Food sovereignty

"Food sovereignty", a term coined by members of Via Campesina in 1996,^[1] asserts that the people who produce, distribute, and consume food should control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution, rather than the corporations and market institutions they believe have come to dominate the global food system.

History

The history of food sovereignty as a movement is relatively young. However, there are a number of key movements and countries that have made significant steps towards making an alternative food system a reality.

Global gatherings

At the Forum for Food Sovereignty in Sélingué, Mali, 27 February 2007, about 500 delegates from more than 80 countries adopted the "Declaration of Nyéléni",^[2] which says in part:

Food sovereignty is 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. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers. Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability.

In April 2008 the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), an intergovernmental panel under the sponsorship of the United Nations and the World Bank, adopted the following definition: "Food sovereignty is defined as the right of peoples and sovereign states to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies."^[3]

Becoming part of government policy

In September 2008, Ecuador became the first country to enshrine food sovereignty in its constitution. As of late 2008, a law is in the draft stages that is expected to expand upon this constitutional provision by banning genetically modified organisms, protecting many areas of the country from extraction of non-renewable resources, and to discourage monoculture. The law as drafted will also protect biodiversity as collective intellectual property and recognize the Rights of Nature.^[4]

Since then another five countries have integrated food sovereignty into their national constitutions or laws. These countries are Venezuela, Mali, Bolivia, Nepal and Senegal; and most recently Egypt (2014 Constitution) ^[5] Some now experience food shortages; the government of Venezuela has introduced rationing, and staple foods have disappeared from the shelves.^[6]

Food sovereignty in Europe

In 2011 more than 400 people from 34 European countries met from the 16th to 21 August in Krems, Austria to plan the development of a European movement for food sovereignty. The meeting included people from the Atlantic to the Urals and Caucasus, as well as from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. These people included international representatives from diverse social movements and civil society organisations.

By coming together they aimed to build on the foundations of the Mali forum in 2007. The objectives were to strengthen local involvement; build a sense of common purpose and understanding; create a joint agenda for action; celebrate the struggle for food sovereignty in Europe; and inspire and motivate people and organisations to work together.

The forum, which was organised on the principles of participation and consensus decision making, used methods to avoid institutionalised prejudices that are inherent in society (such as gender, age, language, occupation). It did this by making a concerted effort to allow for all sections of society to be included in the discussion.^[7]

The forum allowed producers and activists from projects across Europe to share skills, coordinate actions and discuss perspectives. The forum culminated in the Nyéléni declaration.<"Nyeleni Europe declaration">

Since 2011 Europe-wide gatherings and actions have continued, including the Good Food March, where citizens, youth and farmers came together to call for a greener and fairer agricultural policy in Europe, as well as democratic reform of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Food sovereignty versus food security

Food sovereignty was born in response to campaigners' disillusion with food security, the dominant global discourse on food provisioning and policy. The latter emphasises access to adequate nutrition for all, which may be provided by food from one's own country or from global imports. In the name of efficiency and enhanced productivity, it has therefore served to promote what has been termed the "corporate food regime":^[8] large-scale, industrialised corporate farming based on specialised production, land concentration and trade liberalisation. Food security’s inattention to the political economy of the corporate food regime blinds it to the adverse effects of that regime, notably the widespread dispossession of small producers and global ecological degradation.

