The Politics of Food Sovereignty

Concept, Practice and Social Movements

Annie Shattuck, Christina Schiavoni, Zoe VanGelder, Annie Shattuck, Christina Schiavoni, Zoe VanGelder

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367139292
• eBook ISBN: 9781351849272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Food sovereignty has been a fundamentally contested concept in global agrarian discourse over the last two decades, as a political project and campaign, an alternative, a social movement, and an analytical framework. It has inspired and mobilized diverse publics: workers, scholars and public intellectuals, farmers and peasant movements, NGOs, and human rights activists in the global North and South. The term 'food sovereignty' has become a challenging subject for social science research, and has been interpreted and reinterpreted in a variety of ways. It is broadly defined as the right of peoples to democratically control or determine the shape of their food system, and to produce sufficient and healthy food in culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable ways in and near their territory.

However, various theoretical issues remain: sovereignty at what scale and for whom? How are sovereignties contested? What is the relationship between food sovereignty and human rights frameworks? What might food sovereignty mean extended to a broader set of social relations in urban contexts? How do the principles of food sovereignty interact with local histories and contexts? This comprehensive volume examines what food sovereignty might mean, how it might be variously construed, and what policies it implies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

Translating the Politics of Food Sovereignty: Digging into Contradictions, Uncovering New Dimensions

ANNIE SHATTUCK*, CHRISTINA M. SCHIAVONI** & ZOE VANGELDER***

*University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
**International Institute for Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, The Netherlands
***Yale Fox Fellow, Mexico City, Mexico

ABSTRACT Food sovereignty, as a movement and a set of ideas, is coming of age. Rooted in resistance to free trade and the globalizing force of neoliberalism, the concept has inspired collective action across the world. We examine what has changed since food sovereignty first emerged on the international scene and reflect on insight from new terrain where the movement has expanded. We argue that to advance the theory and practice of food sovereignty, new frameworks and analytical methods are needed to move beyond binaries—between urban and rural, gender equality and the family farm, trade and localism, and autonomy and engagement with the state. A research agenda in food sovereignty must not shy away from the rising contradictions in and challenges to the movement. The places of seeming contradiction may in fact be where the greatest insights are to be found. We suggest that by taking a relational perspective, scholars can begin to draw insight into the challenges and sticking points of food sovereignty by training their lens on shifts in the global food regime, on the efforts to construct sovereignty at multiple scales, and on the points of translation where food sovereignty is articulated through historical memory, identity, and everyday life.

Introduction

Food sovereignty is not a fixed principle, it’s a process … it’s happening, and it’s been made to happen, through the struggles of millions of people all over the world. (Paul Nicholson, La Via Campesina)¹

In the fall of 2013, some 300 scholars and activists gathered at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies to discuss the challenges and promise of food sovereignty. Paul Nicholson, farmer, Basque leader, and founding member of the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, addressed the gathering in his usual animated voice. ‘Today’, he told a packed room, ‘you go to any kind of social forum and you will see that food sovereignty is the principle alternative presented against capitalism—there is no other. The others are resistance. This is a proposal’ (see note 1).

In the last decade, food sovereignty—the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems²—was enshrined in the constitutions and/or national laws of Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nepal, Nicaragua, Mali, and Senegal. The concept has inspired communities from the South Side of Chicago, to the Hawaiian Islands, to Occupied Palestine. Rooted in resistance to neoliberal globalization and free trade, movements for food sovereignty are globalizing as well; the idea now inspires collective action among tens of millions of people all over the world.

Food sovereignty is undoubtedly coming of age—as a movement and a set of ideas about how to democratize both access to resources and political power. But as the movement grows, challenges and contradictions emerge. Some scholars have remarked that food sovereignty has been only minimally successful in affecting policy or changing regulations (Edelman, 2014; Hospes, 2014). Others have noted contradictions in strategies for food sovereignty: between attempts by local activists to create food systems that are relatively autonomous from the whims of the global market and organized campaigns to change state policy and motivate institutional support for small farmers (Clark, 2013; Edelman, 2014; McKay, Nehring, & Walsh-Dilley, 2014); between proposals championing communal vs. individual rights (Agarwal, 2014; Claeys, 2014); and between a focus on making trade more fair and efforts to build autonomous local food systems (Bacon, 2015; Burnett & Murphy, 2014).

