Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138062627
• eBook ISBN: 9781351665513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective.

The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.

Chapters 1 and 24 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

Introduction

The food commons are coming …

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter and Ugo Mattei

Seeing with new eyes

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, only one vision has become hegemonic worldwide. The marginalization of any alternative to the single thought, also known as the end of history (Fukuyama, 1989; IUC, 2009), has quickly generated what is known as neoliberalism, the new form of hybridization between public sovereignty and private corporations that has come to dominate contemporary structures of global governance (Harvey, 2007). This arrangement, with a crucial role for the military industrial complex, has not only produced new forms of world disorders. It has also disrupted the fundamental understanding of modernity, that of a neat distinction between a public and a private sector. The new hybrid corporate power, the current form of capital accumulation, now runs the world within a logic of global sovereignty that defeats every form of democratic control. Every single aspect of human life has been attracted within this bio-political machinery so that the very human being is now commodified like every other aspect of nature. The most tangible manifestation of this process is in the domain of two of the fundamental building blocks of human life: water and food. These two essential components of life are now almost entirely transformed into commodities, leading to forms of domination and subordination that are difficult to overestimate. The consequences of the current extractive system are so deep as to produce a new geological era, the so-called Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2006; Purdy, 2015) or Capitalocene (Moore, 2017), which is likely to destroy the very conditions of life and human civilization (Brown, 2008; Capra and Mattei, 2015).

It is as a reaction to the massive abuses visited upon nature and community by the imperatives of reproduction of the dominant structure of power that the commons have re-emerged. This notion has the ambition to ground a counter-narrative and a political and institutional organization capable of shifting our pattern of development from an extractive and individual into a generative and collective mode. It is not, however, a new notion, as the commons have long constituted one way to organize and govern the relationship between society and nature resources (Sahlins, 1972; Mauss, 2002; De Moor, 2011; Ferrando and Vivero-Pol, 2017). The re-birth of the commons as an alternative, generative vision against neoliberal corporate plunder started with two heroic battles in the Global South. One emerged in 1994 in Chiapas (Mexico) with the Movimiento Zapatista as a reaction to the entry of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into force. It was ignited by the impossibility for local farmers to ­survive with dignity in the global corporate food system (in its broader sense). The other arose in Cochabamba (Bolivia) in 2001, triggered by the need to defend water against corporate privatization by an American company with the support of the national government. In both cases, the commons were invoked to defend local communities against governments transformed into cronies of global corporate interests. Food and water, components of our very physical existence, have therefore been at the origins of the re-birth of the commons as a strategy of defence and (hopefully) of transformation: defence against ongoing commodification of commons still owned or governed collectively, and transformation to re-invent or design de novo forms to use, steward and share resources important for the community outside the market and state logic. Interestingly, however, while the notion of water as a commons is now widely recognized and has grounded many battles even in the Global North (Barlow and Clarke, 2017; Bieler, 2017), food as a commons has not been a conscious target of political battles and civic claims (Ferrando, 2016); indeed, it has not even been a paradigm of research (Vivero-Pol, 2017a).

Yet, we believe food can also be valued and governed as a commons and that approaching it under this intellectual framework offers important insights into a possible alternative vision coherent with the needs of reproduction of life rather than of capital. This book aims to open that discussion in the belief that we can obtain for food at least some of the (though partial) successes that we have been able to obtain with water.

Valuing food as a commodity is at odds with human history

Capitalism has been thriving and reproducing a troublesome relationship with food and food systems. The contemporary food regime of corporations and financial investors is such that while many eat poorly and badly, others have access to all the food they desire: purchasing power is what separates the two. Moreover, industrial production and global distribution of food are major driving forces in pushing the environment beyond its planetary and ecological boundaries, mortgaging the livelihood of future generations. This scenario is characterized by extreme inequality and power imbalances. At its centre is the idea that food is an object for sale (a commodity) and the food system is nothing but an opportunity to extract private value. In such a context, achieving the universal right to adequate food (a legal entitlement), food and nutrition security (a global public good) or food justice and food sovereignty inevitably appears a long-term vision at best, a utopian goal at worst. It is therefore essential to broaden political imagination: to explore and practice alternative paradigms of food and visions of food systems capable of overcoming the normative, technical, political lock-ins the industrial food system has created (IPES-Food, 2016). The paradigm of food as a commons, as a way to value food and to govern its production and allocation, will unlock our imagination, encouraging us to design other types of policies and legal frameworks for the food system that have been so far disallowed because they were not aligned to the dominant narratives of capitalism (Wright, 2013).

The aim of this book is to investigate the multiple enclosures at the basis of the dominant industrial food regime and to explore how such enclosures could be challenged by re-describing and re-conceptualizing food as a commons. As in many other areas of people’s livelihoods, enclosures, plunder and exclusions have occurred through legislation, pricing, patents, discourses and public violence (Mattei and Nader, 2008). As a consequence, the opportunities for the production, transformation and consumption of food as a commons have been marginalized and repressed. The social construction of food as a commodity, in fact, denies its non-economic attributes (as vital fuel for our bodies, as a human right, as a product of Nature, or as an element of our culture) in favour of an exclusive focus on its tradable features, such as its external appearance and packaging, taste, or shelf-life, but first and foremost, its price and calorie content. Inevitably, this leads to neglect social and relational properties of food, alongside an emphasis on cheap calories and the dismissal of the ecological role of food systems in stewarding biodiversity and nature’s inherent connection with society and the organization of the economy (Díaz et al., 2018; Moore, 2017).

