Nora McKeon - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Nora McKeon
CC-BY-SA Strategy that all people need to benefit from a just transition, we insist that social i... more CC-BY-SA Strategy that all people need to benefit from a just transition, we insist that social inequalities within territories must be taken into consideration. Recognizing these important contributions, we have a number of specific concerns about the F2F Strategy. Production Ensuring sustainable food production means concrete changes in business as usual. However, the F2F Strategy does not address the causes of our current challenges in sustainable and structural ways. The F2F Strategy fails to recognize that there are various food systems and production models in Europe and that issues such as pesticide and antimicrobial use, excess fertilization, biodiversity loss, labour exploitation, and unhealthy diets promotion are essentially linked to the industrial food system. This lack of recognition restricts the ability of the F2F Strategy to adequately support small-scale producers and peasant agriculture. Instead, the F2F Strategy highlights precision farming and the digital transformation of farms, with an active role for the financial sector, rather than public policies. This can lead to further promotion of farm concentration and accelerate the disappearance of small-scale farmers that are the core of agroecology and a sustainable food systems approach. In this regard, we note that post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) National Strategic Plans will play a central role in achieving the goals of the F2F Strategy. While the Commission's CAP reform proposal has been deemed compatible with the Green Deal and the F2F Strategy4, we call on the EC to take the necessary legal, financial and practical measures to ensure there is full alignment between the F2F Strategy and the future CAP. Agroecology The F2F Strategy fails to recognize the role of agroecology in European food systems and its potential. In the F2F Strategy, agroecology is defined in a limited way, despite the ample recognition by farmers, social movements and international organisations of its key role in integrating ecological principles into the design and management of agricultural systems. While we are pleased to see a focus on new knowledge and innovations to scale up agroecological approaches in primary production, this should not be used to delay action. While more research is always valuable, there is already a wealth of peer-reviewed science about agroecology which provides evidence for immediate action. 5,6 From this perspective, gene editing remains a false solution that should not be pursued-not only in light of the judgment of the EU Court of Justice, 7 but as a matter of avoiding further privatization of food systems. With regards to sustainable food production, and in the context of the current crises, more ambitious targets are needed to promote ecological practices that increase biodiversity and soil fertility, reduce erosion and contamination of soils, water and air, support adaptation to climate change and decrease energy consumption. The F2F Strategy highlights and recognizes the potential of organic farming, especially in relation to opportunities for youth, but fails to adequately define organic agriculture. It also fails to pay enough attention to farm renewal, access to land and extensive livestock farming.
Development, 2021
This article helps lay a basis for the kind of deep analysis of the stakes of global food governa... more This article helps lay a basis for the kind of deep analysis of the stakes of global food governance that is required today, under the impact of the COVID 19 crisis and with the threat of corporate capture of decision-making spaces. The article reviews the history of global food governance, identifies the critical questions that need to be asked, and suggests some directions that may contribute to strengthening the agency of rights-holders, weakening that of corporations, and democratizing multilateral governance.
However, the solutions being put forward by the FSS to address these problems are predominantly n... more However, the solutions being put forward by the FSS to address these problems are predominantly new extensions of old approaches, cloaked in rhetoric of “innovation.” Since the proposed solutions are silent on the underlying drivers of the aforementioned crises, they are unlikely to address the root causes of food insecurity: systemic inequality, concentrated power, and governance that works for corporations and elites rather than to support workers and ecological integrity. Indeed, FSS solutions are very likely to backfire. Innumerable examples exist of large-scale agricultural investment schemes which were touted as “transformative” yet which delivered ecological and social harm instead, from the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) of Tanzania1 to commercial shrimp operations in Bangladesh,2 among many others.
Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, 2016
UNRISD welcomes such applications. The designations employed in UNRISD publications, which are in... more UNRISD welcomes such applications. The designations employed in UNRISD publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practice, and the presentation of material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNRISD concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The responsibility for opinions expressed rests solely with the author(s), and publication does not constitute endorsement by UNRISD.
