Food Security, Food justice or Food Soverignty: Countermovements to the global food regime (original) (raw)
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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 Global Politics of Food: A Critical Overview
2011
In May 2010, the Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad Mexico hosted an international conference on The Global Politics of Food: Sustainability and Subordination, bringing together 33 academics and activists from seven countries to exchange ideas and information on The Global Politics of Food: Sustainability and Subordination. Published in the University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, the Symposium papers examine the complex ways in which the global food system reinforces hierarchies of power and privilege. “The Global Politics of Food: A Critical Overview” provides a substantive introduction to the Symposium, identifying the disparate strands of the vast field of food politics and suggesting some of their intersections.Like many other arenas of life, the world of food is a world of politics and power. Inequalities of power and privilege across the globe affect who has access to food and who does not, who controls its production and who is harmed by that production, how consumptive...
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
Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice
In this very timely book, two of the most prominent critics of the global food system dissect the causes of hunger and the food price crisis, locating them in a political economy of capitalist industrial production dominated by corporations and driven by the search for profits for the few instead of the welfare of the many. The picture that emerges is a political economy of global production that is failing badly to feed the world and is itself contributing to the spread of inequalities that promote hunger.
Crisis of legitimacy and challenges for food policy
Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, 2015
Looking into the food system through the lens of food security, the first decade of the 21st Century was a period of broken promises, distrust, as well as fear and anxiety due to multiple crises in the financial markets-in the agri-food sector and in global politics. I will argue that this economically and politically volatile environment and the widespread distrust of major international and national agencies in terms of governance has led to a global legitimacy crisis, which I consider one of the biggest obstacles in mobilizing the public for social change and policy reforms. These failures become clear when we consider past pledges that were made to address world hunger. Emerging during the mid-1970s, food security remained as a public policy priority and a popular discourse defining the conditions of food provisioning in modern society (Koç, 2013). At the World Food Summit of 1996, food security was defined as a condition that exists "when all people, at all times, have physical, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life" (FAO, 1996). As I outline below, the global community has failed to ensure food security for all. Failed promises and global distractions One of the notable developments of the 20 th Century was a series of retreats from the previous global priorities set at forums such as the World Food Summit (WFS) and the Kyoto Protocol. Failure to meet established targets had significant consequences for long-term food system
The Global Politics of Food: Introduction to the Theoretical Perspectives Cluster
The corporate-dominated, fossil-fuel dependent model of agricultural production has produced chronic undernourishment, an epidemic of obesity and diet-related diseases, and unprecedented ecological devastation. In May 2010, the Universidad Interamericana in Mexico City hosted an international conference on The Global Politics of Food: Sustainability and Subordination. Sponsored by Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc. and by Seattle University School of Law, the conference took place under the auspices of the South-North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law (SNX), a yearly gathering of scholars in the Americas that seeks to foster transnational, cross-disciplinary and inter-cultural dialogue on current issues in law, theory and culture. Published in the University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, the conference papers examine the complex ways in which the global food system reinforces hierarchies of power and privilege. This Introduction situates the essays collected in the theoretical pespectives cluster within the parameters of LatCrit and outsider jurisprudence, and explains how these essays contribute to our understanding of the role of food policy in perpetuating the subordination of marginalized populations on a global scale. The Introduction also discusses the growing food sovereignty and food justice movements, and the importance of integrating the insights of these movements into the broader critique of neoliberal globalization.