Globalization and food sovereignty: global and local change in the new politics of food (original) (raw)
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The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016
Research into food sovereigntybroadly defined by transnational social movements 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' (Nyéléni 2007a)is a dynamically evolving area of academic inquiry. Recent years have seen a bourgeoning of studies focused on theoretical explorations of the concept, on the dynamics within and among movements connected to it, and on real-life attempts to put it into practice. From within these studies is an emerging consensus that food sovereignty, in its multiple dimensions, is best understood and approached as a process (Edelman et al. 2014; Iles and Montenegro de Wit 2015; Shattuck, Schiavoni, and VanGelder 2015). The concept itself is a moving target, a reflection, in part, of the shifting terrain of global agrifood politics (McMichael 2015) and of the new actors who have taken it up (Patel 2009). The peasant movements that originally thrust the concept into public light continue to form a key mobilizing base for food sovereignty, while they
Food Sovereignty:convergence and contradictions, conditions and challenges
This article introduces this special collection on food sovereignty. It frames the collection in relation to a broader political and intellectual initiative that aims to deepen academic discussions on food sovereignty. Building upon previous and parallel initiatives in ‘engaged academic research’ and following the tradition of ‘critical dialogue’ among activists and academics, we have identified four key themes – all focusing on the contradictions, dilemmas and challenges confronting future research – that we believe contribute to further advancing the conversation around food sovereignty: (1) dynamics within and between social groups in rural and urban, global North–South contexts; (2) flex crops and commodities, market insertion and long-distance trade; (3) territorial restructuring, land and food sovereignty; and (4) the localisation problematique. We conclude with a glance at the future research challenges at international, national and local scales, as well as at the links between them, while emphasising the continuing relevance of a critical dialogue between food sovereignty activists and engaged scholars.
Optimism of the Will: Food Sovereignty as Transformative Counter Hegemony in the 21st century
This thesis explores the significance of the transnational movement for food sovereignty, in the context of three key intensifying tensions in global and national food systems: namely over-production, inequality, and ecological degradation. Using the synthesised methodology of a neo-Gramscian political ecology, the thesis asks whether the engagements to date of the Food Sovereignty movement with these tensions are deep and constructive. It does this by using the device of a hypothesis, within the framework and method of a Gramscian theory of politics: is the Food Sovereignty movement a counter-hegemonic movement, vis-à-vis the globalising capitalist food system as a hegemonic power formation in global politics? Thus, the substance of the thesis is a ‘balance of forces’ assessment, conducted in order to determine the existing ‘effective reality’ as between the forces of food sovereignty and those of the globalising capitalist food system. The form of the thesis takes accordingly a ‘double-movement’ character. The first movement is where the context, being, respectively, the political-institutional, and economic-ecological, framework and conditions of the globalising capitalist food system, is discussed and analysed in depth. Here the theoretical resources of political ecology, and supportive Marxist-informed political economy approaches such as regime and food regime theory, and theories exploring the dynamics and historical evolution of globalising capitalism across time and space, are marshalled in order to probe the manner in which the hegemony of the globalising capitalist food system has been constructed and maintained over time, and to understand the ways in which that hegemony is being renegotiated in the context of the contemporary ‘global food crisis’. The second movement analyses the responses by key actors within the Food Sovereignty movement to the political-institutional, and economic-ecological, context. This movement draws on the empirical work undertaken for the thesis, in the form of two case studies: the development of food sovereignty at the transnational level by the peasant and family farmer organisation La Via Campesina; and two elements of the local food movement in Australia, namely on the Coffs Coast region of New South Wales, and the Food Connect social enterprise in Brisbane, Queensland. Particular attention is focused on the efforts devoted by La Via Campesina to the securing of a new United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Peasants; and to the development of a hybridised version of community-supported agriculture in Australia by Food Connect. The thesis concludes that the Food Sovereignty movement is a potential counter-hegemonic movement, and accordingly that its engagements with the tensions of the globalising capitalist food system are deep and constructive. This positive conclusion is tempered with a number of qualifications regarding the lack of coherence, in certain respects, of the food sovereignty alternative, which are, in my assessment, impacting its political effectiveness. At the same time, these limitations represent opportunities for the further theoretical and political development of food sovereignty, which in turn will enhance its transformative potential
Introduction: Critical perspectives on food sovereignty
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2014
Visions of food sovereignty have been extremely important in helping to galvanize broad-based and diverse movements around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Yet while food sovereignty has thrived as a 'dynamic process', until recently there has been insufficient attention to many thorny questions, such as its origins, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. This essay contributes to food sovereignty praxis by pushing the process of critical self-reflection forward and considering its relation to critical agrarian studies - and vice versa.
Food Sovereignty: A Critical Case
2017
For decades, the global food security strategy has operated on the assumption that poverty and hunger result from a state of underdevelopment, which can be alleviated through the distribution of technology to increase farm-level productivity. In more recent years, transnational corporate involvement within food security has led to a global imposition of intellectual property rights over seed and agriculture science, thus catalyzing a process of accumulation by dispossession. Those who have been dispossessed of their seed, knowledge, food cultures, and social relations of production, however, have not stood idly by. NGO, peasant and human rights organizations have galvanized around food sovereignty, a radical-rights based alternative to the business as usual approach of food security. Broadly defined, food sovereignty is the peoples’ right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It has also been described as ‘repossessing the commons’, or taking back those aspects of life, ...
2014
ABSTRACT. The second half of the last decade has been profoundly marked by a major food crisis with a global reach, qualified by Holt-Giménez, Patel and Shattuck (2009) as a “silent tsunami, ” which has driven about 75 million people to undernourishment and another 125 million people to extreme poverty (Bello 2009b). In light of such a devastating phenomenon, the recent years have witnessed a veritable outpouring of scholarly works on the effects of the food crisis on developing countries, on the critique of the neoliberal food regime, and the emergence of food countermovements confronting neoliberalism. In this review article, I address the global food problem in today’s context from the perspective of “food sovereignty, ” arguing that it is essential to break with mainstream perspectives that prioritize the economic aspects of the global food problem and overestimate the role of high politics and policy experts instead of exploring the ways in which genuine grassroots participatio...
The hefty challenges of food sovereignty's adulthood— Synthesis paper
The three articles in this section reflect a broader shift that is taking place in the debate on food sovereignty. After almost two decades since its inception, the term—which is also a " counter-narrative " , a " mobilizing tactic " , and a " political agenda " (Desmarais, this issue)—has gained significant leverage as an alternative paradigm to industrial agriculture. A sign of the term's maturity may be the growing consensus shared by critical food studies scholars and activists about its potential as an alternative paradigm. At the same time, food sovereignty's adulthood is rife with complex challenges. At stake is no less than turning a dream born in the margins into a concrete, viable reality for the global agrifood system. This article focuses on three challenges faced by the food sovereignty movement today: (1) operating across multiple scales; (2) maintaining internal democratic practices as the movement continues to grow and become more complex; and (3) building cross-sectoral alliances to foster broader social change. Operating across multiple scales As Desmarais points out (this issue), one of the key features of the Global Food Sovereignty Movement is that it recognizes the particular histories and geographies of the struggles that are part of it while at the same time providing a common ground and shared vision. Such a vision— summed up by the three principles indicated by Wittman (this issue) of ecological sustainability, distributive justice and procedural justice—ultimately seeks to change the asymmetrical power