Development, 2021
African food systems are a rich and varied tapestry of production systems, crops, seed, territori... more African food systems are a rich and varied tapestry of production systems, crops, seed, territorial markets, cultures, biodiversity and ecologies. As the UN Food Systems Summit worked to retrench the many pathologies that have systematically eroded African food systems, African civil society organizations mobilized to push back. In the African regional people's countermobilization, participatory dialogues opened space for continent-wide articulations of a future built on peoples' choices and control of natural resources, territorially-embedded solutions, the human rights of all, family farming, and peasant agroecology.
Development, 2021
In this editorial, we use the term 'food system' to encompass the entire range of actors and thei... more In this editorial, we use the term 'food system' to encompass the entire range of actors and their interlinked activities involved in the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal of food products that originate from agriculture, forestry, or fisheries, and parts of the broader economic, societal and natural environments in which they are embedded (FAO 2014). We use 'the global food system' to refer to the current hegemonic order. This food system, which McMichael (2009) refers to as the 'corporate food regime', emerged out of the global economic shocks of the 1970s and 1980s ushering in the current period of neoliberal capitalist expansion. It is characterized by unprecedented market power of monopoly agrifood corporations and finance capital, globalized ani
Sustainability, 2021
The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural... more The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural weaknesses and inequalities embedded in the global industrial agri-food system. While the mainstream narrative continues to emphasise the importance of ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of global supply chains to counter COVID-related disruptions, the pandemic has also highlighted the resilience of small-scale, sustainable family farming and of spatially and socially embedded food systems. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three surveys, this study examines organic and agroecological farmers’ responses to the first COVID-related lockdown (March–May 2020) in Italy, as well as the responses of grassroots alternative food networks (AFN) in the city region of Rome. The results show how local grassroots action played a significant role in ensuring food access, provisioning, and distribution, often in the face of delayed or insufficient action of mainstream food system ...
Globalizations, 2020
This Special Forum is based on a collective dialogue between place-based struggles to defend righ... more This Special Forum is based on a collective dialogue between place-based struggles to defend rights and territories and the dynamics of global trends. Behind apparently fragmented battles we see an emerging common vision, like a mosaic composed of separate tiles, building towards emancipation and justice. Based on discussions in a workshop in Siena in November 2018, the Forum assembles some pieces of the mosaic through five thematic articles crafted in exchanges between social movement, academic and civil society activists. In this Introduction we review other current convergence efforts looking at two related dimensions: sharing ideas and analysis in order to develop a common understanding of global evolutions, and bringing people together to take transformative action by building shared spaces, alliances, campaigns and solidarity. We then situate the Siena workshop and the People's Sovereignty process that has grown from it in this broader context. Finally, we introduce the five articles.
Globalizations, 2020
All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was not... more All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was nothing more than a commodity, a mere 'factor' of production that can be exploited to generate financial returns. Movements and activists are organizing, resisting, protecting and promoting life-giving visions against this continuous enclosure of living beings and paces: they use their bodies, laws, educational projects, histories and visions to regain control over territory as a political space, self-determine and create solidarities. In the act resistance, they are the target of moral, physical and legal violence. They and their ideas are criminalized, disciplined, punished and in some cases exterminated. In this contribution, activists from the Basque Country, Guatemala, Kenya and the Six Nations and a group of academics get together to learn from each other, support the ongoing search for common vocabularies and identify possible milestones of a coordinated and international strategy for a lifeenhancing future.
UN Chronicle, 2012
The UN Chronicle has evolved over the past years into an increasingly attentive and inclusive jou... more The UN Chronicle has evolved over the past years into an increasingly attentive and inclusive journal. The focus of each number on a specific issue, like climate change or disarmament, makes it possible to examine these questions from a variety of viewpoints. Its contributors testify to its broad geographic outlook. Recent issues have featured articles by academics, UN officials, government representatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and recently, the fanciful innovation of testimony by novelists. What are largely missing, however, are the voices from peoples organizations directly representing those sectors of the population most affected by the issues under discussion.
1. Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives Section One: Theorizing Land Grabbi... more 1. Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives Section One: Theorizing Land Grabbing, Globalization and Governance 2. Land Grabs Today: Feeding the Disassembling of National Territory 3. Land Grabbing as Security Mercantilism in International Relations 4. Governing the Global Land Grab: Multipolarity, Ideas, and Complexity in Transnational Governance Section Two: Transnational Actors and Emerging Global Land Governance 5. The Governance of Gulf Agro-Investments 6. 'One Does Not Sell the Land Upon Which the People Walk': Land Grabbing, Transnational Rural Social Movements, and Global Governance 7. International Human Rights and Governing Land Grabbing: A View from Global Civil Society 8. Certification Schemes and the Governance of Land: Enforcing Standards or Enabling Scrutiny? 9. The Challenge of Global Governance of Land Grabbing: Changing International Agricultural Context and Competing Political Views and Strategies Section Three: Review of Recent Global Land Governance Instruments 10. The FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests 11. The Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investment 12. The Minimum Human Rights Principles Applicable to Large-Scale Land Acquisitions or Leases 13. Private Governance and Land Grabbing: The Equator Principles and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels 14. Restrictions to Foreign Acquisitions of Agricultural Land in Argentina and Brazil
Globalizations, 2018
Today's 'irregular migration' from Sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in decades of policies which ... more Today's 'irregular migration' from Sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in decades of policies which have impoverished rural economies and dispossessed smallscale producers to make room for export-oriented monocultures. Under pressure from opportunistic xenophobic political configurations the EU is reacting by seeking to block the unwanted flow of African migrants in their home countries through measures denounced by European civil society organizations. Its long-term recipe for 'addressing the root causes of migration' involves using EU cooperation funds to leverage resources from private investors 'looking for new investment opportunities in emerging markets', thereby promoting the same model of agricultural production and global value chains that has sparked today's migration waves. An absent voice in the debate is that of the rural organizations in the territories from which the migrants originate. This paper seeks to reframe the issues from the viewpoint of these social constituencies, to recuperate their popular history of the evolutions that have transformed a portion of rural mobility into Europe-bound irregular migration, to map relevant contemporary rural transformations and the complexities of relations they engender, and to highlight initiatives underway today to build options of dignified and remunerative rural livelihoods for young people. Setting the West Africa-Europe nexus in the context of global processes of migration governance, this paper explores the opportunities for counter-hegemonic strategizing that EU internal policy contradictions open up and suggests how convergences might be promoted among actors and spaces that are currently inadequately connected with a view to defending both the right to migrate and the right to choose to stay at home.
CC-BY-SA Strategy that all people need to benefit from a just transition, we insist that social i... more CC-BY-SA Strategy that all people need to benefit from a just transition, we insist that social inequalities within territories must be taken into consideration. Recognizing these important contributions, we have a number of specific concerns about the F2F Strategy. Production Ensuring sustainable food production means concrete changes in business as usual. However, the F2F Strategy does not address the causes of our current challenges in sustainable and structural ways. The F2F Strategy fails to recognize that there are various food systems and production models in Europe and that issues such as pesticide and antimicrobial use, excess fertilization, biodiversity loss, labour exploitation, and unhealthy diets promotion are essentially linked to the industrial food system. This lack of recognition restricts the ability of the F2F Strategy to adequately support small-scale producers and peasant agriculture. Instead, the F2F Strategy highlights precision farming and the digital transformation of farms, with an active role for the financial sector, rather than public policies. This can lead to further promotion of farm concentration and accelerate the disappearance of small-scale farmers that are the core of agroecology and a sustainable food systems approach. In this regard, we note that post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) National Strategic Plans will play a central role in achieving the goals of the F2F Strategy. While the Commission's CAP reform proposal has been deemed compatible with the Green Deal and the F2F Strategy4, we call on the EC to take the necessary legal, financial and practical measures to ensure there is full alignment between the F2F Strategy and the future CAP. Agroecology The F2F Strategy fails to recognize the role of agroecology in European food systems and its potential. In the F2F Strategy, agroecology is defined in a limited way, despite the ample recognition by farmers, social movements and international organisations of its key role in integrating ecological principles into the design and management of agricultural systems. While we are pleased to see a focus on new knowledge and innovations to scale up agroecological approaches in primary production, this should not be used to delay action. While more research is always valuable, there is already a wealth of peer-reviewed science about agroecology which provides evidence for immediate action. 5,6 From this perspective, gene editing remains a false solution that should not be pursued-not only in light of the judgment of the EU Court of Justice, 7 but as a matter of avoiding further privatization of food systems. With regards to sustainable food production, and in the context of the current crises, more ambitious targets are needed to promote ecological practices that increase biodiversity and soil fertility, reduce erosion and contamination of soils, water and air, support adaptation to climate change and decrease energy consumption. The F2F Strategy highlights and recognizes the potential of organic farming, especially in relation to opportunities for youth, but fails to adequately define organic agriculture. It also fails to pay enough attention to farm renewal, access to land and extensive livestock farming.
