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1 Introduction
Today we face a double social crisis. On one hand, a crisis of regulation has emerged, in the shape of failing regulatory and welfare states. On the other hand, a crisis of emancipation has arisen, in terms of the decline of social revolution and socialism as paradigms of radical social transformation. Human rights, as an incarnation of both regulatory and emancipatory politics, are trapped in this double crisis and are struggling to overcome it (Santos 1997, 80â1). Since they are globally recognized, human rights are at the heart of contemporary global governance debates, and are closely tied to what some have called the emergence of a global civil society (Kaldor et al. 2007) or transnational public sphere (Habermas 2010, 475). A large number of social movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use the human rights framework for its legitimizing force and universalizing effect, to the extent that some are able to argue that human rights have become a near-hegemonic ideology (Gauchet 2000, 280). Indeed, it is against a backdrop of failing ideologies that human rights have risen to their current prominence (Moyn 2012), leading to a situation where other emancipatory strategies may now be marginalized (Kennedy 2002, 108).
At the same time, human rights are increasingly criticized for having individualizing, Western and liberal implications (Engle Merry 1997; Rajagopal 2003), for reducing their subjects to victims (RanciĂšre 2004), for being imperialistic (Douzinas 2007) and for supporting the expansion of liberalism (Charvet and Kaczynska-Nay 2008) and capitalism (Sardar 1998). They have also been accused of being tied to the state (Baxi 2007b) and domination processes (Agrikoliansky 2010), of not addressing issues of power (Stammers 1995, 2009), and of promoting unrealistic expectations, thereby discouraging political dialogue and increasing social conflicts (Glendon 1991). Finally, it has been argued that human rights alienate activists from their own local cultural understandings (Engle Merry 1997), and reduce social solidarity and appreciation of the public good (Kneen 2009). Human rights stand at a crossroads. Can they serve as a progressive form of politics? Or are human rights just one more variety of a global, state-centric and individualistic (Gauchet 1980, 22, 25) hegemony (Santos and RodrĂguez-Garavito 2005, 14)?
The food sovereignty movement, a transnational movement of rural social organizations that work towards achieving structural changes in the global food system (Holt-GimĂ©nez 2011), has widely relied on the discourse of rights to advance its claims (Patel 2007; Rosset and Martinez 2010). Those who call themselves peasants â and make up the vast majority of the almost 870 million people chronically undernourished on the planet (FAO 2012) â have put the right to produce, the right to land, the right to protection from dumping and the right to food sovereignty at the core of their struggles over the last decades. The transnational agrarian movement VĂa Campesina1 has even adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, and succeeded in putting it on the agenda of the United Nations Human Rights Council (Edelman and James 2011; Golay 2009; Claeys 2012b). If human rights are indeed of little use to the oppressed, why are we witnessing âthe increasing frequency of the language of rights in the statements of peasant movementsâ (Kneen 2009, 2)? What can be made of this apparent contradiction (Landy 2013), and under which conditions can the use of human rights by social movements be subversive?2 In other words, is it possible for social movementsâ activists to use human rights in a way that challenges power (Stammers 1999, 1005)?
To answer this question, this book explores the following themes: (a) why are assertions of rights so prevalent in the discourse of contemporary agrarian movements, and what are the advantages of framing claims as rights?; (b) what are the various understandings of human rights that circulate within the food sovereignty movement, and how do these conceptions differ from dominant conceptions of human rights?; (c) what constraints are associated with the human rights framework and what strategies are adopted by social movements to overcome these constraints?; (d) how did the food sovereignty movement succeed in transforming its concerns into internationally acknowledged human rights claims? Where and why did it fail?; (e) how did human rights organizations and rights-based development NGOs react to the emergence of the food sovereignty movement and its demand that new rights be recognized for peasants?; and (f) how are human rights being reconfigured under the impetus of contemporary agrarian movements?
