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Abstract
This article critically reflects upon conceptual and analytical questions that affect the practical implementation of food sovereignty in Uganda, a country often labelled as the potential breadbasket of Africa. It proposes to look at the integration of food and land-based social relations in the context of localised and historical–geographical specificities of livelihood practices among Acholi peasants in northern Uganda as a way to ground the concept. It argues that many of the organising principles at the core of the food sovereignty paradigm are inscribed in the socio-cultural and ecological practices of peasant populations in northern Uganda. Yet these practices are taking place in an increasingly adverse national and international environment, and under circumstances transmitted from the past, which enormously challenge their implementation and jeopardise the future of food security and sovereignty prospects for peasant agriculture.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Arthur Owor Spender for fieldwork assistance and the guest editors of this special issue, who provided insight and expertise that greatly improved the manuscript. Last but not least I need to thank the residents of the villages in Amuru District who shared their time and knowledge, and without whom this work would not have been possible. To them this work is dedicated.
Notes
1. Bush, “Food Riots.”
2. United Nations, World Economic Situation, 7.
3. FAO, Hunger on the Rise.
4. McMichael, “Food Sovereignty in Movement”; and Bello, The Food Wars.
5. Weis, “The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions”; and Weis, “The Meat of the Global Food Crisis.”
6. Araghi, “The Invisible Hand,” 133.
7. Desmarais, La Via Campesina.
8. Witman et al., “The Origins and Potential,” 2.
9. McMichael, “Food Sovereignty, Social Reproduction.”
10. Kloppenburg, “Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession,” 372.
11. Altieri and Nicholls, “Scaling up Agroecological Approaches,” 121.
12. Van der Ploeg, “Peasant-driven Agricultural Growth,” 1000.
13. Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty, Food Security.”
14. Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’.”
15. Edelman, “Food Sovereignty.”
16. Boyer, “Food Security, Food Sovereignty,” 333.
17. Bryceson et al., Disappearing Peasantries?
18. Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change.
19. Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty, Food Security,” 1252.
20. Ratjen et al., “Food Sovereignty and Right to Food.”
21. UBOS, Citation2012 Statistical Abstract, 41.
22. Ibid., 224.
23. Ibid., v.
24. De Soto, The Mystery of Capital.
25. Mailo land is the outcome of the 1900 Buganda Agreement between the British Crown and the Baganda Oligarchy, which assigned exclusive control of 9000 square miles to Baganda traditional chiefs.
26. Batungi, Land Reform in Uganda.
27. Mamdani, “The Contemporary Ugandan Discourse.”
28. McAuslan, Land Law Reforms in East Africa.
29. Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa.
30. Lahiff et al., “Market-led Agrarian Reform.”
31. World Bank, Uganda Economic Update Special Focus, 57.
32. See Mitchell, “The Properties of Markets.”
33. Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation; and Tosh, “Lango Agriculture.”
34. Mamdani, “Peasants and Democracy in Africa.”
35. Bategeka et al., Institutional Constraints to Agricultural Development, 2.
36. Okello, Opposition Response to the Government Budget, 13.
37. FAO, WTO Agreement on Agriculture.
38. IFPRI. The Supply of Inorganic Fertilizers, 4.
39. World Bank, Uganda Economic Update, xiii–xvi.
40. World Bank, Uganda.
41. World Bank, Uganda Economic Update, 31.
42. EPRC, Improving the Use of Agricultural Technologies, 1.
43. Museveni, “State of the Nation,” 3.
44. World Bank, Uganda Economic Update, 22, 58.
45. Republic of Uganda, The National Food and Nutrition Strategy, iv.
46. World Food Programme, Uganda Overview.
47. Lwanga-Lunyiigo, The Struggle for Land.
48. Branch, Displacing Human Rights.
49. The most common staple food in Uganda, made out of bananas.
50. World Bank, Uganda Economic Update, 66.
51. Republic of Uganda, The National Food and Nutrition Strategy.
52. Thompson, “Alliance for a Green Revolution,” 345
53. Ratjen et al., “Food Sovereignty and Right to Food,” 27.
54. Child, “Civil Society in Uganda.”
55. Hönig, “Civil Society and Land Use.”
56. Borras and Franco, “Food Sovereignty & Redistributive Land Policies,” 107.
57. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place; and Schoenbrun, “We are what we Eat.”
58. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place, 20.
59. Schoenbrun, “We are what we Eat,” 65.
60. Atkinson, The Roots of Ethnicity, 5.
61. Girling, The Acholi of Uganda, 183.
62. Mafeje, The Agrarian Question.
63. Girling, The Acholi of Uganda, 191.
64. Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, 21.
65. Uganda Government, Report on Uganda Census of Agriculture.
66. Natarajan and Willey, quoted in Altieri, “Scaling up Agroecological Approaches,” 125.
67. UBOS, Citation2012 Statistical Abstract, 43.
68. Ibid., 42.
69. Ibid., 44.
70. UBOS, Uganda Census of Agriculture 2008/2009, Vol. III, 304, 310, 323.
71. UBOS, Ibid., Vol. IV, 14.
72. Ravnborg et al., Land Tenure under Transition, 17.
73. Ibid., 22, 39.
74. Friedmann, “Household Production and the National Economy,” 163.
75. See Van der Ploeg, The New Peasantries, 1–6.
76. See Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.
77. Van der Ploeg, “Peasant-driven Agricultural Growth,” 1004; and Wood, “Peasants and the Market Imperative.”
78. Friedmann, “Household Production and the National Economy.”
79. Bush, Poverty and Neoliberalism, 194.
80. McMichael, “Peasants make their own History.”
81. Borras et al., Transnational Agrarian Movements.