long-distance trade fit in the food sovereignty paradigm?

There are many good reasons why food sovereignty advocacy has tended to view long-distance or foreign trade of agricultural products in a negative light. The reconfiguration of land and social relations to produce commodities for export obviously has old roots in European colonialism, and in many places agro-export production continues to be predicated on and/or generative of severe land and social inequalities. Dependence on long-distance trading systems frequently amounts to a double-edged sword for smallholders and farm workers, with especially damaging impacts in many of the world’s poorest countries. On one side is the extreme volatility of tropical agricultural commodities, long subject to frequent boom-bust swings. As Martin Khor (2000, 11) puts it: ‘many developing countries still dependent on commodity exports have been trapped in a bad corner of the world trading system’. On the other side, rising imports of cheap (and frequently subsidized) surpluses from industrialized countries have glutted local markets and reshaped the nature of food provisioning, a dynamic that will inevitably be threatened by limits to fossil energy supplies at some point in the future (and in the meantime will be tied to ever-more-destructive forms of fossil energy extraction).

The increasing distance and durability of food is also deeply entwined with the mounting concentration of corporate power over global agro-food systems, and contains under-accounted atmospheric costs that must be understood in light of the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigating climate change. Industrialized agriculture is a major source of GHG emissions (e.g. from large machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, deforestation and intensive livestock operations) and the extreme specialization of landscapes means that both agro-inputs and outputs frequently travel over long distances. While the distance that food moves from farm to mouth is part of its climate impact, it is important to recognize that the nature of production typically has a much greater impact on emissions; or, to put it another way, ‘food miles’ are just one part of the much bigger environmental case against industrial agriculture (Weber and Matthews 2008). In contrast, labour-intensive and biodiverse small farms tend to reduce GHG emissions in production, enhance the capacity for carbon sequestration within landscapes and reduce the distance that food is transported. In short, there is much to be sai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Agrarian Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Editors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: critical perspectives on food sovereignty
• 2. Historicizing food sovereignty
• 3. Food sovereignty: forgotten genealogies and future regulatory challenges
• 4. Diálogo de saberes in La Vía Campesina: food sovereignty and agroecology
• 5. Peasant-driven agricultural growth and food sovereignty
• 6. Food sovereignty via the ‘peasant way’: a sceptical view
• 7. What place for international trade in food sovereignty?
• 8. Farmers’ rights and food sovereignty: critical insights from India
• 9. Life in a shrimp zone: aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh’s coastal landscape
• 10. Toward a political geography of food sovereignty: transforming territory, exchange and power in the liberal sovereign state
• 11. Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada
• 12. The ‘state’ of food sovereignty in Latin America: political projects and alternative pathways in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia
• 13. Food sovereignty in Ecuador: peasant struggles and the challenge of institutionalization
• 14. Re-purposing the master’s tools: the open source seed initiative and the struggle for seed sovereignty
• 15. Food sovereignty, food security and democratic choice: critical contradictions, difficult conciliations
• Index