Public Policies for Food Sovereignty

Social Movements and the State

Annette Aurelie Desmarais, Priscilla Claeys, Amy Trauger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138240957
• eBook ISBN: 9781315281797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Écologie

An increasing number of rural and urban-based movements are realizing some political traction in their demands for democratization of food systems through food sovereignty. Some are pressuring to institutionalize food sovereignty principles and practices through laws, policies, and programs. While the literature on food sovereignty continues to grow in volume and complexity, there are a number of key questions that need to be examined more deeply. These relate specifically to the processes and consequences of seeking to institutionalize food sovereignty: What dimensions of food sovereignty are addressed in public policies and which are left out? What are the tensions, losses and gains for social movements engaging with sub-national and national governments? How can local governments be leveraged to build autonomous spaces against state and corporate power?

The contributors to this book analyze diverse institutional processes related to food sovereignty, ranging from community-supported agriculture to food policy councils, direct democracy initiatives to constitutional amendments, the drafting of new food sovereignty laws to public procurement programmes, as well as Indigenous and youth perspectives, in a variety of contexts including Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, Switzerland, UK, Canada, USA, and Africa. Together, the contributors to this book discuss the political implications of integrating food sovereignty into existing liberal political structures, and analyze the emergence of new political spaces and dynamics in response to interactions between state governance systems and social movements voicing the radical demands of food sovereignty.

1

Can the revolution be institutionalized?

Amy Trauger, Priscilla Claeys and Annette Aurélie Desmarais

Introduction

Since peasant movements introduced their notion of food sovereignty more than two decades ago, struggles to achieve dignity and autonomy and radically transform the global food system, have gained momentum in many regions of the world. Struggles for food sovereignty are more diverse and complex than ever. They include both urban and rural social actors who are involved in resisting the appropriation and commodification of seeds, lands, water, and other natural resources; building local and territorial markets and new ways of managing the commons; halting trade and investment agreements; demanding socially-just food and agricultural policies; and transforming social and gender relations, while also building new and sometimes international alliances and overcoming internal social movement tensions. As food sovereignty movements seek to turn their demands into public policy and gain visibility and power, they engage with various institutions at sub-national (local, municipal, provincial), national, regional, and global scales. As a result of these often long and contentious processes, food sovereignty principles and practices may at times be translated, with differing degrees of success or failure, into laws, policies, and programmes (Schiavoni 2016; Iles and Montenegro de Wit 2015).

An increasing number of scholars are documenting these developments and analysing the evolving and place-specific manifestations of food sovereignty, the diverse contexts in which the institutionalization of food sovereignty takes place, and the multiplicity of social actors involved (see, for example, among others, (Davila and Dyball 2015; Iles and Montenegro de Wit 2015; Clark 2016; Roman-Alcalá 2016). This literature signals that social actors operating under the banner of food sovereignty face a number of challenges when they engage in policy formation. Among the most important of these is how to simultaneously reflect and engage in the radical change that is at the heart of food sovereignty while creating the institutional spaces for deliberation and action to meet food sovereignty objectives in any given place. What happens within food sovereignty movements themselves as they struggle to define their own internal structures, dynamics, and rules of engagement is perhaps even more significant and understudied, as many of the chapters in this edited volume indicate.

While the literature on food sovereignty continues to grow in volume and complexity, there are a number of key questions that remain, in our view, largely unexamined. These relate specifically to the processes and consequences of seeking to institutionalize food sovereignty. For example, what political conditions and public policies currently exist or are being established for the implementation of food sovereignty? How is food sovereignty institutionalized in specific ways in different places? What dimensions of food sovereignty are addressed in public policies and which are left out? What are the tensions, losses, and gains for social movements engaging with sub-national and national governments? How can local governments be leveraged to build autonomous spaces against state and corporate power? How can global norms be effectively used or transformed to hold states and corporations accountable? The contributors to this book take up these questions to analyse the emergence of new political spaces and dynamics in response to interactions between state governance systems and social movements voicing the radical demands of food sovereignty.

While this edited volume cannot answer all of these questions, we argue that addressing some of them might inform future efforts and help strengthen the global food sovereignty movement. In this volume we explore the challenges, achievements and potential of struggles and draw lessons from various attempts to institutionalize food sovereignty principles and practices via policies and programmes in various social, cultural, and political contexts. The volume showcases a variety of empirically-driven cases from North and South America and Europe that engage with a variety of institutional processes, ranging from constitutional amendments and the participatory elaboration of food sovereignty inspired laws to the creation of new formal democratic spaces of deliberation and alternative social movement structures and practices in attempts to implement food sovereignty. While emphasizing cases of engagement at a sub-national level (i.e. struggles at the local, municipal, and provincial levels), we also examine interactions between national states and social movements.

