We Want Land to Live

Making Political Space for Food Sovereignty

Amy Trauger, Nik Heynen, Mathew Coleman, Sapana Doshi

• Éditeur: University of Georgia Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820350264
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Human Geography

We Want Land to Live explores the current boundaries of radical approaches to food sovereignty. First coined by La Via Campesina (a global movement whose name means "the peasant's way"), food sovereignty is a concept that expresses the universal right to food. Amy Trauger uses research combining ethnography, participant observation, field notes, and interviews to help us understand the material and definitional struggles surrounding the decommodification of food and the transfor­mation of the global food system's political-economic foundations.

Trauger's work is the first of its kind to analytically and coherently link a dialogue on food sovereignty with case studies illustrating the spatial and territorial strate­gies by which the movement fosters its life in the margins of the corporate food regime. She discusses community gardeners in Portugal; small-scale, independent farmers in Maine; Native American wild rice gatherers in Minnesota; seed library supporters in Pennsylvania; and permaculturists in Georgia.

The problem in the food system, as the activists profiled here see it, is not markets or the role of governance but that the right to food is conditioned by what the state and corporations deem to be safe, legal, and profitable—and not by what eaters think is right in terms of their health, the environment, or their communities. Useful for classes on food studies and active food movements alike, We Want Land to Live makes food sovereignty issues real as it illustrates a range of methodological alternatives that are consistent with its discourse: direct action (rather than charity, market creation, or policy changes), civil disobedience (rather than compliance with discriminatory laws), and mutual aid (rather than reliance on top-down aid).

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Political Economies of Food Sovereignty

What we said in 1997 is not [what] we say [food sovereignty] is now.

Paul Nicholson, La Via Campesina, 2013

The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, article 25(1), asserts that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing.” Yet, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO, 2013), an estimated 870 million people do not have enough food to meet their needs and suffer from chronic undernourishment. The vast majority of people suffering from hunger and hunger-related conditions live in the least developed countries, and all people who suffer from hunger in either the developed or the developing world live in extreme poverty. Many of those in the developing world are landless former peasants or farmers struggling to live off the exports of commodities to the Global North. Clearly, the right to food is not a guarantee, even for those who grow food; the right is available only to those who are willing and able to pay for (or otherwise receive as aid) legally sanctioned food.

The failures of food security and other policies to guarantee the right to food are at the heart of the radical reforms that food sovereignty demands in order to end hunger and secure sustainable livelihoods for small-scale farmers (Holt-Giménez & Shattuck, 2011). Food sovereignty narratives identify modern notions of property rights and global capitalist markets as the source of the problems in the food system. These narratives are clear that reform in the food system requires the rejection of the global market for commodities as a mechanism for food security, and they implicate the state for its policies that marginalize small producers (Nyéléni, 2007). The calls for radical solutions, however, do not adequately engage with the problems that the modernist liberal state presents for food sovereignty. Working through these gaps and omissions requires an understanding of what is meant by liberal sovereignty and how it works in relationship to power, territory, and rights.

But first, a history.

The Political Economic Context of Food Sovereignty’s Emergence

Many food sovereignty scholars identify the enclosure acts in Great Britain in the 1700s and 1800s, which privatized common lands and forced thousands of peasants off the land, as a pivotal moment in the modernization of agriculture (Dawson, 2010). Enclosure consolidated farmland in the hands of a few and induced thousands of workers, now without the means to produce for themselves, to work for wages in factories (Kropotkin, 1907). This spatial shift in landownership facilitated and paralleled the transition from agrarian, feudal (or otherwise “traditional”) societies toward an urbanized, rationalized capitalist society structured politically through the nation-state and its biopolitical functions (Foucault, 1978; Habermas, 1987). According to Harvey (1990), “Scientific domination of nature promised freedom from scarcity, want and the arbitrariness of natural calamity” (12). Modernist assumptions about the separation of nature and society also normalized new allegiances to the state and its guarantee of food security through innovations in agricultural science (Russell, 1966).

