We are not all the same: taking gender seriously in food sovereignty discourse

Abstract

The vision of food sovereignty calls for radical changes in agricultural, political and social systems related to food. These changes also entail addressing inequalities and asymmetries of power in gender relations. While women’s rights are seen as central to food sovereignty, given the key role women play in food production, procurement and preparation, family food security, and food culture, few attempts have been made to systematically integrate gender in food sovereignty analysis. This paper uses case studies of corporate agricultural expansion to highlight the different dynamics of incorporation and struggle in relation to women’s and men’s different position, class and endowments. These contribute to processes of social differentiation and class formation, creating rural communities more complex and antagonistic than those sketched in food sovereignty discourse and neo-populist claims of peasant egalitarianism, cooperation and solidarity. Proponents of food sovereignty need to address gender systematically, as a strategic element of its construct and not only as a mobilising ideology. Further, if food sovereignty is to have an intellectual future within critical agrarian studies, it must reconcile the inherent contradictions of the ‘we are all the same’ discourse, taking analysis of social differences as a starting point.

Keywords:

• gender
• women
• food sovereignty
• land
• labour
• corporate agriculture

Notes

1. Wittman et al., “The Origins,” 4.

2. Patel, “Food Sovereignty,” 670.

3. Wittman et al., “The Origins”; and Patel, “Food Sovereignty.”

4. Patel, “Food Sovereignty”; and Patel, cited in Wittman, “Food Sovereignty,” 92.

5. During the fifth conference, held 16–23 October 2008 in Maputo, Mozambique, LVC launched a world campaign “For an End to Violence against Women”. Patel, “Food Sovereignty”; and Wittman, “Food Sovereignty.” Five years later, in Jakarta, at the Fourth Women’s Assembly of LVC, peasant women from all over the world reasserted the commitment to end violence against women and discussed achievements and ways forward, including a strategy for reinforcing and giving continuity to the campaign against violence in all countries. LVC, “Women’s Assembly Evaluates its Global Campaign.”

6. Wittman et al.,“The Origins”; and Wittman, “Food Sovereignty”. For an account of gender issues within LVC and its Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, see Monsalve, “Gender and Land.”

7. Wittman et al., “The Origins”; and Patel, “Food Sovereignty.”

8. Caro Molina, “Feminism and Food Sovereignty.”

9. Cousins and Scoones, “Contested Paradigms,” 44.

10. Brass, Peasants, Populism, and Postmodernism, 314.

11. Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty,” 1249.

12. La Via Campesina (LVC), Women of Via Campesina International Manifesto, emphasis added.

13. Patel, “Food Sovereignty.”

14. Ibid., 1.

15. van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe, The Art of Peasant Farming, 130.

16. Bernstein, Class Dynamics, 65, 124; and Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’,” 1051.

17. ‘Corporate’ in this sense can refer either to capitalist firms, state-owned companies, non-profit organisations or farmer-owned cooperatives. See White et al., “The New Enclosures,” 619.

18. As recently expounded by van der Ploeg, The Art of Peasant Farming.

19. Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’,” 1046.

20. Labour regimes are ‘different methods of recruiting labour and their connections with how labour is organized in production (labour process) and how it secures its subsistence’. Bernstein, “Labour Regimes,” 31–32.

21. Patel, “Food Sovereignty,” 2.

22. FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture.

23. Monsalve, “Gender and Land.”

24. This position emerged during the debates held at the GCAR international seminar on “Agrarian Reform and Gender”, in 2003 in Cochabamba, which convened representatives of peasant, indigenous and human rights movements from 24 countries. Within a position that lobbies for communal forms of land tenancy, the participants also recognised the need to strengthen women’s land rights in different tenure systems and ‘not only as individual private property’. Ibid., 200. They asked: ‘how secure can individual entitlements to lands for peasant women be when established in a context of privatization and economic liberalization policies that have already brought about dispossession and loss of land of many families and communities?” Ibid., 198.

25. O’Laughlin, “Gender Justice,” 203.

26. For comprehensive discussions of feminist critiques of agrarian and peasant studies, see Razavi, “Engendering the Political Economy”; and Deere, “What Difference does Gender Make?”