Haiti can be seen as a case study. Migration from the countryside to cities has reflected a transition from subsistence agriculture to factory labor. Farmers were forced to make this move because of heavy imports of "Miami rice", with which their natively-grown rice could not compete in the local market. By 2008, Haiti was importing 80 percent of its rice, leaving them extremely vulnerable to price and supply fluctuations. When the price of rice did triple in 2008, many Haitians could not afford to buy it.^[9]

Writing in Food First's Backgrounder, fall 2003, Peter Rosset argues that "food sovereignty goes beyond the concept of food security... [Food security] means that... [everyone] must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day[,] ... but says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced." Food sovereignty includes support for smallholders and for collectively owned farms, fisheries, etc., rather than industrializing these sectors in a minimally regulated global economy. In another publication, Food First describes "food sovereignty" as "a platform for rural revitalization at a global level based on equitable distribution of farmland and water, farmer control over seeds, and productive small-scale farms supplying consumers with healthy, locally grown food."^[1]

Criticisms of the Green Revolution

The Green Revolution is upheld by some proponents of food security as a success story in increasing crop yields and combating world hunger. However, many in the food sovereignty movement are critical of the green revolution and accuse those who advocate it as following too much of a Western culture technocratic program that is out of touch with the needs of majority of small producers and peasants.

The ‘green revolution’ refers to developments in plant breeding between the 1960s and 1980s that improved yields from major cereal crops, particularly wheat and rice, and other staple crops. The main focus was on the research, development and transfer of agricultural technology, such as hybrid seeds and fertilisers, through massive private and public investment that went into transforming agriculture in a number of countries, starting in Mexico and India.

While the green revolution may have produced more food, world hunger continues because it did not address the problems of access.^[10] Food sovereignty advocates argue that the green revolution failed to alter the highly concentrated distribution of economic power, and if anything, exacerbated it – particularly access to land and purchasing power.

Some of these views are supported by the World Bank- and UN-sponsored IAASTD report.^[11][12] The focus on technology paid no regard to who controlled that technology and ignored the knowledge of the people who were expected to adopt it. Results included significant biodiversity loss due to the mass adoption of hybrid seeds and soil erosion.

The adoption of genetically modified (GMOs) cropping by the government of Western Australia in 2010 and the subsequent failure of crop segregation has led to the contamination of at least one organic farm by Monsanto's GM canola.^[13] The organic certification of the certified organic farm of Steve and Sue Marsh was withdrawn in 2010 due to GM contamination.^[13] A court case in the Supreme Court of Western Australia for nuisance and negligence failed to achieve any relief or protection for the organic farm.^[13] However, the organic certification of the Marsh farm was reinstated in 2013.^[13]

Academic perspectives

Food Regime theory

It is in its capacity as a social movement that food regime analysts are interested in food sovereignty. With its Marxist influences, food regime theorists are interested in how moments of crisis within a particular food regime are expressive of the dialectical tension that animates movement between such configurations (i.e., periods of transition). According to leading theorist Philip McMichael, food regimes are always characterised by contradictory forces. Consolidation of a regime does not so much resolve as it does contain, or else strategically accommodate, these tensions; meanwhile, their intensification, often via the mobilisations of social movements, often signals a period of transition.

According to McMichael, a "world agriculture" under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture ("food from nowhere") represents one pole of the "central contradiction" of the present regime. He is interested in the food sovereignty movement’s potential to escalate the tension between this and its opposing pole, the agroecology-based localism ("food from somewhere") advocated by various grassroots food movements.^[14] Offering slightly different conclusions, recent work by Harriet Friedmann suggests that "food from somewhere" is already being co-opted under an emergent "corporate-environmental" regime^[15] (cf. Campbell 2009).^[16]

Criticisms

Wrong baseline assumptions

Some scholars argue that the Food Sovereignty movement follows wrong baseline assumptions (small-scale farming is not necessarily a freely chosen life-style and farmers in least developed and highly developed countries do not face the same challenges). The Food Sovereignty movement may be right about the mistakes of neoliberal economic ideology, but it is silent about the fact that most famines actually occurred under socialist and communist regimes that pursued the goal of food self-sufficiency (cf. Aerni 2011).^[17]

Political-jurisdictional model

There is a lack of clear vision within the food sovereignty movement regarding the political or jurisdictional community at which its calls for democratisation and renewed "agrarian citizenship" (cf. Wittman 2009)^[18] are directed. In public statements, the food sovereignty movement urges for strong sovereign powers for both national governments and local communities (in the vein of the indigenous rights movement, Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) and the like) (elsewhere it has also appealed to global civil society to act as a check against abuses by national and supranational governing bodies).