The cases in this volume demonstrate there is no obvious way of assessing whether and how radical social transformation can result from the translation processes between social movements and institutions. The cases point to the need to look beyond legal change, strictly speaking, to explore the broader impacts, including on social movements themselves, of engaging in policy-making. They also call for exploring food sovereignty struggles, strategies and alternatives that do not limit themselves to institutionalization through policy-making but also focus on the internal dynamics of social movements. In what follows we present food sovereignty as a transnational social movement struggle and set of alternative practices that seek to transform food systems. We then provide a brief summary of the literature on social movements, institutions, and the challenges facing social movements engaging with the state to then discuss the challenges of institutionalizing food sovereignty. This leads us to build on the various contributions to this volume to draw lessons learned from ongoing processes in various regions and to point to areas for future research.

Food sovereignty as a revolutionary social movement struggle

Food sovereignty as a rural political struggle was initially mobilized by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) that emerged in the early 1990s (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010; Desmarais 2007). LVC defines itself as

an autonomous, pluralist, and multicultural movement, independent from any political, economic or other type of affiliation.

It is a movement that

defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature (La Via Campesina 2011).

As Desmarais (2007, 53) explains, LVC “formed in the North and South around common objectives: an explicit rejection of the neo-liberal model of rural development, an outright refusal to be excluded from agricultural policy development, and a firm determination to work together to empower a peasant voice”. Currently, the movement is composed of 164 local and national organizations in 73 countries located in 9 world regions and represents about 200 million farmers. The ultimate goal of LVC is to build new social relations and radically different kinds of food systems based on the principles of food sovereignty. La Via Campesina’s revolutionary stance opposes the enclosure of the means of production by capitalism and advocates for the creation of alternative forms of political autonomy and governance.

Over the last twenty years, LVC has succeeded in developing a common agenda across the North–South divide and in gaining the support of numerous NGOs, academics, environmentalists, and even some states that today defend some version of food sovereignty. The widely accepted definition of food sovereignty formulated at the 2007 Nyéléni Food Sovereignty Forum – an encounter that gathered not only peasant movements but all other rural and urban-based constituencies working towards radical transformation of the food system – highlights the interests and rights of food gatherers, producers, and consumers as well as the ability of local communities to determine their own food systems. Importantly, it also centers on rights to food-producing resources (i.e. land, water, seeds, and territories) without threats of violence or interference from the state (Claeys 2015b). This is not solely suggestive of new forms of political autonomy. As the Nyéléni documents state:

Food sovereignty is more than a right; in order to be able to apply policies that allow autonomy in food production it is necessary to have political conditions that exercise autonomy in all the territorial spaces: countries, regions, cities and rural communities. Food sovereignty is only possible if it takes place at the same time as political sovereignty of peoples (Nyéléni 2007, 5, emphasis added).

Following Nyéléni, food sovereignty is often conceptualized as resting on six pillars. These include focusing on food for people, valuing food providers, localizing food systems, placing control at the local level, building knowledge and skills, and working with nature. More recently, indigenous peoples in Canada have added a seventh pillar that recognizes the spiritual dimensions of food sovereignty in that food is sacred. For Kneen (2011), this is “foundational” because,

If food is sacred, it cannot be treated as a mere commodity, manipulated into junk foods or taken from people’s mouths to feed animals or vehicles. If the ways in which we get food are similarly sacred, Mother Earth cannot be enslaved and forced to produce what we want, when and where we want it, through our technological tools. And of course, if food is sacred, the role of those who provide food is respected and supported (p. 92).

Conceptualizing food sovereignty as a transnational social movement struggle might well be what Michael Watts means by “radicalism writ large” (2009, 23). It coalesces local, deeply-situated struggles, connects them, and transforms them into a transnational organized politics of system change, and as such, it may represent a local, national, and transnational “organized politics of anti-enclosure” (Watts 2009, 23). According to Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011), food sovereignty forms a “radical” response to food system failures to provide food security. They posit that food sovereignty differs from what they call the “progressive” alternatives such as organic agriculture, in partial but significant ways, specifically with regard to its relationship to governance and markets. They caution that the radical nature of food sovereignty is threatened by mission creep if food systems actors make concessions to institutions on key elements of the platform. They suggest that food sovereignty could lose its political distinctiveness and become like other – co-opted – progressive food movements if it does not work to rectify systemic injustices enabled by both states and markets.

The revolutionary social and political change that food sovereignty movements seek doesn’t translate well to the territorial boundaries of modern liberal states (Desmarais and Wittman 2014). Indeed, struggles for food sovereignty confront the political realities of liberal sovereignty, namely, the territorialization of politics and economics under the governance of the modern nation state. These struggles signal rejection of the policy status quo, and politically contest the governance structures and instruments over food and agriculture (McMichael 2009), while challenging the hegemony of transnational capital in the food system. For Trauger (2014a), LVC and their allies oppose both the authority of the state and market to control food production and the limits to autonomy that liberal states offer in terms of food production and consumption. In her research on LVC, Claeys (2012) shows that peasant movements have directed their energy both towards institutional engagement at various levels and towards forms of protest that are largely sub-institutional because their “claims are not geared towards compensations that the welfare state can provide” (p. 846). Indeed, engagements at the sub-national and sub-institutional levels are often illegal and criminalized (Trauger 2014a).