Development, 2021
This article helps lay a basis for the kind of deep analysis of the stakes of global food governa... more This article helps lay a basis for the kind of deep analysis of the stakes of global food governance that is required today, under the impact of the COVID 19 crisis and with the threat of corporate capture of decision-making spaces. The article reviews the history of global food governance, identifies the critical questions that need to be asked, and suggests some directions that may contribute to strengthening the agency of rights-holders, weakening that of corporations, and democratizing multilateral governance.
However, the solutions being put forward by the FSS to address these problems are predominantly n... more However, the solutions being put forward by the FSS to address these problems are predominantly new extensions of old approaches, cloaked in rhetoric of “innovation.” Since the proposed solutions are silent on the underlying drivers of the aforementioned crises, they are unlikely to address the root causes of food insecurity: systemic inequality, concentrated power, and governance that works for corporations and elites rather than to support workers and ecological integrity. Indeed, FSS solutions are very likely to backfire. Innumerable examples exist of large-scale agricultural investment schemes which were touted as “transformative” yet which delivered ecological and social harm instead, from the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) of Tanzania1 to commercial shrimp operations in Bangladesh,2 among many others.
Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, 2016
UNRISD welcomes such applications. The designations employed in UNRISD publications, which are in... more UNRISD welcomes such applications. The designations employed in UNRISD publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practice, and the presentation of material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNRISD concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The responsibility for opinions expressed rests solely with the author(s), and publication does not constitute endorsement by UNRISD.
Development, 2021
African food systems are a rich and varied tapestry of production systems, crops, seed, territori... more African food systems are a rich and varied tapestry of production systems, crops, seed, territorial markets, cultures, biodiversity and ecologies. As the UN Food Systems Summit worked to retrench the many pathologies that have systematically eroded African food systems, African civil society organizations mobilized to push back. In the African regional people's countermobilization, participatory dialogues opened space for continent-wide articulations of a future built on peoples' choices and control of natural resources, territorially-embedded solutions, the human rights of all, family farming, and peasant agroecology.
Development, 2021
In this editorial, we use the term 'food system' to encompass the entire range of actors and thei... more In this editorial, we use the term 'food system' to encompass the entire range of actors and their interlinked activities involved in the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal of food products that originate from agriculture, forestry, or fisheries, and parts of the broader economic, societal and natural environments in which they are embedded (FAO 2014). We use 'the global food system' to refer to the current hegemonic order. This food system, which McMichael (2009) refers to as the 'corporate food regime', emerged out of the global economic shocks of the 1970s and 1980s ushering in the current period of neoliberal capitalist expansion. It is characterized by unprecedented market power of monopoly agrifood corporations and finance capital, globalized ani
Sustainability, 2021
The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural... more The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural weaknesses and inequalities embedded in the global industrial agri-food system. While the mainstream narrative continues to emphasise the importance of ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of global supply chains to counter COVID-related disruptions, the pandemic has also highlighted the resilience of small-scale, sustainable family farming and of spatially and socially embedded food systems. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three surveys, this study examines organic and agroecological farmers’ responses to the first COVID-related lockdown (March–May 2020) in Italy, as well as the responses of grassroots alternative food networks (AFN) in the city region of Rome. The results show how local grassroots action played a significant role in ensuring food access, provisioning, and distribution, often in the face of delayed or insufficient action of mainstream food system ...
Globalizations, 2020
This Special Forum is based on a collective dialogue between place-based struggles to defend righ... more This Special Forum is based on a collective dialogue between place-based struggles to defend rights and territories and the dynamics of global trends. Behind apparently fragmented battles we see an emerging common vision, like a mosaic composed of separate tiles, building towards emancipation and justice. Based on discussions in a workshop in Siena in November 2018, the Forum assembles some pieces of the mosaic through five thematic articles crafted in exchanges between social movement, academic and civil society activists. In this Introduction we review other current convergence efforts looking at two related dimensions: sharing ideas and analysis in order to develop a common understanding of global evolutions, and bringing people together to take transformative action by building shared spaces, alliances, campaigns and solidarity. We then situate the Siena workshop and the People's Sovereignty process that has grown from it in this broader context. Finally, we introduce the five articles.
