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Abstract
This paper addresses the ambiguity of the term ‘sovereignty’ in food sovereignty (FS), intending to clarify the ‘aspirational sovereignty’ that food sovereignty movements indicate as the ideal configuration of power that would allow FS to flourish, or which might help measure movement towards FS. Since aspirational sovereignty is conditioned by existing power relations, the paper elaborates components of ‘actually existing sovereignty’, based on readings of a variety of political and social science literatures. By critically assessing the difference between actually existing and aspirational sovereignty across three geographic–political levels, the paper offers strategic options for constructing FS, and suggests what such an elaborated definition of FS’s sovereignty might offer future research on FS.
Acknowledgements
I thank my supervisor Jun Borras for his invaluable assistance in moving through the world of scholarly research. Colleagues at ISS, including Louis Thiemann, Christina Schiavoni, Zoe Brent, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Kana Okada and Mindi Schneider provided useful feedback on this paper; thanks go to them but, as usual, I take credit for any remaining inadequacies.
Notes
1. For example, at the ‘Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue’ symposium held at Yale University, September 2013 and at the International Institute of Social Studies, January 2014.
2. Patel, “Grassroots Voices,” 668.
3. Edelman, “Food Sovereignty”; Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty: A Sceptical View”; and Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty, Food Security, and Democratic Choice.”
4. McMichael, “Global Citizenship.”
5. Bacon, “Who decides what is Fair in Fair Trade?”
6. Schiavoni, “Competing Sovereignties.”
7. Alonso-Fradejas et al., “Food Sovereignty,” 443.
8. Alonso-Fradejas et al., “Food Sovereignty,” 444.
9. There are of course nuances within and between these categories that could and should be dealt with, but these are beyond the scope of this paper.
10. Claeys, “Via Campesina’s Struggle.”
11. According to the principles formulated at the 2007 Nyéléni international conference organised in part by LVC, a ‘food sovereign’ food system: (1) focuses on food for people (rather than as commodities); (2) values food producers; (3) localises food systems; (4) puts control locally; (5) builds knowledge and skills; and (6) works with nature. Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007. http://www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290.
12. See McMichael, “Historicizing Food Sovereignty” for an example of the former; and Borras, “The Politics of Transnational Agrarian Movements” for the latter.
13. Although there are other sites worth considering as levels themselves (eg the farm, household, neighbourhood, village, city, province), these are contained within the local level. I have chosen not to address ‘the individual’ as a level of sovereignty mainly because the ontologies of FSMs have promoted more communal than individual conceptions of power and sovereignty. Further, such an inclusion would require addressing detailed debates over structure and agency – and how these play out in individuals – and would thus take the paper too far off course. Aside from keeping in mind that every site above the single human level is composed of individuals who themselves might compete or collaborate within it, in this paper the individual level is put aside.
14. Corbin, “Grounded Theory.”
15. See the LVC declarations and proclamations listed below. For scholarly works consulted, see, among others, Borras et al., Transnational Agrarian Movements; Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty; Litfin, The Greening of Sovereignty; and Wills, “The World turned Upside Down?”
16. One caveat is that the relationships between rules and outcomes are not simple. Rules can have material and/or discursive influence, but are not uniformly or determinatively linked to changes in outcomes. Furthermore, in his treatment of sovereignty Agamben notes the importance of the ‘state of exception’, wherein established rules do not apply to certain subjects. Agamben, Homo Sacer.
17. Castells, “Communication”; and Trauger, “Toward a Political Geography,” 11.
18. Iles and Montenegro, “Sovereignty at what scale?”
19. Foucault, Society must be Defended.
20. Hansen and Stepputat, “Sovereignty Revisited,” 295.
21. Li, “To make Live or let Die?,” 67.
22. Edelman, “Food Sovereignty.”
23. Iles and Montenegro, “Sovereignty at what scale?” 482.
24. See, for example, LVC, “The G20.”
25. Desmarais, “Peasant Resistance”; Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty; and Patel, “Grassroots Voices,” 668.
