Global Activism in Food Politics

Power Shift

A. Mann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137341402
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sullo sviluppo globale

Who should provide food, and through what relationships? Whose livelihoods should be protected? For over 20 years the peasant farmers of La Via Campesina have been engaged in the fight against injustice, hunger and poverty under the banner of food sovereignty, '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'. They campaign for healthy, sustainable alternatives to an industrial food system controlled by agribusiness companies and the architects of unfair trade agreements. This book draws on grounded case studies of agrarian movements in the Americas and Europe as exemplars of a 'power shift, ' as local opposition scales up to global action in an effort to wrest control of our food away from transnational corporations and back to communities.

1

Introduction

A food system in crisis

‘Bread, dignity and social justice!’ chanted the crowds in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in February 2011. While the uprising in Egypt was the result of complex economic and political grievances, it is no accident that the first signs of the insurrection began at a grocery stand.

Without a food safety net, 80 per cent of the world’s population are immediately at risk of hunger when natural disaster, war or unemployment strikes (Sheeran, 2011). The age of cheap food, which never existed for some, is over. One out of seven people wakes up every morning without the certainty of a meal. Ironically, those who work in agriculture are the most affected (FAO, 2013). Even more ironic are the skyrocketing revenues of the agribusiness companies that dominate our industrialised food system. In the last quarter of 2007, while hunger riots broke out in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Haiti, Mexico, the Philippines and Mozambique, Archer Daniels Midland’s profit increased by 42 per cent, Monsanto’s by 45 per cent and Cargill’s by 86 per cent. Cargill subsidiary Mosaic Fertilizer increased its revenue by 1,200 per cent (Holt-Gimènez, 2009).

Since the 2008 food crisis, chronic droughts in Russia, the US and India and continued intense speculation in agricultural commodities have led to forecasts of further food price hikes, particularly in conflict zones, including the Arab region and Central Africa (Fan, 2012). According to José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this has immense implications for the survival of ‘the vulnerable and the poor’, who spend up to 75 per cent of their income on food (FAO, 2012a). While revised FAO reports have downgraded the official 2009 estimate of one billion hungry, approximately 870 million are already deprived of access to adequate food, in spite of the fact that sufficient food is being produced to feed more than twice the world’s population (FAO, 2009).

Described as ‘the world’s greatest solvable problem’ by the World Food Program (2012), hunger is largely a consequence of structural inequalities that persist due to what the former UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler (et al. 2011, p.333), has described as ‘schizophrenic’ global governance. While UN agencies promote the right to adequate food and nutrition through human rights frameworks, dominant economic institutions and governments promote marketdriven and technocratic solutions that have failed those in greatest need of them. Following the food price crisis of 2008, a flood of studies, with the notable exception of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD, 2009), recommended increased investment in biotechnology and a new Green Revolution, as opposed to improving access to productive resources and establishing equitable trade policies. The Washington Consensus, the dominant economic doctrine championed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the only route to prosperity and development, has not had the desired trickle-down effect in the countries where most of the poor live. Rather, the globalised food system provides a graphic illustration of how trade liberalisation has enabled international financial institutions and transnational corporations (TNCs) to limit the capacity of nation-states to manage their own economies. National governments have to strive for domestic prosperity within the context of a liberalised trade regime moulded and maintained by powerful economic interests. Geopolitical power blocs, such as trade agreements and supranational governing bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO), leave nation-states subject to the whim of the market’s power. Neoliberalism – characterised by strong private property rights, technological rationalism and free markets – has not, in fact, improved the lives of the poor. Free trade is failing to feed the world.

Civil society responds

In response to increasingly global socio-economic and environmental problems, transnational social movements have emerged as influential political actors. In their struggles against established orthodoxies such as free-trade multilateralism, ordinary people have been organising and developing innovative citizenship practices and new forms of public action. They are also adopting the institutional strategies of their more powerful and well-resourced opponents. These emergent repertoires of action have been accompanied by new ways of working with government and non-government organisations. In an era characterised by multiple crises of finance, food and climate, social movements are leading the way in challenging established agendas.

One such movement is the subject of this book. La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way) is a network of over 160 rural peoples’ organisations situated in approximately 80 countries in the Global North and South and claims to be the world’s largest social movement (Saragih, 2012). In 2013, La Via Campesina celebrated 20 years of campaigning for ‘food sovereignty’, defined as ‘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’ (Nyèlèni Declaration, 2007). The concept of food sovereignty challenges the dominance of agribusinesses and an unjust trade system, promoting an alternative system of small-scale, localised agriculture as a fairer solution to hunger, poverty and climate change.

