Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2013.876998
M. Edelman
‘Food sovereignty’ has become a mobilizing frame for social movements, a set of legal norms and practices aimed at transforming food and agriculture systems, and a free-floating signifier filled with varying kinds of content. Canonical accounts credit the Vía Campesina transnational agrarian movement with coining and elaborating the term, but its proximate origins are actually in an early 1980s Mexican government program. Central American activists nonetheless appropriated and redefined it in the late 1980s. Advocates typically suggest that ‘food sovereignty’ is diametrically opposed to ‘food security’, but historically there actually has been considerable slippage and overlap between these concepts. Food sovereignty theory has usually failed to indicate whether the ‘sovereign’ is the nation, region or locality, or ‘the people’. This lack of specificity about the sovereign feeds a reluctance to think concretely about the regulatory mechanisms necessary to consolidate and enforce food sovereignty, particularly limitations on long-distance and international trade and on firm and farm size. Several regulatory possibilities are mentioned and found wanting. Finally, entrenched consumer needs and desires related to internationally-traded products – from coffee to pineapples – imply additional obstacles to the localisation of production, distribution and consumption that many food sovereignty proponents support.
{"title":"Food sovereignty: forgotten genealogies and future regulatory challenges","authors":"M. Edelman","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876998","url":null,"abstract":"‘Food sovereignty’ has become a mobilizing frame for social movements, a set of legal norms and practices aimed at transforming food and agriculture systems, and a free-floating signifier filled with varying kinds of content. Canonical accounts credit the Vía Campesina transnational agrarian movement with coining and elaborating the term, but its proximate origins are actually in an early 1980s Mexican government program. Central American activists nonetheless appropriated and redefined it in the late 1980s. Advocates typically suggest that ‘food sovereignty’ is diametrically opposed to ‘food security’, but historically there actually has been considerable slippage and overlap between these concepts. Food sovereignty theory has usually failed to indicate whether the ‘sovereign’ is the nation, region or locality, or ‘the people’. This lack of specificity about the sovereign feeds a reluctance to think concretely about the regulatory mechanisms necessary to consolidate and enforce food sovereignty, particularly limitations on long-distance and international trade and on firm and farm size. Several regulatory possibilities are mentioned and found wanting. Finally, entrenched consumer needs and desires related to internationally-traded products – from coffee to pineapples – imply additional obstacles to the localisation of production, distribution and consumption that many food sovereignty proponents support.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876998","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.937709
K. Paprocki, J. Cons
This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production.
{"title":"Life in a shrimp zone: aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh's coastal landscape","authors":"K. Paprocki, J. Cons","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.937709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.937709","url":null,"abstract":"This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.937709","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2013.852082
H. Bernstein
This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that ‘frame’ food sovereignty (FS): (1) a comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised agriculture, and its ecological consequences, in the current moment of globalisation, (2) advocacy of a (the) ‘peasant way’ as the basis of a sustainable and socially just food system, and (3) a programme to realise that world-historical goal. While sharing some of the concerns of (1), I am sceptical about (2) because of how FS conceives ‘peasants’, and the claim of some of its leading advocates that small producers who practice agroecological farming – understood 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 (3) 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.
{"title":"Food sovereignty via the ‘peasant way’: a sceptical view","authors":"H. Bernstein","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.852082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.852082","url":null,"abstract":"This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that ‘frame’ food sovereignty (FS): (1) a comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised agriculture, and its ecological consequences, in the current moment of globalisation, (2) advocacy of a (the) ‘peasant way’ as the basis of a sustainable and socially just food system, and (3) a programme to realise that world-historical goal. While sharing some of the concerns of (1), I am sceptical about (2) because of how FS conceives ‘peasants’, and the claim of some of its leading advocates that small producers who practice agroecological farming – understood 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 (3) 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.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.852082","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.963568
M. Edelman, T. Weis, A. Baviskar, S. Borras, E. Holt-gimenez, D. Kandiyoti, Wendy Wolford
Visions of food sovereignty have been extremely important in helping to galvanize broad-based and diverse movements around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Yet while food sovereignty has thrived as a ‘dynamic process’, until recently there has been insufficient attention to many thorny questions, such as its origins, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. This essay contributes to food sovereignty praxis by pushing the process of critical self-reflection forward and considering its relation to critical agrarian studies – and vice versa.