Globalizations, 2020
All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was not... more All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was nothing more than a commodity, a mere 'factor' of production that can be exploited to generate financial returns. Movements and activists are organizing, resisting, protecting and promoting life-giving visions against this continuous enclosure of living beings and paces: they use their bodies, laws, educational projects, histories and visions to regain control over territory as a political space, self-determine and create solidarities. In the act resistance, they are the target of moral, physical and legal violence. They and their ideas are criminalized, disciplined, punished and in some cases exterminated. In this contribution, activists from the Basque Country, Guatemala, Kenya and the Six Nations and a group of academics get together to learn from each other, support the ongoing search for common vocabularies and identify possible milestones of a coordinated and international strategy for a lifeenhancing future.
UN Chronicle, 2012
The UN Chronicle has evolved over the past years into an increasingly attentive and inclusive jou... more The UN Chronicle has evolved over the past years into an increasingly attentive and inclusive journal. The focus of each number on a specific issue, like climate change or disarmament, makes it possible to examine these questions from a variety of viewpoints. Its contributors testify to its broad geographic outlook. Recent issues have featured articles by academics, UN officials, government representatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and recently, the fanciful innovation of testimony by novelists. What are largely missing, however, are the voices from peoples organizations directly representing those sectors of the population most affected by the issues under discussion.
1. Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives Section One: Theorizing Land Grabbi... more 1. Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives Section One: Theorizing Land Grabbing, Globalization and Governance 2. Land Grabs Today: Feeding the Disassembling of National Territory 3. Land Grabbing as Security Mercantilism in International Relations 4. Governing the Global Land Grab: Multipolarity, Ideas, and Complexity in Transnational Governance Section Two: Transnational Actors and Emerging Global Land Governance 5. The Governance of Gulf Agro-Investments 6. 'One Does Not Sell the Land Upon Which the People Walk': Land Grabbing, Transnational Rural Social Movements, and Global Governance 7. International Human Rights and Governing Land Grabbing: A View from Global Civil Society 8. Certification Schemes and the Governance of Land: Enforcing Standards or Enabling Scrutiny? 9. The Challenge of Global Governance of Land Grabbing: Changing International Agricultural Context and Competing Political Views and Strategies Section Three: Review of Recent Global Land Governance Instruments 10. The FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests 11. The Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investment 12. The Minimum Human Rights Principles Applicable to Large-Scale Land Acquisitions or Leases 13. Private Governance and Land Grabbing: The Equator Principles and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels 14. Restrictions to Foreign Acquisitions of Agricultural Land in Argentina and Brazil
Globalizations, 2018
Today's 'irregular migration' from Sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in decades of policies which ... more Today's 'irregular migration' from Sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in decades of policies which have impoverished rural economies and dispossessed smallscale producers to make room for export-oriented monocultures. Under pressure from opportunistic xenophobic political configurations the EU is reacting by seeking to block the unwanted flow of African migrants in their home countries through measures denounced by European civil society organizations. Its long-term recipe for 'addressing the root causes of migration' involves using EU cooperation funds to leverage resources from private investors 'looking for new investment opportunities in emerging markets', thereby promoting the same model of agricultural production and global value chains that has sparked today's migration waves. An absent voice in the debate is that of the rural organizations in the territories from which the migrants originate. This paper seeks to reframe the issues from the viewpoint of these social constituencies, to recuperate their popular history of the evolutions that have transformed a portion of rural mobility into Europe-bound irregular migration, to map relevant contemporary rural transformations and the complexities of relations they engender, and to highlight initiatives underway today to build options of dignified and remunerative rural livelihoods for young people. Setting the West Africa-Europe nexus in the context of global processes of migration governance, this paper explores the opportunities for counter-hegemonic strategizing that EU internal policy contradictions open up and suggests how convergences might be promoted among actors and spaces that are currently inadequately connected with a view to defending both the right to migrate and the right to choose to stay at home.