Food Sovereignty in International Context

Discourse, politics and practice of place

Amy Trauger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138790087
• eBook ISBN: 9781317654247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Food sovereignty is an emerging discourse of empowerment and autonomy in the food system with the development of associated practices in rural and some urban spaces. While literature on food sovereignty has proliferated since the first usage of the term in 1996 at the Rome Food Summit, most has been descriptive rather than explanatory in nature, and often confuses food sovereignty with other movements and objectives such as alternative food networks, food justice, or food self-sufficiency.

This book is a collection of empirically rich and theoretically engaged papers across a broad geographical spectrum reflecting on what constitutes the politics and practices of food sovereignty. They contribute to a theoretical gap in the food sovereignty literature as well as a relative shortage of empirical work on food sovereignty in the global "North", much previous work having focussed on Latin America. Specific case studies are included from Canada, Norway, Switzerland, southern Europe, UK and USA, as well as Africa, India and Ecuador.

The book presents new research on the emergence of food sovereignties. It offers a wide variety of empirical examples and a theoretically engaged framework for explaining the aims of actors and organizations working toward autonomy and democracy in the food system.

1 Putting food sovereignty in place

Amy Trauger

Introduction

The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, Article 25(1), asserts that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing‘” In spite of this, an estimated 870 million people do not have enough food to meet their needs and suffer from chronic undernourishment (UNFAO 2013). The vast majority of people suffering from hunger and hunger-related causes live in the least developed countries, and the majority of people suffering from hunger in either the global North or South live in poverty. Many of those in the global South are landless former peasants or farmers struggling to live off the exports of commodities to the global North. Food sovereignty is an emergent discourse and politics that engages directly with the failure of food security measures to address hunger. It is also a narrative that supports the subverting of the neoliberal agricultural systems which ultimately work to immiserate farmers.

The concept of food sovereignty has gained a surprising amount of traction in a political struggle for progressive reform in the food system in the past decade (Edelman 2014). It has been widely adopted in a variety of places and contexts, and while effective in mobilizing change, it is broad in its scope and ambition (Clapp 2012). Food sovereignty was developed conceptually in a Latin America context, and was publicly unveiled at the Rome World Food Conference in the NGO Response to the Rome Declaration on World Food Security (NGO Response, 1996). This declaration articulated food sovereignty as the right of nations to determine their food systems and policies. It included a six-point plan for ending hunger and articulated the conditions under which food security might be achievable by and for nations. The plan to achieve food sovereignty outlines cultural projects, political agendas, ecological objectives of decreasing the environmental impacts of agriculture, and economic goals all geared toward transforming the political economies of agriculture wherever food is produced. At its core, food sovereignty demands rights for food producers (who are also consumers) to have more decision-making authority in the food system.

The failures of food security and other state-based policies to guarantee the right to food drive the radical reforms called for by food sovereignty to end hunger and secure sustainable livelihoods for small-scale farmers. Food sovereignty narratives claim that modern notions of property rights and global capitalist markets are the source of the problems in the food system, and identify control of production and distribution of food as key to achieving food security. These narratives are clear that reform in the food system requires rethinking the neoliberal market as a mechanism for state-based food security initiatives, and implicates the state for its policies that marginalize small-scale farmers in the interests of capital. The calls for radical solutions however, do not adequately engage with the problems that the modern liberal state presents for food sovereignty. Furthermore, the demands for rights beg questions about the nature of territorial power and the way appeals for rights might function in the juridical structures of the liberal state. Working through these tensions requires an understanding of how food sovereignty works in relationship to place and power.

This book aims to explore what it means politically, economically and socially to secure a space of autonomy for producers and consumers to exchange food. The implications of food sovereignty for states, markets and civil society are potentially troubling, divergent and unique to the aims of food sovereignty. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the geographical challenges and opportunities for actors who are seeking radical solutions to the problems of food provisioning. While this book includes examples from a variety of sites in the core and the periphery, its contributions are largely toward understanding the dynamics of food sovereignty in the global North. Troubling the distinctions between the North and South is part of the political project of food sovereignty, but it is important to note that this book is not about La Via Campesina or agrarian struggles happening in the places from which food sovereignty emerged (Edelman 2014). It is about the translation of a global narrative of autonomy in the food system to a variety of spaces and places in which struggles for power and control in the food system are happening.