From the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 18th century to the present day, capitalist thinking and its practices have increasingly transformed food – an essential element of life – into a private, mono-dimensional commodity for mass consumption in a globalized market. Over the last decade, however, there has been an increased recognition that this view of food as a commodity, as a social construct, can be challenged. Food can be re-conceptualized differently: it can be valued and governed as a commons, and it is constructed as such in a range of initiatives in all world regions.

A subversion of the food paradigm that sustains the current mainstream food system, when it happens, will shed light on the conflict between the hegemonic economic epistemology (an epistemology in which the commons lead to the “tragedy” of overexploitation, and in which private property and allocation through market mechanisms predominate) and the non-dominant alternatives (political, historical, legal and radical–activist approaches to the commons), which have been gaining legitimacy in recent decades.

The framing of food as a commodity, the production of which responds to price signals and the allocation of which depends on purchasing power, is increasingly being challenged. Alternative framings have been proposed, often implicitly, by a range of grassroots movements and customary indigenous traditions all over the world. Small-scale farmers, peasants and fisherfolk, farmworkers, conscious eaters and regulators, food security activists, academics and human rights advocates, among others, are developing alternative food paradigms in multiple loci (urban and rural areas in the Global South and North) by defending the public nature of many food-producing resources such as seeds, water, land and agricultural knowledge. The de-commodification and commoning of food (and of the whole food system as the broader objective) will open up a transition towards a plurality of new food regimes. As a result, features other than exchange value shall be given greater recognition: food, under these competing paradigms, is re-conceptualized as essential to the satisfaction of a human need (nutrition + culture + community), with justice, democracy and the inherent recognition of the ecological limits and moral obligations as pivotal elements. Food systems will emerge in various forms, and the individual freedom to extract nature and maximize profits will be deemed incompatible with the common good of people and the planet (Patel and Moore, 2018).

This book aims to enrich the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, niches of resistance (transition towns, food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, commons) and organizational scales (local food systems and national policies, South–South collaborations and international governance and agreements). It asks two questions: What would food policies look like, once we shift to the paradigm of food as a commons? And how do we get there?

The thriving commons as a civic counter-movement to the global food crises

The commons are back … if they were ever gone. The multiple crises the world has faced in the last decades have prompted scholars, policy makers and activists to seek solutions that enable us to live a satisfying, fair and sustainable life within planetary boundaries. The reappearance of the commons represents a promising transformative pathway to replace the neoliberal model. Historically, the commons have been associated with a record of resilience, collective governance and sustainability. They provide an inspirational narrative based on solid moral grounds. Commons thinking offers a counter-claim to the idea that society is and should be composed of atomized individuals, acting as rational agents seeking to maximize their individual utility and competing against other individuals in order to thrive as a separate individual rather than as a member of an ecological collectivity.¹ However, the narrative of the commons was marginalized in the 20th century by the ascent of possessive individualism (Macpherson, 1971), rational choice (Schelling, 1984), the diffusion of the individualistic ethos and domination proper of colonialism, the objectification of nature, social Darwinism (Leonard, 2009) and the famous fable of the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Unlike these, the commons discourse recognizes that people shall live their lives as aware individuals deeply embedded in, and not acting against, social relationships and the environment. Moreover, individuals’ active participation is essential to realizing collective and personal goals, moving away from a purely individual rights-based, market-based and private-property worldview.

From a historical perspective, treating food as a pure commodity devoid of other important dimensions is an anomaly. For centuries, food was cultivated in common and considered a mythological or sacred item; it was allocated according to need, rather than on the basis of the ability to pay. In different times and geographies, food shaped civilizations and socio-economic transformations. Often, it was considered so important in terms of culture, religion and survival that its production and distribution were governed by non-market rules; production, distribution and consumption were collective activities, done in common rather than alone or within the nuclear family (Diamond, 1997; Fraser and Rimas, 2011; Montanori, 2006). Food-producing commons were ubiquitous in the world, and history records are full of commons-based food production systems ranging from the early Babylonian Empire (Renger, 1995), ancient India (Gopal, 1961), the Roman Empire (Jones, 1986), Medieval Europe (Linebaugh, 2008) and early modern Japan (Brown, 2011). Food was considered a commons as well as a public tool, with diverse and certainly evolving proprietary schemes ranging from a private good given for free to idle Temple priests, a resource levied by kings and feudal lords as well as a public tool used by Roman emperors, Mayan dignitaries and the British government to prevent disturbances and appease the revolting crowds (Jones, 1986; Schuftan, 2015; Kent, 2015). Food always carried many dimensions, and, except in recent history, it was never reduced to a tradeable priced good.

However, in the Western context, the idea of the commons was gradually abandoned: the enclosures movement, which started in England in the 16th century, and the abolition of the poor laws by the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 symbolize this shift (Polanyi, [1944] 2001). The commons re-entered the political and social agenda only in the 1980s, as a counter-movement to – as society’s self-defense against – the commodification process that acceler...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Co-Writers
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Rebranding food and alternative narratives of transition
• PART II Exploring the multiple dimensions of food
• PART III Food-related elements considered as commons
• PART IV Commoning from below: Current examples of commons-based food systems
• PART V Dialogue of alternative narratives of transition
• PART VI Conclusions
• Index