Those who take a radically critical view on state sovereignty would argue against the possibility that national sovereignty can be reconciled with that of local communities^[19] (see also the debate about multiculturalism and indigenous autonomy in Mexico^[20][21][22] ). On the other hand, Raj Patel is more favourable towards this prospect: for Patel, an adapted version of Seyla Benhabib’s Kantian-inspired cosmopolitan federalism – involving multiple, layered geographies of democratic attachment and jurisdiction – could offer a promising vehicle for the realisation of food sovereignty on a large-scale. Patel’s important proviso here is that a stronger version of Benhabib’s accompanying principle of moral universalism is also pursued. By Patel’s assessment, the food sovereignty movement is showing promising signs of moving towards the radical egalitarianism and democratic praxis that such a model entails.

Crisis of the peasantry?

In its strong reassertion of rural and peasant identities and forms of social reproduction, the food sovereignty movement has been read as a sharp challenge to modernist narratives of inexorable urbanisation, industrialisation of agriculture and de-peasantisation. However, as part of ongoing debates over the contemporary relevance of the "agrarian question" in classical Marxism,^[23][24] Henry Bernstein is critical of these largely celebratory accounts. Specifically, levels Bernstein, such analyses tend to present the agrarian population as a unified, singular and world-historical social category. Therefore, they fail to account, in any more than a gestural manner, for:

• this population’s vast internal social differentiation (North/South, gender and class positionalities);
• the conservative, cultural survivalist tendencies of a movement that has emerged as part of a backlash against the perceived homogenising forces of globalisation^[25] (Boyer discusses whether food sovereignty is a counter or anti-development narrative^[26] )

In so doing, these accounts cannot escape a certain agrarian populism (or agrarianism) according to Bernstein (for a response to Bernstein, see McMichael (2009)^[27]).

See also

• Agribusiness
• Agroecology
• Food price crisis
• Land grabbing
• Land reform
• Malnutrition
• Slow Food

Footnotes

Literature

• Annette Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, and Hannah Wittman (2010). Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community. Food First Books. ISBN 978-0-935028-37-9
• Choplin, Gérard; Strickner, Alexandra; Trouvé, Aurélie [Hg.] (2011). Food sovereignty - towards a new agricultural and food policy in Europe (Ernährungssouveränität - Für eine andere Agrar- und Lebensmittelpolitik in Europa). Mandelbaum Verlag. ISBN 978-3-85476-346-8
• Vazquez, Jennifer M. (2011). The role of indigenous knowledge and innovation in creating food sovereignty in the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin (MS thesis). Iowa State University. Retrieved March 14, 2013. 

External links

• European Forum for Food Sovereignty - Krems, Austria, August 2011
• Nyéléni First International Forum for Food Sovereignty (Sélingué, Mali - February 2007) and International newsletter - voice of the movement for Food Sovereignty
• War on Want's Food Sovereignty programme
• "FOOD SOVEREIGNTY: towards democracy in localized food systems" by Michael Windfuhr and Jennie Jonsén, FIAN. ITDG Publishing - working paper. 64pp. 2005. Provides information on the Food Sovereignty Policy Framework. Links to many key statements and documents produced over the past decade. Downloadable PDF available.
• "International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty". The International NGO/CSO Planning Committee - IPC is a global network of NGOs/CSOs concerned with food sovereignty issues and programs. The IPC serves as a mechanism for diffusion of information on food sovereignty and food security issues.
• Food sovereignty viewed from the south
• Food sovereignty and rural youth (MIJARC)
• Michel Pimbert, 2010. IIED. Towards Food Sovereignty. Reclaiming autonomous food systems
• "What is food sovereignty?" - World Development Movement