In this chapter I introduce the idea of food sovereignty, its basic principles and develop a rough sketch of its history. I then present in conceptual form the challenges of place and space that are presented to food sovereignty in its struggle with state and market for autonomy. In so doing, I aim to illustrate the ideas about food sovereignty that frame this engagement and which are drawn from the Nyéléni Declaration of 2007. The Nyéléni Declaration is a key discursive foundation for the proliferation of food sovereignty practice and politics in a variety of places. There is much to unpack in the Nyéléni documents, and scholars of food sovereignty have done so in a variety of fora, including the one from which many of the chapters in this volume are drawn. The chapters from Kurtz and also Desmarais and Wittman were first presented at the Yale Conference on Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue in 2013. Versions of the remaining chapters were presented at the 2013 Congress of the European Society of Rural Sociology in a session on food sovereignty organized by the editor of this volume.

Food sovereignty histories

Many food sovereignty scholars identify the enclosure acts in Great Britain in the 1700s and 1800s that privatized common lands and forced thousands of peasants off the land and into factories as a pivotal moment in the modernization of agriculture (Dawson 2010). This spatial shift in land ownership facilitated and paralleled the transition from agrarian, feudal (or otherwise “traditional”) societies toward an urbanized, rationalized capitalist society structured by the biopolitical nation-state and its functions as an economic entity (Foucault 1978, Habermas 1987). Scientific rationality informed the modernist development agenda, which suggested that according to Harvey (1990, 12) “scientific domination of nature promised freedom from scarcity, want and the arbitrariness of natural calamity.” The modernist assumptions about the separation of nature and society also normalized new allegiances to the state and its guarantee of food security through innovations in agricultural science (Russell 1966).

Since the end of World War II, agricultural production in nearly every part of the world has transitioned to some degree to a modernist agricultural system characterized by a vertically-integrated market (versus subsistence) economy of food (Friedmann 1993). Decision-making power about some of the most fundamental aspects of life—land, seed and food supplies—is now concentrated in the hands of national states, supranational organizations and transnational corporations (Goodman and Watts 1997). The commodification of food, in the second food regime (Friedmann and McMichael 1989) resulted in the vertical integration and the concentration of power in a few very large firms with national governments increasingly tailoring food regulation to the demands of agribusiness. Social movements, like those that give rise to food sovereignty, signal discontent with the policy status quo, and politically contest the governance of food and agricultural production (McMichael 2009).

According to food sovereignty scholars, the appearance of these radical narratives is often thought of as a response to “crises” in the global economic system and the socio-ecological systems that support and sustain peasant agriculture (Rosset 2008). These crises are the product of a political-economic system that is characterized by power asymmetries in the food system that benefit global capital. National state governments and supranational organizations work together, largely through territorial-state policies, such as structural adjustment programs, to enroll small-scale producers in the global market economy (Patel and McMichael 2009). In these narratives, neo-colonial processes normalize modernist development paths to engage as many people as possible in urban/industrial sectors, accumulate through dispossession, and facilitate the capitalist transformation of the countryside (Bello 2009, Pimbert 2009). This process impoverished millions through removing them from the land and into wage-labor relations in the global economy. It also led to state-based food security programs to provide food to people made hungry by this restructuring.

State-run food security programs, premised on the normative notion that people should have access to safe, adequate and appropriate food, emerged with the development of the welfare state in the 1960s, primarily in the global North. In the US, food security policies emerged as a response to both the overproduction of commodities and widespread poverty during the Great Depression (Allen 1999). This model has since expanded to many more states, particularly during the Cold-War era. The technological changes brought to bear on agriculture via the Green Revolution were justified by mitigating food insecurity (Morvaridi 2012). The development of policies that employ market mechanisms to distribute food to the poor are consistent with neoliberal notions of the subject which position the individual as responsible for nutritional intake via purchasing food or receiving it as food aid (Barrett 2002). Subsidies for commodities produced in the developed world also produce surplus to be used as a tool of foreign policy and artificially suppress food prices to facilitate growth and profit in other economic sectors (Selowsky 1981).