The creation of subjects who value their identity as autonomous individuals politically allegiant to the nation-state and find fulfillment through capitalism is perhaps modernity’s greatest accomplishment (Habermas, 1987; Appadurai, 1996). Modernity is also characterized by the production of unequal social relations, in particular the production of racial categories through natural science (Gilroy, 1993), as well as the gendered division of labor in the production of public and private space (Landes, 1988). Modernity, with its emphasis on urban dwelling and wage-labor relations, also constructs the urban-rural divide that normalizes the countryside as the ideal site for the peasantry and food production (Murdoch & Pratt, 1993). The power of this narrative has transformed societies everywhere, making peasants into laborers and farmers into entrepreneurs (Gidwani, 2008).

In the past sixty years agricultural production in nearly every part of the world transitioned to some degree to a modern agricultural system characterized by a vertically integrated market (versus a subsistence) economy of food (Friedmann, 1993). The commodification of food in this “second food regime” (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989) resulted in the vertical integration as well as a concentration of power among a few very large firms, with national governments increasingly tailoring food regulation to the demands of agribusiness. Decision-making power about some of the most fundamental aspects of life—land, seed, and food supplies—is now concentrated in the hands of national states, supranational organizations, and transnational corporations (Goodman & Watts, 1997). These institutions work together, largely through territorial state policies such as structural adjustment programs, to continue the process of enclosure and to enroll small-scale producers in the global economy (Patel & McMichael, 2009). This form of development had impoverished and made hungry millions of people by removing them from the land and into wage-labor relations in the global economy.

State-run food security programs, premised on the notion that people should have access to safe, adequate, and appropriate food, emerged with the development of the welfare state in the 1960s, primarily in more developed countries. In the United States, food security policies emerged as a response to both the overproduction of commodities and widespread poverty during the Great Depression (Allen, 1999). This model has since expanded to many more nation-states, particularly during the Cold War era. Additionally, the technological changes brought to bear on agriculture via the Green Revolution in developing countries were an exercise in philanthrocapitalism justified by mitigating food insecurity (Morvaridi, 2012). The development of policies that employ market mechanisms to distribute food to the poor are consistent with microeconomic policies and neoliberal notions of the subject that make the individual responsible for nutritional intake via the purchase of food or the receipt of it as food aid (Barrett, 2002). Subsidies for commodities produced in the developed world also produce surplus to be used as a tool of foreign policy and artificially suppress food prices to facilitate growth and profit in other economic sectors (Selowsky, 1981).

Research shows that, in nearly every context, food aid alleviates the short-term need for food in an emergency but initiates a long-term pattern of dependence (Levinsohn & McMillan, 2007). The global circulation of commodities such as rice or maize reduces local prices, lowers farmers’ incomes, and ultimately undermines domestic production. Both the depression in income and the loss of domestic production set up conditions for dependency on foreign sources of food. Additionally, policies such as subsidies for commodity production encourage oversupply in countries from which the aid comes, which creates systemic dependence and poverty. Export models of agricultural development, such as the production of coffee, also produce situations of vulnerability in which farmers can potentially grow a commodity they can neither consume nor sell if global prices decline below the costs of production. This means that both food aid (the production of consumers) and export-oriented models of development (the production of commodities) are part of the “spatial fix”—the transnational restructuring of space via capitalist transformation of rural agricultural spaces (Harvey, 2003).

Food safety legislation connects the capitalist transformation of agriculture to the state and its food security programs in tangible ways. Food safety standards are a key mechanism for governing global trade in commodities (Dunn, 2003). Harmonization between countries is specifically designed to reduce barriers to trade and promote free trade. Standards, however, when based on the science of hygiene or food safety, often facilitate the production of food in ways that benefit multinational capital and marginalize small-scale producers (Kurtz, Trauger, & Passidomo, 2013). Food safety legislation is an effective way for states to steer agricultural production toward large-scale production models, such as those privileged in the contentious Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in the United States. The FSMA is designed to prevent food contamination rather than react to its occurrence. This means that food safety practices that were never appropriate for small-scale production and that are cost prohibitive for most farmers are now required, sparking widespread resistance from small-scale farmers.