Human rights have enabled the common framing of claims across different political, economic, cultural and ideological contexts (Borras 2004), and have facilitated the food sovereignty movementâs insertion into global food governance debates (Patel 2009). But rights claims have also presented food sovereignty activists with a challenge in the shape of the paradox of institutionalization, because human rights praxis tends to be reduced to a praxis that is organized through and oriented towards institutionalized structures of power. This may seriously endanger the âemancipatory thrustâ of human rights (Stammers 2009, 106, 225), and sheds light, in my opinion, on why those who arguably need the right to food the most have found the existing human rights framework lacking. My main argument is that, to inject subversive potential into their rights-based claims, food sovereignty activists have developed an alternative conception of rights that is more plural, less statist, less individualistic and more multicultural than dominant conceptions of human rights. In parallel, they have deployed a combination of institutional and extra-institutional strategies to demand new rights and reinforce grassroots mobilization through rights. Their rights-creating activity has had considerable impacts: various dimensions of the right to food sovereignty have been institutionally recognized at local or national levels (Beuchelt and Virchow 2012), and new rights that are constitutive of the food sovereignty paradigm are in the process of being recognized at the UN Human Rights Council (Golay 2013). In addition, the emergence of transnational peasant movements in the 1990s has led to a partial reconceptualization of the right to food, a human right already recognized in international human rights law. The transnational right to food network has placed an increased emphasis, in recent years, on the importance of moving toward sustainable, relocalized and pro-smallholder agricultural development models. At the same time, food sovereignty activists face many challenges: how can new rights for peasants be advanced while alliances with other rural constituencies are built? How can the effective implementation of the new legal frameworks be ensured? How can local food sovereignty practices be developed, state action secured (and of what kind?) and structural changes in global governance obtained?
In this book, I adopt a âsocial constructionistâ view of rights which does not see human rights as a given but instead as products of human social interaction (Short 2009, 103). I look at the reconfiguration of human rights under the impetus of contemporary transnational agrarian movements, following the efforts of indigenous peoples to âreconstructâ human rights (RodrĂguez-Garavito and Arenas 2005; Daes 2004; Kenrick and Lewis 2004; DĂaz-Polanco and SĂĄnchez 2002; Sieder and Witchell 2001; Falk 1988). I explore grassroots perspectives on human rights, from North and South, and show that the study of both institutional and extra-institutional arenas is necessary to analyse the process of emergence of ânew rightsâ (Bob 2010c). I demonstrate that, if social actors are indeed âforced to resort to using exogenous, internationally legitimated means to secure their right to be differentâ (Hirtz 2003, 910), this is not the end of the story. Peasant movements have proven to be extremely creative in their grappling with human rights, although serious consideration of the limits of the human rights framework will be needed to further advance food sovereignty. VĂa Campesinaâs use of rights moves beyond the Marxist critique of human rights because the movement deploys rights to challenge capitalism itself. Marx, and many Marxist intellectuals after him, rejected human rights as part of their wider critique of capitalism (Douzinas 2010). At the heart of this critique was the belief that the recognition and enforcement of rights for the disadvantaged was unlikely to improve their well-being in absence of reforms altering distribution of wealth and power, an argument that has also been advanced by some liberal thinkers (Simon 2003, 20). The question raised by VĂa Campesina is no longer: are human rights bourgeois rights (Marx 1875) but by whom are they appropriated? Are they defined by social struggles or by hegemonic powers? This book shows that, as nearly every social controversy today is framed as a clash of rights (Glendon 1991, 4), the struggle to determine human rights is highly political.
The actors
Two broadly defined categories of social actors are discussed in this book: food sovereignty activists and right to food defenders. The food sovereignty activists discussed in this book are, for the most part, small-scale farmers, peasants and indigenous people who belong to the transnational agrarian organization VĂa Campesina. Many are movement leaders,3 some are support staff, but most are grassroots members. This category also includes activists from agrarian movements other than VĂa Campesina, as well as academics and NGO representatives. All demand food sovereignty. Right to food defenders are NGO staff, academics, legal experts and UN representatives who work towards the promotion and protection of the human right to adequate food. A good proportion of these human rights defenders are lawyers, although many are not.
Food sovereignty activists have been at the forefront of the global justice movement,4 while right to food defenders have played an important role in advancing economic, social and cultural rights. It is striking that human rights defenders have played only a minor role in the global justice movement,5 while food sovereignty activists, despite their use of the human rights framework, remain somewhat on the margins of the human rights community. The reasons for this double disconnect are explored in this book. Both food sovereignty activists and right to food defenders form part of the global food movement6 (Holt-GimĂ©nez 2011, 110). In their efforts to defend alternative, fair and more sustainable or healthy food systems, they are joined by many other types of activists â for example, organic, fair trade, slow food and local/community food activists â who would not necessarily identify with either food sovereignty or the right to food, although some might. The global food movement is rapidly growing, and the 2007â8 global food crisis revealed its vitality. It is multifaceted and diverse, in large part because the members of this movement â consumers, landless people, agricultural workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, rich and poor, rural and urban â all experience the global food system differently.