Scholars have also noted serious tensions between the interests of different participants in the food sovereignty project. For instance, the interests of small-scale farmers and different classes of rural landless workers cannot easily be reconciled (Bernstein, 2014; Patel, 2009), while the need of producers to receive fair prices seems at odds with the dependence of poor urban consumers on cheap food (Bernstein, 2014). The family farm and systems of patriarchy often go hand in hand (Agarwal, 2014). Furthermore, discourses on food sovereignty coming from the global South do not always resonate with urban communities in North America organizing around racial justice (Holt-Giménez & Wang, 2011). Questions that are at once both theoretical and practical, like ‘who is the sovereign in food sovereignty?’ persist as well (Edelman, 2014). These debates are not merely academic—they represent serious political challenges for a growing movement.³

This collection of articles builds on conversations at two events in which these contradictions loomed large. These ‘critical dialogues’ on food sovereignty, organized jointly by the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Transnational Institute, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in September of 2013 at Yale University in New Haven and in January 2014 at the ISS in The Hague, were held as part of an ongoing process to advance debates on food sovereignty.⁴

Many of the contradictions outlined above have motivated scholars to question whether food sovereignty can be more than a political slogan. Noting shifting definitions and limited regulatory uptake, researchers have struggled to find a blueprint for realizing food sovereignty that can be scaled up and applied across the board (Hospes, 2014). We argue that this search is misguided and ineffectual. We offer a different approach to understanding the challenge and potential of food sovereignty—and a research agenda for critical scholars of globalization—that engages with the shifting global politics which movements now confront; that recognizes that sovereignty itself is multivalent and always contested; that contextualizes different struggles for food sovereignty as reflections of specific histories and identities; and that takes everyday life as a starting point for analysis.

Shifting Terrain, Shifting Politics of Sovereignty

Food sovereignty was born, like all ideas, as a product of its time. The concept has its roots in nationalist food politics of the 1980s (Edelman, 2014), but on the world stage, food sovereignty rose to prominence in the aftermath of structural adjustment. In the mid-1990s social movements were forced to reckon with a wave of free trade agreements. As cheap commodities flooded rural economies in the Global South, the agricultural sector consolidated dramatically.⁵ These circumstances left an already weak state apparatus even weaker with respect to regulating flows of food and agricultural goods. The peasant farmers represented by La Via Campesina were, in many ways, the collateral damage of this era. Invoking sovereignty as a rallying cry framed hunger, agrarian reform, and rural economies as an issue of human rights and national control (McMichael, 2014; Patel, 2009). The call to sovereignty was a conscious effort to bring power back to the state from deregulated markets and free trade regimes—and as such, to bolster the rights and livelihoods of peasants.

Since ‘food sovereignty’ rose to prominence in 1996, the ground has shifted under rural social movements.⁶ Peasant farmers are dealing with a confluence of events, including the growing involvement of financial actors in agricultural production and food provisioning (Isakson, 2014), increasing ecological pressures and uncertainty (Ribot, 2014), more rural–urban circular migration and multi-cited livelihoods (Hecht, 2014; Nguyen & Locke, 2014), and increasing concern with health, given the rise in diet-related disease and pesticide toxicity in both the Global North and South (De Schutter, 2011; Noyes et al., 2009).

First, as Phil McMichael explains in this issue, movements have had to confront not only a trade-centered assault on peasant economies, but also vast—and vastly complicated—financialization of agriculture (Clapp, 2014; Fairbairn et al., 2014; Isakson, 2014). Since 2007, three spikes in food prices have occurred, all partly fueled by commodities speculation. Corporations continue their patterns of vertical integration, while also turning to schemes such as contract farming to ‘incorporate smallholders into global value chains’: small-scale farmers may own the land, but in many cases, cede degrees of control over their economies and labor (McMichael, 2015). A new wave of investment, in farmland—the oft-cited ‘land grab’—is also bound up in the transformation of global agricultural politics and trade (McMichael, 2012).⁷ This ‘investment-led assault’ (McMichael, 2015) is multifaceted and has shifted the terms of opposition to include defending ‘“ways of life” on the land against not only market forces … but also organized physical and economic enclosures’ (McMichael, 2015). Meanwhile, in both the global North and South, food insecurity is becoming an increasingly urban concern, intensified by these new waves of dispossession.