This book traces how the concept of food sovereignty has been constructed not only as a new way of understanding the production, distribution and consumption of food but as a solution to multiple global crises stemming from the neoliberal project – a ‘political restructuring of capital’ on a global scale (McMichael, 2008). While conflicts stemming from acute food insecurity provide a political opportunity for social movements such as La Via Campesina to engage in policy networks and promote new understandings of hunger as a chronic problem, they have also enabled a reframing of the agrarian question to embrace a broader set of relations around rights, social reproduction and sustainability. Through this reframing, they are ‘opening a window on the social, demographic and ecological catastrophe of neoliberalism’ (McMichael, 2008, p.43). They are challenging the capitalist accumulation relation (Harvey, 2005) by revealing how the industrialisation of agriculture generates overproduction, depressed prices, casual labour and dispossession, with devastating consequences not just for the countryside but for all of society. In doing so, they are recentring agriculture as part of a larger project against the destructive imposition of market relations and commodification on every aspect of life.

To explain how La Via Campesina and its allies are enacting an ontological shift that revalues small-scale or peasant farming, this book takes a ground-up approach by focusing on the food sovereignty campaigns of grassroots actors. It responds to the following questions: What are the circumstances under which citizens mobilise? How do rural social movements, in particular, generate new values and understandings that resist unexamined assumptions about development? What factors influence the formulation of common agendas on local, national, regional and international scales? In responding to these questions this book describes the strategies and actions that Chilean, Mexican and Basque farmers’ movements have implemented in activism to bring about domestic political change and ‘periodic’ or ‘sustained’ international action (von Bülow, 2010a) though coalition building, the creation of political spaces for the formulation of joint initiatives (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). These coalitions may be ‘instrumental’ in aiming for achievement of a short-term goal (Tarrow, 2005), or become more enduring transnational alliances. In participating in La Via Campesina’s campaign for food sovereignty, these groups are executing the scale-shift to transnational collective action, a process through which ‘individuals, non-state groups, and/or organisations mobilise jointly around issues, goals and targets that link the domestic and international arenas’ (von Bülow, 2010a, p.5). This requires regular communication, coordination of tasks, allocation of resources and processes for collaborative decision-making. These organisational issues are integral to the search for ‘ideational pathways’ (von Bülow, 2010a) in the form of common agendas and collective action frames that can be communicated to wider publics including consumers, corporations and governments.

Why La Via Campesina?

La Via Campesina is representative of a dynamic mobilisation of transnational peoples’ movements resisting the accumulation, concentration and centralisation of capital through neoliberal policy at the expense of the social and ecological health of the planet. These movements are also protesting the foreclosure of alternative ways of working and living that are not based around economic self-interest driven by purely market relations. While the term ‘peasant’ is commonly associated with a resistance to progress or backwardness in the West, for members of La Via Campesina it speaks to ‘people of the land’ (Pimbert, 2009). The term represents recognition of and respect for rural lifestyles and sustainable livelihoods and a rejection of large-scale industrial agriculture. Within the broad range of alter-globalisation movements, La Via Campesina is exceptional for its membership of small-holder farmers, landless peasants, fisherfolk, and migrant and seasonal workers, who number over 1.2 billion globally (Saragih, 2012). Its resistance to representation by non-governmental organisations (NGO)s, its innovative alliance building and its insistence on setting the agenda subvert dominant understandings of transnational advocacy networks (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). As a grassroots movement, La Via Campesina is remarkable in the way it transgresses the borders between the Global North and South; food sovereignty encompasses the diverse concerns of small farmers from Maputo to Manitoba. Escalating threats are contributing to their shared identity and solidarity as the domination of the global food supply chain by transnational agribusiness monopolies is compounded by a new generation of ‘wicked problems’ (Levin et al., 2012). A ‘nutrition transition’ in emerging economies is fuelling obesity epidemics in countries such as Mexico, China and Brazil. Large-scale foreign investment or ‘land-grabbing’ for alternative food and energy sources is damaging the food security, incomes, livelihoods and environments of local people (High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, 2011). Food has never been more political.

What ‘power shift’?

