Food Security: The Elaboration of Contested Claims to a Consensus Frame* (original) (raw)
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Food Policy, 2006
Food security studies, while giving ever more attention to issues of perception and local knowledge in food outcomes, have yet to engage in a systematic discussion of the role played by society in food outcomes. While contemporary studies of food outcomes address issues of the social, especially as social structures relate to access to and production of food, this literature lacks an accompanying theory of the social that might lend it broad, cross-contextual coherence.
Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements
Agroecology is in fashion, and now constitutes a territory in dispute between social movements and institutionality. This new conjuncture offers a constellation of opportunities that social movements can avail themselves of to promote changes in the food system. Yet there is an enormous risk that agroecology will be co-opted, institutionalized, colonized and stripped of its political content. In this paper, we analyze this quandary in terms of political ecology: will agroecology end up as merely offering a few more tools for the toolbox of industrial agriculture, to fine tune an agribusiness system that is being restructured in the midst of a civilizational crisis or, alternatively, will it be strengthened as a politically mobilizing option for building alternatives to development? We interpret the contemporary dispute over agroecology through the lenses of contested material and immaterial territories, political ecology, and the first and second contradictions of capital. Popular pressure has caused many multilateral institutions, governments, universities and research centers, some NGOs [non-governmental organizations], corporations and others, to finally recognize 'agroecology'. However, they have tried to redefine it as a narrow set of technologies, to offer some tools that appear to ease the sustainability crisis of industrial food production, while the existing structures of power remain unchallenged. This co-optation of agroecology to fine-tune the industrial food system, while paying lip service to the environmental discourse, has various names, including 'climate smart agriculture', 'sustainable-' or 'ecological-intensification', industrial monoculture production of 'organic' food, etc. For us, these are not agroecology: we reject them, and we will fight to expose and block this insidious appropriation of agroecology. The real solutions to the crises of the climate, malnutrition, etc., will not come from conforming to the industrial model. We must transform it and build our own local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production by peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban farmers, etc. We cannot allow agroecology to be a tool of the industrial food production model: we see it as the essential alternative to that model, and as the means of transforming how we produce and consume food into something better for humanity and our Mother Earth.
Food encapsulates the entire circuit of production that connects field to fork. The biological necessity of food is always already enmeshed within complex relations of capital. Access to a safe, nutritious, and socially acceptable food supply co-conditions how food is grown, processed, exchanged and transported, and ultimately consumed. Discursively, food security signifies relations of sustenance via flows of comestible capital, subjectivating populations through regimes of governmentality, vulnerability, and visibility that exploit the biopolitical insertion of bodies into the late capitalist economic machine. As an issue of environmental justice, food security reveals the disparate impacts of foodways, regimes, and practices on marginalized groups, and the limitations of late capitalism in accounting for environmental degradation. This dissertation theorizes food security by tracing its articulation in farm/food policy, living wage activism, and anti-hunger advocacy discourses. My first chapter frames, via Marxian political economy, Foucauldian biopolitics, and articulation theory, the relations of sustenance by which this project is driven. In my second chapter, I take up the Marxian concept of social metabolism to consider the ways the farm bill arranges the circuit of comestible exchange. Analysis of Congressional deliberations reveals how, in an entrenched agriculture/nutrition war of position, food security is articulated as risk, valorizing the fertility of agribusiness and re-employing the wasted poor. Chapter III explores the subjectivation of the working poor; tipped restaurant workers’ living wage activism functionally antagonizes the hegemony of employment-based notions of food security. In Chapter IV, the Food Stamp Challenge is taken up in terms of a bio/politics of visibility, and considers how food operates as an element in class relations. My fifth and final chapter brings themes across all of the chapters into sharper focus. It directly addresses my research questions about food security and (bio)political economy, explicates the rhetorical dimensions of food security across policy, activism, and advocacy contexts, and concludes with implications for critical praxis.
Getting to the core of food security and food sovereignty Relationality with limits?
Does food sovereignty have a core? Can it and yet still be spoken of as wildly relational, as being a process which prioritizes means over ends? Those are the type of questions posed in this commentary. After applauding Lucy Jarosz's ability to synthesize an incredibly diverse literature, spanning decades, the author admits to his own struggles in embracing food security and food sovereignty as radically relational while retaining an ability to critique ends. For example, what if out of inclusive processes emerge problematic (and in some cases outright injustice) practices? In other words, is getting the means right 'good enough'? Or do phenomena like food security and food sovereignty presuppose particular ends? And if so, what is that core and how can it exist in phenomena premised on nonessentialism?