Changes in geopolitics have also affected food sovereignty as the power dynamics between and within states are shifting. While the countries of the G8 remain major players in global food politics (see McMichael, 2015), they must now play alongside other powerful actors, from the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to the growing ‘pink tide’ of left-leaning countries in Latin America (see Schiavoni, 2015). These shifting axes of power are reflected not only in new relationships among states, but also between states and civil society, as can be seen with the newly reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) (see McMichael, 2015; Claeys, 2014). Such developments simultaneously pose new challenges and openings and raise new questions for the role of the state vis-à-vis food sovereignty—a theme that emerges throughout this issue.

These changes in geopolitics and structural transformations in the global economy come at a time of increasingly unstable climate conditions, among other challenges. Urban and rural ways of making a living are no longer as distinct as they once were: many households are stretched between spaces, with the work of childrearing and caring for the elderly in the countryside and rural youth increasingly drawn to urban life and the economic opportunities there. Migration between city and countryside is often the only way to make ends meet. Pesticide toxicity affects more farmers and farmworkers, as well as consumers, making access to healthy food a rallying cry for urban and rural communities alike; and the global movement for agroecology is rising. Now considered a twin pillar of food sovereignty, agroecology has become the practical method for building food sovereignty at the farm scale (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012).

In short, these new realities suggest that the context—socioeconomic, political, and ecological—in which food sovereignty was originally hatched has changed more than a little. The experiences, movements, and positions encompassed under the umbrella of food sovereignty have always been diverse (Desmarais & Wittman, 2014), but the shifts that we are seeing today demand a new degree of flexibility in the way that food sovereignty is imagined, researched, and put into practice.

For researchers, this shifting political terrain is a fruitful space of engagement. While there has been a flush of recent literature on financialization and the global land grab, there have been fewer investigations on other aspects of change in the global food regime, including of the effects of increasing rural–urban circular migration, the way climate change interacts with market volatility and historical inequality, new South–South trade arrangements, and corporate consolidation in the Global South, to name a few. Deeper examination of the spaces in which these changes are negotiated could help to identify where there might be opportunities for structural transformation.

Multiple and Competing Sovereignties

The circumstances of the current moment also challenge us in our understanding of sovereignty as such. There is no one international sphere capable of regulating booming commodities markets, financial investments in farmland, or contract farming schemes. These flows of capital and financial interests represent a real shift in power, an increase in the power of unregulated markets to distribute resources. Unlike in the heyday of the WTO, there is no single governing authority from which to regain (food) sovereignty (McMichael, 2015).

As Schiavoni explains in this issue, some of the apparent contradictions of food sovereignty may in fact be explained by contradictions inherent in the concept of sovereignty itself. She notes, as do others (Claeys, 2014; Iles & Montenegro de Wit, 2015), that political theorists describe both internal and external dimensions of sovereignty. External sovereignty, the sovereignty of nations within their own territories, is the most oft-invoked and arguably the most accepted form of sovereignty. However, sovereignty also calls upon the internal political structure of society w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Translating the Politics of Food Sovereignty: Digging into Contradictions, Uncovering New Dimensions
• 2. The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project
• 3. Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina’s Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years
• 4. Competing Sovereignties, Contested Processes: Insights from the Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment
• 5. Sovereignty at What Scale? An Inquiry into Multiple Dimensions of Food Sovereignty
• 6. Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life: Toward a People-centered Approach to Food Systems
• 7. ‘Quiet Food Sovereignty’ as Food Sovereignty without a Movement? Insights from Post-socialist Russia
• 8. Return to Freedom: Anti-GMO Aloha ‘Āina Activism on Molokai as an Expression of Place-based Food Sovereignty
• 9. Broadening the Land Question in Food Sovereignty to Northern Settings: A Case Study of Occupy the Farm
• 10. A Recipe for Change: Reclamation of Indigenous Food Sovereignty in O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation for Decolonization, Resource Sharing, and Cultural Restoration
• Index