This book argues that over the past 20 years La Via Campesina has not only become the major agricultural movement among the ‘alter-globalist’ groups that claim ‘another world is possible’ (OWINFS, 2013); it has also significantly reconfigured the power relations within global civil society and international food politics. A power shift can be identified on the operational level with the movement’s increasing direct engagement in formal policy-making processes, particularly in relatively hospitable arenas such as the FAO, alongside, rather than behind, NGOs. The second, profound shift is witnessed in the movement’s success in framing debates and placing food sovereignty on domestic, regional and international political agendas. In some cases, this has led to discursive commitments from state actors, and even policy and procedural change in the form of incorporation of the concept of food sovereignty in state constitutions. This is no mean feat in the light of the pervasive rhetoric that the self-regulating market will feed the world, which has dominated food and agriculture policy for decades.

International mobilisation in the form of activism across national boundaries has a long history. Transnational mobilisation implies ‘a newer manifestation of cultural, political and economic integration’ (De Vereaux & Griffin, 2006). The contemporary wave of transnational activism is distinct in its relationship to globalisation, the ‘increasing volume and speed of flows of capital and goods, information and ideas, people and forces that connect actors between countries’ (Keohane, 2002, p.194), and in its relation to the evolving structure of international politics that, in many cases, incentivises and triggers resistance (Tarrow, 2005). Comprised of ordinary people with wide-ranging concerns, today’s transnational social movements challenge the traditional divisions between domestic and international politics in campaigns that target globalisation and international political structures. For example, the global liberalisation of trade under the auspices of the WTO has provided major impetus to the cross-border organising of rural social movements in particular (Desmarais, 2002; Edelman, 2005). ‘Free’ trade has had destructive impacts on rural economies in countries from India to Peru through low-price exports, dumping practices and the corporate subsidy system (McMichael, 2008). Yet, while these impacts go a long way towards explaining the motivation for La Via Campesina members to unite in global campaigns, they do not fully explain the transnationalisation of the claims of independent members of the movement. Survey and analysis of the domestic food sovereignty campaigns conducted by farmers’ organisations in Chile, Mexico and the Spanish Basque Country demonstrates that the path to transnational organising is also driven by engagement in other national, regional and transnational networks in response to issues related to, but not restricted to, trade, such as gender equity, biodiversity and the preservation of cultural heritage.

The move to self-representation by social movements in international negotiations represents a power shift within the realm of civil society. La Via Campesina’s peasant farmers have denied their obsolescence by demonstrating resistance and resilience in organising to defend their communities, breaking from ‘the paternalistic embrace of well-intentioned NGOs’ (Desmarais, 2007, p.90). In doing so, they have achieved direct engagement with state governments, regional trade councils and supranational bodies such as the FAO. International NGOs engaged in the fight against hunger are frequently accused of co-option and deradicalisation though their dependence on funding by states and development agencies. Unelected and unaccountable to those they represent, these NGOs are vulnerable to the same lack of transparency and effectiveness that plagues global governing institutions, including the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. Alert to this, social movements such as La Via Campesina are choosing to carve out political spaces for claims-making independently of NGOs embedded in existing power structures, and are forging new alliances with co-operative, capacity-building partners in an effort to carry out transformative change in agriculture and food policy. The new, networked forms of political mobilisation practised by these groups make possible a scale-shift from local to national, regional and international public fora. In enacting this shift, social movement participants are expanding their repertoire of strategies, from communication through the media, in mass protests and in everyday, unstructured action, to lobbying and the formulation of formal policy instruments such as The Declaration of Peasant Rights – Women and Men (2009a).

The malleable discourse of food sovereignty drives the power shift by facilitating convergence between the diverse political agendas, campaign messages and strategic preferences of La Via Campesina members. As a broad framing device or ‘master frame’ (Snow & Benford, 1992), food sovereignty accommodates positions on land redistribution, the rights of women, resistance to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the defence of local economies. It facilitates the formation of a discourse coalition, ‘a group of actors that, in the context of an identifiable set of practices, shares the usage of a particular set of story lines over a particular period of time’ (Hajer, 2006, p.70). This approach describes politics as a process by which actors build coalitions around narratives through which they impose their own views of reality. It enables the analysis of strategic action in the context of socio-historical discourses, and explores how the representation of interests through global activism ‘illuminates how different actors and organisation practices help to reproduce or fight a given bias without necessarily orchestrating or coordinating their actions or without necessarily sharing deep values’ (p.71).