{"title":"Introduction: critical perspectives on food sovereignty","authors":"M. Edelman, T. Weis, A. Baviskar, S. Borras, E. Holt-gimenez, D. Kandiyoti, Wendy Wolford","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.963568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.963568","url":null,"abstract":"Visions of food sovereignty have been extremely important in helping to galvanize broad-based and diverse movements around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Yet while food sovereignty has thrived as a ‘dynamic process’, until recently there has been insufficient attention to many thorny questions, such as its origins, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. This essay contributes to food sovereignty praxis by pushing the process of critical self-reflection forward and considering its relation to critical agrarian studies – and vice versa.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.963568","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2013.876623
A. Desmarais, Hannah Wittman
This paper examines how the concept and framework of food sovereignty has been incorporated in food policy agendas across diverse sectors of Canadian society, particularly in the work and discourse of the National Farmers Union, Québec's Union Paysanne, Food Secure Canada and movements for Indigenous food sovereignty. This analysis highlights both the challenges to conceptualizing food sovereignty and the tensions in defining inclusive policies that engage with food sovereignty at distinct, and often overlapping, scales. We critically assess how the ‘unity in diversity’ principle of food sovereignty functions in the Canadian context, paying particular attention to the policy implications of debates about the meaning of food sovereignty. What is most evident in examining the demands of a wide range of actors using food sovereignty language in Canada is a shared aim to reclaim a public voice in shaping the food system and a growing convergence around ideals of social justice, environmental sustainability and diversity. But, if food sovereignty is about fundamental transformation of the food system, it is yet in initial stages in this country.
{"title":"Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada","authors":"A. Desmarais, Hannah Wittman","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876623","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines how the concept and framework of food sovereignty has been incorporated in food policy agendas across diverse sectors of Canadian society, particularly in the work and discourse of the National Farmers Union, Québec's Union Paysanne, Food Secure Canada and movements for Indigenous food sovereignty. This analysis highlights both the challenges to conceptualizing food sovereignty and the tensions in defining inclusive policies that engage with food sovereignty at distinct, and often overlapping, scales. We critically assess how the ‘unity in diversity’ principle of food sovereignty functions in the Canadian context, paying particular attention to the policy implications of debates about the meaning of food sovereignty. What is most evident in examining the demands of a wide range of actors using food sovereignty language in Canada is a shared aim to reclaim a public voice in shaping the food system and a growing convergence around ideals of social justice, environmental sustainability and diversity. But, if food sovereignty is about fundamental transformation of the food system, it is yet in initial stages in this country.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876623","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.938057
Isabella Giunta
The Ecuadorian Constitution (2008) declared food sovereignty a strategic goal and a government obligation, embracing many of the proposals put forth since the late 1990s by Ecuadorian federations linked to Vía Campesina. The issue of food sovereignty has expanded from the inner circles of peasant organizations to the wider context of the whole Ecuadorian society. The paper provides an overview of this process, describing the collective actions that made it possible. Moreover, it attempts to explain the reasons why the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ is currently evaluated as weak, and the motivations for a gap between constitutional mandates and the ongoing official policies.