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 Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue Food Sovereignty: A skeptical view
This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that 'frame' Food Sovereignty (FS) : (i) a comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised agriculture, and its ecological consequences, in the current moment of globalisation; (ii) advocacy of a (the) 'peasant way' as the basis of a sustainable and socially just food system; and (iii) a programme to realise that world-historical goal. While sympathetic to the first of these elements, I am much more sceptical about the second because of how FS conceives 'peasants', and its claim that small producers who practice agroecological farmingunderstood as low-(external) input and labour intensive -can feed the world. This connects with an argument that FS is incapable of constructing a feasible programme (the third element) to connect the activities of small farmers with the food needs of non-farmers, whose numbers are growing both absolutely and as a proportion of the world's population.
2013
Food security studies, while giving ever more attention to issues of perception and local knowledge in food outcomes, have yet to engage in a systematic discussion of the role played by society in food outcomes. While contemporary studies of food outcomes address issues of the social, especially as social structures relate to access to and production of food, this literature lacks an accompanying theory of the social that might lend it broad, cross-contextual coherence. This article identiWes a means of systematically approaching how actors apprehend and negotiate the complex factors and connections from which they fashion food outcomes by applying postmodern theories of power and knowledge to the study of society's role in food outcomes. In developing this approach, I employ postmodern theory not merely to critique current approaches to the study of food outcomes, but to further a modernist goal, a world with less hunger.
International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 2012
In our knowledge society, science plays a key role in policy-making through the production of assessments that provide evidence-based information to decision-makers. In that manner, science has also gained significant political power. This is an enormous responsibility for scientists but also constitutes a dangerous situation, since different social discourses lead to different analyses of a given problem, and to different solutions with very different impacts. Generally, this is the case of agri-food assessments, including food security, where impacts are huge given the present situation of nearly 1,000 million people suffering from hunger. In agri-food sciences framing of the research is mainly determined by two factors: the linkages between science and the concept of development, and the role given to agriculture in society. In general, it is easy to find two different opposite types of framing, with different objects of study, methods and characteristics. One type, which I refer to as official framing, tends to separate social and natural sciences, is more simplistic in analysing the causes of hunger, of food price crises or other important issues affecting food security. This type of scientific assessment usually regards solutions as more technical rather than social and/or political, and aims to find a panacea that can provide solutions to a given problem, in this case hunger. On the other side we have scientific evaluations, here alternative framing, which tend to be inter/trans-disciplinary, with a higher participation of social sciences. In this case, analyses tend to conceive agri-food system as complex systems, problems are normally more political than technical, and solutions tend to be diverse, contextual to each social, cultural and environmental context. In this sense, to encourage a change in agri-food assessments that recognizes the role of social sciences in addressing food security, critical social scientists can facilitate the introduction of frameworks developed by sustainability scientists into agrifood science, including the study of agri-food systems as socio-ecological complex systems.
Agroecology is in fashion, and now constitutes a territory in dispute between social movements and institutionality. This new conjuncture offers a constellation of opportunities that social movements can avail themselves of to promote changes in the food system. Yet there is an enormous risk that agroecology will be co-opted, institutionalized, colonized and stripped of its political content. In this paper, we analyze this quandary in terms of political ecology: will agroecology end up as merely offering a few more tools for the toolbox of industrial agriculture, to fine tune an agribusiness system that is being restructured in the midst of a civilizational crisis or, alternatively, will it be strengthened as a politically mobilizing option for building alternatives to development? We interpret the contemporary dispute over agroecology through the lenses of contested material and immaterial territories, political ecology, and the first and second contradictions of capital. Popular pressure has caused many multilateral institutions, governments, universities and research centers, some NGOs [non-governmental organizations], corporations and others, to finally recognize 'agroecology'. However, they have tried to redefine it as a narrow set of technologies, to offer some tools that appear to ease the sustainability crisis of industrial food production, while the existing structures of power remain unchallenged. This co-optation of agroecology to fine-tune the industrial food system, while paying lip service to the environmental discourse, has various names, including 'climate smart agriculture', 'sustainable-' or 'ecological-intensification', industrial monoculture production of 'organic' food, etc. For us, these are not agroecology: we reject them, and we will fight to expose and block this insidious appropriation of agroecology. The real solutions to the crises of the climate, malnutrition, etc., will not come from conforming to the industrial model. We must transform it and build our own local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production by peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban farmers, etc. We cannot allow agroecology to be a tool of the industrial food production model: we see it as the essential alternative to that model, and as the means of transforming how we produce and consume food into something better for humanity and our Mother Earth.