Within the global food movement, the transnational movement for food sovereignty7 (see Figure 1.1) is particularly vibrant. The food sovereignty movement is, at its core, a movement of rural social movements and organizations that work towards achieving food sovereignty.8 Analysis of this movement is highly relevant because the rise of transnational agrarian movements in the 1990s has reinforced worldwide opposition to neoliberal capitalism, and has given a new resonance to centuries of debates on the agrarian question (Byres 1982; Bernstein and Byres 2001; Bernstein 2014, 2010; Araghi 1995) and on the role of peasantries in revolutionary processes. Contemporary peasant movements have found ways to simultaneously localize and internationalize their actions, in response to both state decentralization and globalization (Borras 2009, 11). Their mobilizations against genetic crops, dams, mining concessions and trade liberalization have questioned the nature of the relationship between food producers and consumers, between cities and the countryside, between nature and humanity, between North and South (Claeys 2012a, 105). The food sovereignty movement has put an alternative vision on the table (Desmarais 2008b), at a time when the convergence of the financial, food, energy and environmental crises forces us to look for an alternative development model. This may explain why food sovereignty has had so much resonance: numerous NGOs, academics, environmentalists, and even states today defend some version of food sovereignty.
Figure 1.1 The food sovereignty movement
Figure 1.2 The transnational Right To Food Network
In this book, I focus on the transnational and formally organized network VĂa Campesina, but I also give the floor to many other food sovereignty activists, who belong to other agrarian movements,9 or to agrarian-oriented NGOs,10 and/or to academia.11 VĂa Campesina was formally constituted on 16 May 1993, by 46 farm leaders from around the world who had gathered together in Mons, Belgium.12 Twenty years later, the network claims to represent 200 million peasants worldwide (VĂa Campesina 2012b). As of the last International Conference of VĂa Campesina in Jakarta in June 2013, membership amounts to 164 national and subnational organizations in 79 countries.13 Some of its member organizations have become famous for their struggles over land, against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or against the World Trade Organization (WTO), such as the landless workers movement MST (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) in Brazil, and the ConfĂ©dĂ©ration paysanne in France.14 VĂa Campesina relies on a decentralized structure and derives its vitality and legitimacy from its member organizations at local and national levels.15 Among these organizations, differences in worldviews, political agendas and methods of work abound, despite the fact that all defend the interests of economically and politically marginalized sectors of society (Borras 2004, 9). VĂa Campesina has a mixed membership, ranging from farm workers and landless peasants to indigenous peoples and âsmallâ farmers with different types of economic activity, land sizes and methods of production and distribution (from direct consumer sales to contract farming). The ideological, religious, cultural and political persuasions of its member organizations vary too, from those coming from the communist party-based frameworks to those of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, from those of broadly liberal provenance to those arising from environmental or feminist activism. Divisions between member organizations of VĂa Campesina are common in national contexts (Desmarais 2008b). In recent years, the movementâs membership has considerably expanded to take in new members from Asia and Africa, but the Latin and North American regions, as well as Europe, remain very influential.
Also located within the global food movement, the transnational right to food network (see Figure 1.2) has a very different feel. It consists of a constellation of human rights organizations, development NGOs and individual experts attached to various national or international institutions. Advocates of the right to food form what Keck and Sikkink (1998) have termed a transnational advocacy network, but not, in my opinion, a social movement.16 Right to food defenders use advocacy and campaigning as key repertoires of action, but do not (or rarely) engage in protests. They speak on behalf of the hungry and malnourished, but do not seek to improve their own life situation (they usually enjoy a decent standard of living and work to improve the welfare of others). Expressions of solidarity and support towards âvictimsâ of human rights âviolationsâ (Kennedy 2002, 111) form a central part of their work. At the heart of the transnational right to food network is the international human rights organization FIAN, which stands for FoodFirst Information and Action Network.17 Inspired by the approach of Am...
