Agroecology and food sovereignty: charting a way to a radical transformation of the food system (original) (raw)

Agroecology and Food Sovereignty

IDS Bulletin, 2019

We propose that agroecology provides a framework for understanding ‘levels’ for the transition to sustainable food systems. If we agree that agroecology includes social and political dimensions of governing territorial food systems, then it must be linked to movements for food sovereignty. However, the concentration of power in food and farming systems locks in industrial logic, posing immense barriers to agroecological and social transition. This creates a tension between efforts at convergence of food system innovations from below, versus co-optation of grass-roots language and practices by private and public actors who are committed not to changing the logic of industrial agriculture, but instead to reducing its harm. We suggest agroecological and food sovereignty movements consciously embrace this tension as a dance of creativity and appropriation. If this dance can be made generative rather than deadly, it can open pathways for transition to new ways of seeing, experiencing, and getting food.

Book Review: The Future of Agriculture - A Comparison of Paradigms that Aim to Feed the World

Despite the fact that the world has the resources and technology to eradicate hunger and ensure long-term food security for all, the number of hungry reached a tragic apogee of 1.02 billion in 2009 (FAO, 2009a) . At the same time the International Association for the Study of Obesity estimated, that 1.7 billion people were overweight or obese (Lang and Heasman, 2004). Food policy is in crisis. Despite gigantic leaps in production over the past 100 years more people than ever in our history go hungry, while many others are suffering from ill health due to lacking quality in our food production system. Meanwhile an unprecedented and alarming destruction of our resource provider planet earth is advancing (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). While the impacts of climate change will vary it is clear that action has to be taken, particularly in regions projected to experience severe ecological shifts (such as poor countries which will suffer earliest and most according to Stern, 2007). The following essay examines the three broad conceptual frameworks, concerning food policy and the food economy indentified in Tim Lang and Michael Heasman’s book: ‘Food Wars - The Global battle for Mouths, Minds and Market,’, while considering other authors perspectives and opinions. The current - the “Productionist” paradigm, as well as the two alternative frameworks - the “Ecologically Integrated” paradigm and the Life Sciences Integrated Paradigm (LSIP) – are examined and evaluated in regards of their suitability to ensure food security in developing countries.

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

State of the World Food System Special Issue: Mapping the Global Food Landscape

2016

The articles by Friedmann, Koç, and Wise draw out overarching issues in the world food system; issues that resurface throughout this special issue of Canadian Food Studies. They offer complementary views where the dominant model, upon which transnational policies are created, ignores pressing concerns in the food system related to the distribution of food, human health, and the environment. In this contribution, I will use the concept of transnational policy paradigms to illustrate the key tension between the status quo of food policy and emerging alternatives. Focusing on this tension raises two important questions. First, what is the relationship between the dominant model of food policy (which shapes how we identify problems and solutions) and "less travelled" models that frame problems and solutions in a different way? Second, what are the obstacles blocking a paradigm shift? In order to answer these questions, the concept of "policy paradigm" will be unpacked, followed by an assessment of the long-emerging contest between the dominant productionist-neoliberal and alternative agroecological paradigms. Paradigms and production The concept of a "paradigm" refers to scientific communities, shared commitments/values, and the creation of common frameworks among them based on a shared framework for addressing a problem (Kuhn, 1970). Importantly, an implication of this is that paradigms are partly social in

Building, Defending and Strengthening Agroecology A Global Struggle for Food Sovereignty

2015

reality in a food system and rural world that has been devastated by industrial food production and its so-called Green and Blue Revolutions. We see Agroecology as a key form of resistance to an economic system that puts profit before life. [...] Our diverse forms of smallholder food production based on Agroecology generate local knowledge, promote social justice, nurture identity and culture, and strengthen the economic viability of rural areas. As smallholders, we defend our dignity when we choose to produce in an agroecological way.”

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...