Bridging divides: constructing food sovereignty in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an in-depth account of the motivations that inspired the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance to engage food sovereignty for food system change. Pointing to the tensions between the theory and practice of food sovereignty, we highlight the challenges of mobilizing food sovereignty within highly urbanized, consumer-dominated settings. We argue the need to overcome the dominant role of producers in constructing food sovereignty to open up spaces of action for the non-producing population. The spirit of solidarity food sovereignty has inspired needs to be held up and further expanded to build even stronger and lasting alliances between diverse actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Food sovereignty
• Australia
• alternative food politics
• urban food initiatives

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to our informants for sharing their views on food sovereignty in Australia with us. We are also grateful for the valuable feedback we received on previous versions of this paper at different occasions, including the workshop ‘Envisioning the Future of Food Across North–South Divides: Transregional Food Networks and Movements’ at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin 2016. Lastly, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped us sharpen our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Sarah Ruth Sippel is a Senior Researcher at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her research explores the nexus between global food security, financialization of natural resources, and emerging forms of solidarities within global agri-food systems. She is Principal Investigator of a four-year research project on imaginations of land (C04, SFB 1199) funded by the German Research Foundation.

Nicolette Larder is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of New England, Australia. Her work has been published in Local Environment, the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Journal of Agrarian Change. Her current research is focused on Australian food justice movements and the financialization of everyday life in rural Australia.

Notes

1 While being aware of the various issues related to regional indications and their geopolitical and historical ‘metageographies’ (Lewis and Wigen 1997), in this paper we use the terms Global North/South as a shorthand to distinguish contexts marked by highly industrialized agricultural systems (US, Canada, some parts of Europe, Australia, New Zealand) from those where smallholder farming structures prevail. By using these terms we neither seek to unreflectively reproduce metageographical patterns nor ignore the important differences between and within the respective contexts.

2 AFSA is registered as an incorporated association, a legal person that operates not-for-profit.

3 Specifically we used a snowball sampling strategy where we asked participants to nominate others who were key to the early development of AFSA. The six interviewees were nominated as key actors by at least two others within the group. All interview data are presented in a de-identified form to ensure protection of the interviewees’ anonymity.

4 LVC’s framing of food sovereignty is grounded within a particular understanding of peasant farming and its values; for a critical discussion of LVC’s construction of the ‘peasant way’ see Bernstein (2014) and McMichael (2015).

5 The National Food Plan was an election promise of the Gillard Labor Government during the 2010 election. The National Food Plan green paper was released in mid-2012 and was open for consultation. A range of stakeholders including major food and beverage corporations and associated lobby groups, State Governments, the National Farmers Federation, and AFSA, among others, made comments.

6 One critical part of food sovereignty in the Australian context that remains woefully ill-explored is that of indigenous sovereignty. Although AFSA’s People’s Food Plan did include a section on indigenous food practices there was little appetite among neither the urban consumers nor niche producers who currently engage with food sovereignty to reflect on how food sovereignty might contribute to a broader rethinking of indigenous land rights and correcting the legacy of land dispossession. Indigenous groups were also largely underrepresented in the compilation of the People’s Food Plan.

7 According to AFSA, the People’s Food Plan involved over 600 people participating in 40 public forums throughout Australia from September to December 2012 (AFSA 2014).

8 The shift towards producers as AFSA’s key actors has recently been institutionalized by an amendment of AFSA’s constitution that made the organization explicitly farmer led by giving them majority control over decision making processes within AFSA (AFSA 2018a).

9 Since August 2016, AFSA’s farmers’ branch Fair Food Farmers United (FFFU) is a provisionally accepted member of LVC (AFSA 2018b).

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this paper has been supported by the German Research Foundation-funded research project C04 of the SFB 1199 and the Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme initiated by Universities Australia and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). This support is gratefully acknowledged.