The political power of food sovereignty to a great extent lies in its ‘multi-interpretability’ (Hajer, 1995, p.61). The concept is transformative in the sense that it demands a new paradigm or shift in worldviews related to the politics of food. Through their activities, La Via Campesina members attempt to convince consumers and policy-makers that fundamentally unjust conditions have been imposed on peasant farmers for far too long and radical changes to the fundamental structure of the global food system are needed. This radical politicisation or reframing of agriculture and food production requires new values to be ‘planted and nurtured, old meanings or understandings jettisoned, and erroneous beliefs . . . reframed in order to garner support and secure participants’ (Snow et al., 1986, p.473).

The concept of food sovereignty provides an ideological bridge between the social and political grievances experienced by the Chilean, Mexican and Spanish Basque farmers’ movements featured in this book. Their campaigns are crafted to demonstrate the failure of domestic and international agricultural and development policies and the need for major changes in the status, treatment and activity of small-holder farmer communities locally and globally. These campaigns cannot be separated from the political, socio-economic and historical contexts that have triggered, constrained, shaped and influenced their pathways to national, regional and international stages. The case studies that appear in this book have been selected deliberately to highlight contrasts in processes of framing, alliance building and campaign strategising. Politically marginalised domestically, Chile’s National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women, La Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Rurales e Indígena (ANAMURI), leads local campaigns for the rights of seasonal workers and international campaigns for the protection of biodiversity through seed-saving and draws on pan-Andean and international women’s networks to rebuild human, social and symbolic capital. In the case of Mexico’s National Business Association of Rural Producers and Traders, Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo (ANEC), the formation of dense regional coalitions opposed to the NAFTA paves the way for participation in hemispheric cross-border alliances, while farmers and consumers alike campaign locally against the incursion of genetically modified maize and high food prices. Within the unique governmental framework of the European Union (EU), Basque Farmers’ Union Euskal Herriko Nekazarien Elkartasuna (EHNE) engages in joint global campaigns with international NGOs and other peoples’ movements in opposition to GMOs as part of its defence of local culture, heritage and biodiversity, while linking with consumer organisations in direct-selling relationships that rebuild rural–urban linkages. In sum, different articulations of the food sovereignty frame appear in the issue-specific, action-oriented local campaigns of these La Via Campesina members. They share the aim of increasing the visibility and salience of domestic issues across international borders while remaining embedded in local experience and culture. This balancing of the autonomy of members with international co-operation and collective action is a constant challenge for any global social movement. In seeking to aggregate and represent a plurality of interests, La Via Campesina is ‘an evolving “arena of action”, where a movement’s basic identity and strategy may be contested and (re)negotiated over time’ (Borras, 2008b, p.261).

This dynamic, pluralist character makes La Via Campesina a challenging object of study. In this book, a variety of frameworks are applied in a detailed analysis of the communication campaigns of grassroots rural social movement organisations, and their engagement in wider regional and international campaigns as part of La Via Campesina. A discursive approach is applied in the analysis of data gathered from semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted over five months between June 2009 and July 2011, in field sites including the headquarters of La Via Campesina members in Santiago (Chile), Mexico City (Mexico), Durango and Madrid (Spain) and at the headquarters of Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN) International in Heidelberg (Germany). The data collected have been triangulated with textual sources, including campaign collateral, press releases, newsletters, speeches, calls to action, message posts, meeting minutes, professional journals, newspaper inserts, website pages and quantitative data drawn from indices of social and political development, including Freedom House, Eurobarometer and Latinobarometer.

The goal of this book is to shed light on the set of decisions made by social movement organisations in articulating their local realities in both domestic and international campaigns. Why were these decisions taken? How were they implemented? What was the result? In seeking to provide a richly detailed or ‘thick’ description of the campaigns and relationships between members within each movement, this largely qualitative study draws on a multi-method, discursive approach that applies network concepts and frame analysis. The triangulation of collected data illuminates a set of social movement processes that enable La Via Campesina to operationalise the power shift from grassroots to global influence described in this book.

Underpinning the use of this methodological approach is the belief that cultural change can be mapped through changes in discourse, which can be defined as ‘a shared set of concepts, vocabulary, terms of reference, evaluations, associations, polarities and standards of argument connected to a coherent perspective on the world’...