Food security, through its market mechanisms, the (over)production of global commodities, and the territorial, state-based policies that promote it, requires dependency on the modernist industrial model of agriculture. These and other policies undermine the livelihoods of smallholders globally and generate new distances and inequities between producers and consumers. The state, through its policy mechanisms for food security or food safety, is a regulatory Trojan horse for promoting and continuing certain agricultural practices. The state also facilitates the accumulation of capital in the corporate sector, through the way in which new requirements act on and respond to strategic advantages already existing in commoditized, industrialized agriculture. While social movements have emerged to contest the corporate food regime, the state and the free markets it facilitates and enforces have blunted their political edge.

The Alternativeness of the Alternatives

Market relations are implicit in all the so-called sustainable alternatives that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century (Buck, Getz, & Guthman, 1997; Hinrichs, 2000). The emergence of organic agriculture in the 1980s and its widespread adoption as a federal program in the 2000s signaled a change on the part of both producers and consumers to reject environmentally damaging practices, although sales of certified organic products remain small. The development of standards for Fair Trade similarly signaled a rejection, largely by consumers, of unfair labor practices and unfair prices for global commodities, such as coffee and bananas. Sales of Fair Trade products are higher in Europe than in the United States, and such products command a growing market share (Renard, 2003). The globalization of organic production and the success of the Fair Trade model fit well within the neoliberal global food economy.

Under these alternative models, consumers pay more for a product in the belief that they are “doing good,” but they have little or no control over how the benefits are distributed or accrued on the other end of the supply chain (Trauger & Murphy, 2013). Far from addressing the failures of the market to ensure justice for consumers and producers, organic and Fair Trade have scaled up the governance of food from the state regulatory apparatus to supranational nongovernmental organizations that govern within voluntary auditing systems. These consumer-driven and market-based initiatives and their codification into labels and certifications only made organic and Fair Trade agriculture “safe for capitalism” (Guthman, 1998: 150). Other efforts to “draw attention to the severe shortcomings of commodifying food” (McMichael, 2009: 163) include civic agriculture (Lyson & Guptill, 2004) and the (re)localization of food production and consumption through “embedded” markets (Hinrichs, 2000; Winter, 2003).

Embedded or local food systems, however, have a tendency to produce a two-class food system in which those who produce the food cannot afford to purchase it. The production of inequality that persists in capitalism appears even in markets characterized by embeddedness, leaving middle-class consumers with more power and privilege than farmers or lower-income consumers (Hinrichs, 2000). Local food systems also trend toward a “defensive” (Winter, 2003) or “unreflexive” (DuPuis & Goodman, 2005) stance against global capitalism without interrogating how capitalist orientations in local markets reproduce the inequality that embeddedness set out to disrupt. The emphasis on the transformative potential of individual purchasing decisions in local and organic markets also is consistent with the neoliberal agenda of self-care and the modernist paradigm of individual autonomy and rationality (Guthman, 2008b).

Social movements on behalf of the poor and hungry often tend to see global markets as driving the production of inequities in the food system and to tailor their responses accordingly (Hinrichs, 2000; Levkoe, 2006). Food justice or community food security activism seeks to decommodify food, but it often includes charity as a troubling approach to food injustice (Anderson & Cook, 1999; Guthman, 2008b). Charity models are consistent with neoliberal food policies because the distributed foods are often surplus commodities, and their redistribution does not challenge the current economic structures of the food system that produce hunger and surplus in the first place (Poppendieck, 1999). Similarly, food justice movements that focus on equity as a goal are unclear or agnostic about what action is to be taken to achieve that goal (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010) and often discipline individuals to be better neoliberal subjects (Guthman, 2008a; Slocum, Shannon, Cadieux, & Beckman, 2011). Additionally, very few, if any, forms of food activism specifically target neoliberal policies, and they thus fail to engage with the state-based policies that develop and promote markets (Alkon & Mares, 2012).

Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011) assert that the new “food movements” of the late twentieth century constitute a Polanyian “double movement” between regulation and free-market dynamics. Polanyi (1944) argued that capitalism needs regulation of capital to temper its tendency toward crisis. Deregulation often begets efforts at regulatory reform, while regulation foments resistance to restriction; hence the “double” movement. This complex interplay between market freedom and policy formation ensures the existence of the liberal state. According to Polanyi (1944), neither markets nor states can exist or persist without each other. Agricultural policy in northern economies is a case in point of the iterative nature of markets and states. Food sovereignty, according to Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011), is a response to the deregulation of agriculture brought about through neoliberal policies in the Global North that extend globally through transnational capital. Food sovereignty, however, envisions not more regulation of agriculture (i.e., food safety laws) but different kinds of rights, many of which provide protection from corporations (i.e., rights to determine trade) for small-scale farmers, indigenous people, and peasants (Brenni, 2015).

Defining Food Sovereignty

Since the mid-1990s, the concept of food sovereignty has gained considerable traction in a political struggle for progressive reform in the food system (Edelman, 2014). It has been widely adopted in a variety of places and contexts, and while it has been effective in mobilizing change, it is broad in its scope and ambition (Clapp, 2012). The degree to which food sovereignty has become used as a rallying cry for food justice the world over is laudable, but the very broadness of its vision also threatens to reduce it to an empty, shifting signifier (Edelman, 2014), leaving many to wonder what is actually meant by food sovereignty and by whom and on whose behalf it is to be employed. In fact, Edelman argues that contemporary usage (post-1996) of the term to call for radical change in the food system belies a very contradictory past, as well as its murky, perhaps less radical, origins in national food policy discussions in Mexico in the 1980s. He argues that food sovereignty now has a particular origin story that is effective in mobilizing the movement around a particular kind of politics.

This more commonly known origin story asserts that food sovereignty as a concept was first discussed by La Via Campesina at its second international conference in Mexico in 1996. It was then publicly unveiled several months later in the NGO Response to the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and in LVC’s declaration “The Right to Produce and Access to Land” (Wittman, Desmarais, & Wiebe, 2010). These documents articulated food sovereignty as the “rights of nations” to determine their food systems and policies and the rights of peasants to produce food. The NGO response included a six-point plan for ending hunger and articulated the conditions under which food security might be achievable by and for nations. It includes strengthening the participation of farmers and NGOS in policy formation, reducing the concentration of wealth and power in corporations, strengthening the capacities of nations to provide food security, decreasing the detrimental environmental impacts of agriculture, and democratizing trade.

Edelman (2014) and others (Schanbacher, 2010; Patel, 2009) assert that in this document and in general, food sovereignty is positioned against food security. In the NGO statement, however, food sovereignty is identified as a prerequisite to achieving food security. Article 6 states that “international law must guarantee the right to food, ensuring that food sovereignty takes precedence over macro-economic policies and trade liberalization.” Point 6.1 declares that “each nation must have the right to achieve the level of food sufficiency and nutritional quality it considers appropriate without suffering retaliation of any kind.” Point 6.2 asserts that “all countries and peoples have the right to develop their own agriculture. Agriculture fulfills multiple functions, all essential to achieving food security.” Far from presenting their goals as the antithesis of food security, food sovereignty advocates demand the political rights to self-determination and autonomy that are prerequisites, in their view, for food security.

This first declaration of food sovereignty was subsequently elaborated on in various meetings of NGOS and civil society organizations at various meetings. These include the Foro Mundial in 2001, the meeting in Sélingué, Mali, in 2007 from which the Nyéléni Declaration emerged, and a meeting of La Via Campesina in 2012. The Nyéléni Declaration (2007) articulated the most frequently invoked definition of food sovereignty, which is:

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 the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.

Agarwal (2014) notes that this shift in focus from “nations” in 1996 to “peoples” in 2007 is significant in that it positions food sovereignty as allencompassing, embracing everyone in the food chain as a potentially powerful actor.¹ The shift from “nations” to “peoples” is not just a semantic move to make food sovereignty more inclusive, however. It also signals a shift from disentangling national-scale food policies from transnational capital (goals that take up three of the six points in the 1996 declaration) to an interest in local action to assert, generate, and sustain political autonomy at multiple scales.

The Nyéléni Declaration marks a key moment in transnational organizing. It brought together a select group of five hundred delegates from a variety of organizations in eighty different countries to specifically address how to craft an international agend...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Political Practice at the Margins
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index