27. Razavi, “Engendering the Political Economy.”

28. Deere, “What Difference does Gender Make?,” 63. Razavi, “Engendering the Political Economy”, reminds us of feminist scholars such as Agarwal, Folbre, Hart, Kabeer and Whitehead, who have amply documented intra-household gender inequalities.

29. O’Laughin, cited in Razavi, “Engendering the Political Economy,” 207; and O’Laughlin, “Gender Justice,” 204. As O’Laughlin notes, ‘the dynamics of capital accumulation also depend on how non-marketed work affects the real wage and the prices of commodities that enter the circuit of capital. Above all, from the perspective of labour a livelihood does not depend on wage income alone, for it includes the unmarketed labour of women, children and men.’ O’Laughlin, “Gender Justice,” 191.

30. Razavi, “Engendering the Political Economy,” 222.

31. Behrman, Meinzen-Dick and Quisumbing, “The Gender Implications”; and Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications.

32. Julia and White, “Gendered Experiences of Dispossession.”

33. Information and quotes about the Iban Dayak come from unpublished research conducted by Julia in October 2011, commissioned by the Economic and Social Empowerment Commission of Pontianak Archdiocese.

34. One million Indonesian Rupiah was equivalent to about US$90 or €70 at the time of the fieldwork.

35. Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications, 31.

36. FAO, The Gender and Equity Implications (Northern Ghana), 18. In addition to farming, traditional sources of livelihood in this region are fishing and livestock for men, and petty trading of foodstuffs, charcoal production, collection of firewood and picking of dawadawa and shea fruit from the wild for sale for women. Ibid., 15.

37. Ibid., 14.

38. See footnote 6.

39. Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications, 31. It is important, however, to emphasise that these people had been dispossessed of control over land not by processes ignited by capitalist ventures but by past decades of government resettlement and land reform policies, as highlighted in Lund, “Fragmented Sovereignty,” 900.

40. Of the total workforce, 49% are permanent employees (staff), 32% are temporary (specific) workers who have annual renewable contracts and 19% are transient workers (casual labourers), who may be hired for one, two or three months. Female participation is higher among specific (81%) and transient (64%) as opposed to permanent workers (48%). Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 24.

41. Ibid., 23.

42. From notes taken by Park in Arusha during focus group discussions with female wage workers, June 15, 2011.

43. Tobacco farmers in Pakse Village lived in an area with more fertile lands and easier access to water and roads. In contrast, those living in in Somsanook Village were more isolated and farther away from the water. Both villages are in Pakkading District, Borikhamxai Province.

44. Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 32.

47. FAO, The Gender and Equity Implications (Zambia), 29.

48. Ibid., 26.

49. FAO, The Gender and Equity Implications (Northern Ghana).

50. Julia and White, “Gendered Experiences of Dispossession,” 1012.

51. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 20.

52. FAO, The Gender and Equity Implications (Zambia), 27.

53. Ibid., 29.

54. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 20.

55. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications.

56. Ibid; and Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications.

57. Whitehead and Kabeer, Living with Uncertainty; Jackson, “Gender Analysis of Land”; Razavi, Agrarian Change; and O’Laughlin, “Gender Justice.”

58. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 25.

59. This is a relatively high rate of female participation compared with other mango producer groups in Ghana. FAO, The Gender and Equity Implications (Northern Ghana), 23.

60. Ibid.

61. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 22.

62. Ibid., 23.

63. Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications, 33.

64. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 19.

65. Ibid., 21.

66. FAO, The Gender and Equity Implications (Zambia), 28.

67. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications; Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications.

68. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 35.

69. Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications, 35. Additionally, in Tanzania, 28% of respondents noted ‘no change’ in their cash income and 1% said they were ‘worse off’. Daley and Park, The Gender and Equity Implications, 35. In Lao PDR 29% of focus group participants said there had been no change in their food situation and 22% indicated that they were ‘worse off’ than before.

70. Daley et al., The Gender and Equity Implications, 43.

71. From field notes taken by Julia in October 2011.

72. Bernstein, “‘Changing before our very Eyes’.”

73. Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty,” 1255.

74. According to intersectionality perspectives, gender must be understood in the context of multidimensional, cross-cutting power relations embedded in social identities. Collins, Black Feminist Thought; and Shields, “Gender.”

75. Brass, Peasants, Populism, and Postmodernism, 314.