Food security, through its market mechanisms, the (over)production of global commodities and the territorial state-based policies that promote them contributed to dependency on the modernist industrial model of agriculture. These policies undermined the livelihoods of small-holders globally and generated new inequities and disconnections between producers and consumers. The state, through its policy mechanisms on food security or food safety, is a vehicle for promoting and continuing certain agricultural practices. These practices nearly always work to the benefit of the transnational corporations (TNCs) who have strategic advantages in commoditized, industrialized agriculture, and neoliberal state-based policies support TNCs over producers or consumers. Corporate rights, the right of the liberal state to govern and the primacy of private property all support this regime of truth, rights and power in favor of capital.

Food sovereignty narratives challenge the hegemony of transnational capital in the food system. While scholars disagree on the relationship of food security to food sovereignty (Edelman 2014, Patel 2009, Schanbacher 2010), in the 1996 NGO statement, food sovereignty is positioned as a prerequisite to achieving food security. Article 6 states that “International law must guarantee the right to food, ensuring that food sovereignty takes precedence over macro-economic policies and trade liberalization.” Point 6.1 declares that “each nation must have the right to achieve the level of food sufficiency and nutritional quality it considers appropriate without suffering retaliation of any kind‘” Point 6.2 asserts that “all countries and peoples have the right to develop their own agriculture. Agriculture fulfills multiple functions, all essential to achieving food security.” While the meaning of food security that is used here can be debated, food sovereignty narratives articulate that food not be considered a commodity, and that the political rights to govern production and distribution be returned to producers and consumers in the interests of achieving food security.

This first definition of food sovereignty was subsequently elaborated on in various meetings of NGOs and civil society organizations at various meetings. These include the Foro Mundial in 2001 and the meeting in Selengue, Mali in 2007 and a meeting of La Via Campesina in 2012. The Nyéléni Declaration articulates the most frequently invoked definition of food sovereignty, which is

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.

Agarwal (2014) notes that the emphasis on “peoples” is significant in that it positions food sovereignty as all encompassing, embracing everyone in the food chain as a potentially powerful actor. This big-tent vision, however, contains some potentially damning contradictions. Patel (2009) and Agarwal (2014) and others have elaborated on these at length, such as the tension between individual and collective rights and tensions between national and local food self-sufficiency. These tensions have yet to be resolved and are often worked out “on the ground” in food sovereignty practice. The focus on “peoples” is not just a semantic move to make food sovereignty feel inclusive; it indicates a focus on collective action to assert and maintain political autonomy at multiple scales.

The Nyéléni Declaration was a key moment in transnational organizing for food sovereignty as it brought together a select group of 500 delegates from a variety of organizations in 80 different countries to specifically address how to craft an international agenda for resistance and to assert political autonomy at a local level. In the Nyéléni definition of food sovereignty, the interests and rights of producers, distributors and consumers are privileged, as is the ability of “local communities” to determine their food systems to mitigate hunger in all its forms. It also includes a “right to food security,” the transformation of social relationships, particularly between genders and races and the “sharing of productive resources” free from threats of “expulsion and privatization” (Nyéléni 2007, 13). This definition has a lot for scholars to wrestle with, but I interpret it as a questioning of the modernist project, or what the Nyéléni documents identify as the “whole fabric of global economics and society” (2007, 17).

The political-economic context of food sovereignty’s emergence

According to Holt-Gimenez and Shattuck (2013), food sovereignty is a “radical” response to food system failures to provide food security. They posit that foods sovereignty differs from what they call the “progressive” alternatives such as organic agriculture, in partial but significant ways. The most significant differences they cite are the resistance to corporate power and privatization, and collective access to and use of capital. They caution that the radical nature of food sovereignty’s political position is threatened by mission creep if food systems actors make concessions to states and markets around key elements of organizing. 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 facilitated by both states and markets. In the past, policy reforms that favor transnational capital have worked to blunt the edge of social movements to change the neoliberal, modernist parad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Food, Society and Environment
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Putting food sovereignty in place
• I Discourse
• II Politics
• III Practice
• Index