{"title":"Food sovereignty in Ecuador: peasant struggles and the challenge of institutionalization","authors":"Isabella Giunta","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.938057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.938057","url":null,"abstract":"The Ecuadorian Constitution (2008) declared food sovereignty a strategic goal and a government obligation, embracing many of the proposals put forth since the late 1990s by Ecuadorian federations linked to Vía Campesina. The issue of food sovereignty has expanded from the inner circles of peasant organizations to the wider context of the whole Ecuadorian society. The paper provides an overview of this process, describing the collective actions that made it possible. Moreover, it attempts to explain the reasons why the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ is currently evaluated as weak, and the motivations for a gap between constitutional mandates and the ongoing official policies.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.938057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2013.876995
K. Burnett, S. Murphy
International agricultural commodity trade is central to the livelihoods of millions of farmers across the globe, and to most countries' food security strategies. Yet global trade policies are contributing to food insecurity and are undermining livelihoods. Food Sovereignty emerged in part as the articulation of resistance to the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and the imposition of multilateral trade disciplines on domestic agriculture policy. While not explicitly rejecting trade, the food sovereignty movement is identified with a strong preference for local markets. It challenges existing international trade structures, and on the whole its official position on trade remains ambiguous. We argue that trade remains important to the realization of the livelihoods of small-scale producers, including peasants active in the Food Sovereignty movement. It also matters for food security. That it remains underexplored by the movement risks marginalizing millions of smallholder producers, and risks overlooking opportunities to shape trade rules along more food sovereign lines. The authors suggest further development of the movement's position on trade is strategically important.
{"title":"What place for international trade in food sovereignty?","authors":"K. Burnett, S. Murphy","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876995","url":null,"abstract":"International agricultural commodity trade is central to the livelihoods of millions of farmers across the globe, and to most countries' food security strategies. Yet global trade policies are contributing to food insecurity and are undermining livelihoods. Food Sovereignty emerged in part as the articulation of resistance to the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and the imposition of multilateral trade disciplines on domestic agriculture policy. While not explicitly rejecting trade, the food sovereignty movement is identified with a strong preference for local markets. It challenges existing international trade structures, and on the whole its official position on trade remains ambiguous. We argue that trade remains important to the realization of the livelihoods of small-scale producers, including peasants active in the Food Sovereignty movement. It also matters for food security. That it remains underexplored by the movement risks marginalizing millions of smallholder producers, and risks overlooking opportunities to shape trade rules along more food sovereign lines. The authors suggest further development of the movement's position on trade is strategically important.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876995","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.937338
Karine Peschard
Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties. However, the issue of their realization has proven so thorny that even researchers and activists who are sympathetic to farmers' rights now express growing skepticism regarding their usefulness. In this article, I explore this debate through a case study of India's unique Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights (PPV&FR) Act. Based on an analysis of advances and setbacks in implementing the PPV&FR Act and a discussion of other relevant pieces of legislation, I argue that the politics of biodiversity and IPRs in India in recent years has been characteristic of the cunning state, and that this has seriously compromised the meaningful implementation of farmers' rights.
{"title":"Farmers' rights and food sovereignty: critical insights from India","authors":"Karine Peschard","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.937338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.937338","url":null,"abstract":"Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties. However, the issue of their realization has proven so thorny that even researchers and activists who are sympathetic to farmers' rights now express growing skepticism regarding their usefulness. In this article, I explore this debate through a case study of India's unique Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights (PPV&FR) Act. Based on an analysis of advances and setbacks in implementing the PPV&FR Act and a discussion of other relevant pieces of legislation, I argue that the politics of biodiversity and IPRs in India in recent years has been characteristic of the cunning state, and that this has seriously compromised the meaningful implementation of farmers' rights.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.937338","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.937339
A. Trauger
The failures of food security and other policies to guarantee the right to food motivate the calls for the radical reforms to the food system called for by food sovereignty. Food sovereignty narratives identify neoliberal state policies and global capital as the source of the food insecurity, and seek new rights for producers and consumers. However, the nature of territorial state power and the juridical structures of the (neo)liberal state may mute the more radical aims of food sovereignty. An engagement with literature on liberal sovereignty illustrates the primacy of the neoliberal market to the exercise of liberal sovereignty by the modern nation-state. The rights of the state to govern trade, often in the interests of capital, and the rights of trade and commerce often trump the citizen's right to food. Reading political theory against the practice of food sovereignty offers insight into solutions for food sovereignty that work within, against and in between the powers of the sovereign liberal state. These include reframing property rights as use rights, engaging in non-commodified food exchanges and practicing civil disobedience to usher in reforms without compromising on essential elements of the food sovereignty agenda.