Fairbairn (2010, 30) stresses three key factors that strengthen the capacity of food sovereignty activists to resist co-optation and dilution: food sovereignty emerged from those marginalized and oppressed by the corporate food regime, it represents a genuine alternative to (rather than just a variant of) the existing model, and its “intensely political language” hinders potential assimilation and strengthens its potential to effect radical social change. Meanwhile, Alkon and Mares (2012) demonstrate, as do several chapters in this volume, that effectively challenging neoliberal policies remains an ongoing struggle for food sovereignty movements (and other food movements) as they engage with either markets or states. McKay et al (2014), however, assert that “visions of food sovereignty outlined in the Nyéléni Declaration and elsewhere require institutional and legal support and protections, which will rely at least to some degree on state involvement” (p. 1176).

The question of institutionalizing food sovereignty then is how to codify the claims of a social movement within the institutions of the liberal state. At what scale, and with which institutions, might the political demands of food sovereignty be productively engaged? While there is no ready-made answer to this highly complex question, engaging in processes to advance and translate food sovereignty into policy implies looking at the role of “communities, peoples, states and international bodies” (Nyéléni 2007, 2). In other words, it means looking at social movements, institutions and the articulation and interactions between the two in what Schiavoni (2016) has called a historical-relational-interactive framework. Schiavoni asserts that, rather than studying “food sovereignty per se”, it is much more useful to understand food sovereignty as a process of “construction”, in which attempts to change dynamics around food and power are “articulated and attempted, as well as contested – including resisted, refracted or reversed – in a given setting” (p. 1).

Social movements and institutions

Institutions are social creations that arise from social action; as such they can be modified or eliminated by individuals and groups through concerted social effort (Giddens 1984). Barley and Tolbert (1997) define institutions as “shared rules and typifications that identify categories of social actors and their appropriate activities or relationships” (emphasis in original; p. 96). They assert, following Giddens (1984), that institutions gain political power in the way they shape individual action by constraining and enabling certain ways of being and knowing. They write that the normalization of certain kinds of rationalities can lead to “generalized expectations and interpretations of behavior … which gradually acquire the moral and ontological status of taken-for-granted facts, which in turn shape future interactions and negotiations” (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 94). The creation and maintenance of institutions is a continuous process through time, with new institutions arising, while some disappear, and others are transformed from within (Zucker 1987). The process of institutional engagement by social movements can thus be multidirectional, and to be successful it often involves sustained interaction (Lieberman 2002).

Social movements can be defined as informal networks based on common beliefs and solidarity, which mobilize on conflictual issues by frequent recurrence to various forms of protest (Della Porta et al 2006). Social movements share a number of characteristics. They engage in collective action towards change-oriented goals, and they share some degree of organization and temporal continuity. The involvement of social movements in collective action outside of and perhaps against the structures of institutions is what distinguishes social movements from other groups (Neveu 1996). Indeed, for Tarrow (2001), social movements are identified not by their goals, which they may share with other social actors, such as NGOs, but by the kind of actions in which they routinely engage, namely “contentious politics” (p. 11). This contention can take several forms, from protest to institutional engagement and/or disengagement, often involving a constantly reassessed combination of these strategies. While social movements may direct energy towards changing institutions by targeting a state government and its policies, they may challenge the legitimacy of a regime, or they may advocate for structural reorganization of the state. For Goodwin and Jaspers (2015), social movements can therefore be described as “a collective, organized, sustained, and non-institutional challenge to authorities, power-holders, or cultural beliefs and practices” (p. 3).

Much of the literature on the changing nature of social movements demonstrates how social actors have moved beyond traditional forms of social protest and organization and are now engaged in new ways of doing politics, and new ways of exploring and exposing power relationships (Escobar 1995). For example, Melucci (1998, 425) asserts that generating new cultural identities and meanings is an exercise in redefining power. He suggests that rather than believing that we can rid society of power, a key role of social movements is to reveal where that power lies by exposing the “non-transparency of political processes” thus making some forms of power “more visible and therefore more negotiable than others” (p. 426). The job of social movements then is to question and redefine “what counts as political”, where (in what spaces) politics occur and “who gets to define the rules of the game” (Alvarez et al 1998, 12). Sikkink (2002) writes, regarding transnational advocacy networks, that “the power to shape the agenda, or to shape the very manner in which issues are perc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Can the revolution be institutionalized?
• PART I: States, institutions and food sovereignty
• PART II: Power and politics – social movement challenges to institutionalizing food sovereignty
• PART III: Determining the rules of engagement – challenges within social movements
• Index