26. Dingwerth, Democratic Governance, 11.
27. For example, Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics.”
28. Warren, “What does Corruption Mean?,” 328.
29. See Dryzek and Stevenson, “Global Democracy”; and Eckersley, The Green State, 115.
30. Menser, “Transnational Participatory Democracy.”
31. Eckersley, “Greening the Nation-state,” 159.
32. Eckersley, The Green State, 1.
33. Massey, For Space.
34. For example, LVC, “In the Year of Family Farming.”
35. For example, LVC, “Evenstad Declaration.”
36. Tsing, Friction.
37. Wright and Wolford, To inherit the Earth; and Wiebe, “Women Reversing Desertification.”
38. ICSP, From Maputo to Jakarta.
39. IAASTD, Agriculture at a Crossroads.
40. Altieri and Toledo, “The Agroecological Revolution in Latin America.”
41. Holt-Giménez, Campesino a campesino; and van der Ploeg, Peasants and the Art of Farming.
42. For example, LVC, “Deal a Decisive Blow to Neoliberalism.”
43. Desmarais, “The Vía Campesina”; and LVC, “November 25th.”
44. Kloppenburg and Hassanein, “From Old School to Reform School?,” 418.
45. Weis, “The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions”; and LVC, “The People of the World.”
46. Jansen, “The Debate on Food Sovereignty Theory; and Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty, Food Security, and Democratic Choice.”
47. Robbins, “Exploring the Localization Dimension.”
48. Burnett and Murphy, “What Place for International Trade?”
49. Jansen, “The Debate on Food Sovereignty,” 219.
50. Jansen, “The Debate on Food Sovereignty,” 228.
51. Purcell and Brown, “Against the Local Trap.”
52. Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own; Agarwal, “Gender Relations and Food Security”; White, “Agriculture and the Generation Problem”; and Ribot, Democratic Decentralization of Natural Resources, 12.
53. Borras and Franco, Towards a Broader View, 11.
54. Robbins, “Exploring the Localization Dimension.”
55. Clark, “Can the State foster Food Sovereignty?,” 2.
56. McKay and Nehring, “The ‘State’ of Food Sovereignty in Latin America,” 2013, 1.
57. See Scott, Seeing like a State; and Boyer, “Food Security, Food Sovereignty.”
58. Foster and Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist needs to Know.
59. Fox, The Politics of Food in Mexico.
60. Monsalve Suárez, “The Human Rights Framework.”
61. Malseed, “Where there is No Movement.”
62. O’Brien, “Rightful Resistance Revisited.”
63. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders.
64. See McKay and Nehring, “The ‘State’ of Food Sovereignty in Latin America,” 2014; Giunta, “Food Sovereignty in Ecuador”; Cockburn, “Bolivia’s Food Sovereignty”; and Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.
65. Clark, “Can the State foster Food Sovereignty?”; Godek, “The Complexity of Food Sovereignty Policymaking”; and McKay and Nehring, “The ‘State’ of Food Sovereignty in Latin America,” 2014.
66. Schiavoni, “Competing Sovereignties.”
67. Thiemann, “Operationalizing Food Sovereignty.”
68. McKay and Nehring, “The ‘State’ of Food Sovereignty in Latin America,” 2014, 1196.
69. Godek and Araújo, “Opportunities and Challenges.”
70. Sundar, “Mimetic Sovereignties.”
71. Trauger, “Toward a Political Geography,” 1140.
72. Ibid.
73. Tarlau, “Thirty Years of Landless Workers.”
74. Trauger, “Toward a Political Geography,” 1145.
75. Trauger, “Toward a Political Geography,” 1148.
76. Trauger, “Toward a Political Geography,” 1131.
77. CFS, “Reform of the Committee on World Food Security,” 2.
78. CFS, “Reform of the Committee on World Food Security,” 1.
79. Brem-Wilson, “Towards Food Sovereignty.”
80. Godek and Araújo, “Opportunities and Challenges.”
81. LVC, “Rome.”
82. Watson, Foundations of International Political Economy, 180.
83. Desmarais, Globalization and the Power of Peasants, 104–134.
84. Claeys, “Via Campesina’s Struggle.”
85. Mulvaney and Schiavoni, “Evaluation of the CSM.”
86. Guffens et al. “The Myth of Good Land and Natural Resource Governance.”
87. Rosset and Martínez-Torres, “Diálogo de saberes in La Vía Campesina.”
88. See Mouffe, “Civil Society”.
89. Rosset, “Rethinking Agrarian Reform.”
90. Borras, “The Politics of Transnational Agrarian Movements”; and Scholte, “Civil Society.”
91. Tsing, Friction.
92. Ibid., 7.
93. Monsalve Suárez, “The Human Rights Framework.”
94. Baletti et al., “‘Late Mobilization’.”
95. Patel, “Grassroots Voices,” 663.