{"title":"Toward a political geography of food sovereignty: transforming territory, exchange and power in the liberal sovereign state","authors":"A. Trauger","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.937339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.937339","url":null,"abstract":"The failures of food security and other policies to guarantee the right to food motivate the calls for the radical reforms to the food system called for by food sovereignty. Food sovereignty narratives identify neoliberal state policies and global capital as the source of the food insecurity, and seek new rights for producers and consumers. However, the nature of territorial state power and the juridical structures of the (neo)liberal state may mute the more radical aims of food sovereignty. An engagement with literature on liberal sovereignty illustrates the primacy of the neoliberal market to the exercise of liberal sovereignty by the modern nation-state. The rights of the state to govern trade, often in the interests of capital, and the rights of trade and commerce often trump the citizen's right to food. Reading political theory against the practice of food sovereignty offers insight into solutions for food sovereignty that work within, against and in between the powers of the sovereign liberal state. These include reframing property rights as use rights, engaging in non-commodified food exchanges and practicing civil disobedience to usher in reforms without compromising on essential elements of the food sovereignty agenda.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.937339","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-10-15DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2013.876996
B. Agarwal
In recent years, the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ has gained increasing ground among grassroots groups, taking the form of a global movement. But there is no uniform conceptualization of what food sovereignty constitutes. Indeed, the definition has been expanding over time. It has moved from its initial focus on national self-sufficiency in food production (‘the right of nations’) to local self-sufficiency (‘the rights of peoples’). There is also a growing emphasis on the rights of women and other disadvantaged groups, and on consensus building and democratic choice. This paper provides a critique of some of the major tenets of the food sovereignty movement. It recognizes that many developing countries may wish to pursue the goal of self-sufficiency in the context of the global food crises, and that it is important to promote social equality and democratic choice. Taken together, however, there can be serious contradictions between the key features of the food sovereignty vision, such as between the goals of national and local food self-sufficiency; between promoting food crops and a farmer's freedom to choose to what extent to farm, which crops to grow, and how to grow them; between strengthening family farming and achieving gender equality; and between collective and individual rights, especially over land ownership. The paper also reflects on the ways in which some of the food sovereignty goals could be better achieved through innovative institutional change, without sacrificing an individual's freedom to choose.
{"title":"Food sovereignty, food security and democratic choice: critical contradictions, difficult conciliations","authors":"B. Agarwal","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876996","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ has gained increasing ground among grassroots groups, taking the form of a global movement. But there is no uniform conceptualization of what food sovereignty constitutes. Indeed, the definition has been expanding over time. It has moved from its initial focus on national self-sufficiency in food production (‘the right of nations’) to local self-sufficiency (‘the rights of peoples’). There is also a growing emphasis on the rights of women and other disadvantaged groups, and on consensus building and democratic choice. This paper provides a critique of some of the major tenets of the food sovereignty movement. It recognizes that many developing countries may wish to pursue the goal of self-sufficiency in the context of the global food crises, and that it is important to promote social equality and democratic choice. Taken together, however, there can be serious contradictions between the key features of the food sovereignty vision, such as between the goals of national and local food self-sufficiency; between promoting food crops and a farmer's freedom to choose to what extent to farm, which crops to grow, and how to grow them; between strengthening family farming and achieving gender equality; and between collective and individual rights, especially over land ownership. The paper also reflects on the ways in which some of the food sovereignty goals could be better achieved through innovative institutional change, without sacrificing an individual's freedom to choose.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876996","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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