Food sovereignty: forgotten genealogies and future regulatory challenges

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.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• food security
• social movements
• agriculture
• Mexico
• Costa Rica
• Central America

I presented an earlier version of this paper at the International Conference on Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, Yale University, 14–15 September 2013, and at the Anthropology Colloquium, CUNY Graduate Center, 1 November 2013. I greatly appreciate the constructive comments I received from participants in both fora and from an anonymous JPS reviewer. The paper draws on research that over the years received support (for which I am most grateful) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grants 5180 and 5627), the US National Science Foundation (Grants 9319905 and 0107491), and the PSC-CUNY Awards Program (Grants 668480 and 635290032).

Notes

¹In contrast, an Intergovernmental Working Group of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, mandated with drafting a Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, held its first meeting in July 2013. The first draft under discussion contained several provisions related to food sovereignty (see Edelman and James 2011, Golay and Biglino 2013). A Convention on Food Sovereignty was one demand of the NGO Forum and allied social movements at the 2001 Rome +5 World Food Conference (Shaw 2007, 359).

²As Clapp warns, ‘a broad conceptualization may work well in the early stages of a movement, but it is likely that the concept will need to be more precisely articulated, which may in turn cause it to lose some of its supporters’ (2012, 176).

³The proceedings volume from this meeting states, ‘Food sovereignty, simply defined, is ensuring that land, water, seeds and natural resources are controlled by small and medium-sized producers. It is directly linked to democracy and justice’ (Vía Campesina 1996, 21).

⁴A more complete listing of relevant meetings and framing documents is in Windfuhr and Jonsén (2005, 47–52). This process of refinement produced increasingly precise definitions, but also ‘increasing levels of inconsistency’ (Patel 2009, 666). Key ideas include protection for food producers, especially small-scale ones; regulation of agricultural production and trade; an end to dumping of developed-country surpluses in developing countries; sustainable, agro-ecological production practices; democratic control, by ‘the people’, ‘local producers’ or by those who ‘produce, distribute and consume food’; management of resources, seeds and territories by small-scale food producers, and gender and other kinds of social equality. Occasionally, food sovereignty enthusiasts (Patel 2009, 666–7) acknowledge that such capacious framings contain internal or even ‘fatal’ contradictions, elisions and substantial doses of wishful thinking.

⁵The relevant section in the book was based on an article Edelman published in 1991 in the now-defunct journal Peasant Studies (not to be confused with the Journal of Peasant Studies). See Edelman (1991, 229). Edelman also mentioned ‘food sovereignty’ in another article (1998, 59) published one year before the book De Schutter mentioned.

⁶In another work, Claeys locates the origins of ‘food sovereignty’ in Central America in the mid-1980s (2013, 3).

⁷A few years later this was true in Honduras (and perhaps elsewhere in the region) as well. See Amador (1994).

⁸These leaders were from leftist and centrist organisations; none of them became involved in Vía Campesina.

⁹According to Spalding, ‘In the absence of any competing, long-term national development plan, this MIDINRA document served as the main expression of the regime's economic vision’ (1994, 73).

¹⁰As late as 2008, the declaration of the Latin American Presidential Summit on Food Sovereignty and Security also used the terms largely interchangeably (Cumbre Presidencial 2008).

¹¹On the Ngram, see Egnal (2013) and Rosenberg (2013).

¹²Two years earlier, the phrase ‘food sovereignty’ appeared in discussions of Canada's food aid program, with one speaker asserting that ‘the first test of any emerging nation's real sovereignty is food sovereignty’ (Canadian Institute of International Affairs 1981, 107). The term, however, failed to gain traction at the time.

¹³Journalist Alan Riding charged accurately that PRONAL ‘emerged as a SAM without money’ (Riding 1986, 286). SAM – the Sistema Alimentario Mexicano – was the previous government's food program (dismantled in 1983), which tried simultaneously to provide support prices to farmers and subsidies to consumers, thus worsening an already critical fiscal deficit.

¹⁴Martínez-Torres and Rosset are right that ‘[f]ood sovereignty is a concept coined by actively appropriating and inventing language’ (2010, 161). What they and other Vía Campesina activists fail to realise, however, is that the language appears to have been appropriated – even if indirectly – from PRONAL and Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid – surely not the most inspiring political-intellectual ancestor for these Mexico-based scholar-activists.

¹⁵On contacts in this period between Mexican and Central American peasant activists, see Boyer (2010) and Holt-Giménez (2006). It may be significant that the 1996 Vía Campesina conference that adopted a food sovereignty program was held in Mexico, where local movements would have been aware – at very least – of the De La Madrid government's rhetoric about ‘food sovereignty’.

¹⁶The conventional view is typified by an editorial in the Nyéléni Newsletter:

food sovereignty is different from food security in both approach and politics. Food security does not distinguish where food comes from, or the conditions under which it is produced and distributed. National food security targets are often met by sourcing food produced under environmentally destructive and exploitative conditions, and supported by subsidies and policies that destroy local food producers but benefit agribusiness corporations. Food sovereignty emphasizes ecologically appropriate production, distribution and consumption, social-economic justice and local food systems as ways to tackle hunger and poverty and guarantee sustainable food security for all peoples. It advocates trade and investment that serve the collective aspirations of society. It promotes community control of productive resources, agrarian reform and tenure security for small-scale producers, agro-ecology, biodiversity, local knowledge, the rights of peasants, women, indigenous peoples and workers, social protection and climate justice (Focus on the Global South 2013).

¹⁷Fairbairn rightly suggests that ‘food sovereignty is both a reaction to and an intellectual offspring of the earlier concepts of the “right to food” and “food security”’ (2010, 15).

¹⁸Fairbairn's idea that ‘food security’ is a relatively new concept, dating to the 1970s, clearly requires rethinking (2010, 22–3, 2012, 221).

¹⁹Writing on Canada, Desmarais and Wittman stress ‘unity in diversity’ as a key principle of food sovereignty. They also point to the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), which among other things was the country's major exporter, as an institution of ‘food sovereignty’ (2013). But they also acknowledge that importing countries would be unlikely to view the CWB that way. Indeed, part of the CWB's early success was that its single-desk buyer system eliminated competition among farmers, ‘allowing them to achieve greater economic clout in the global grain trade’ (Magnan 2011, 116).

²⁰Of course some food activists, as Fairbairn (2012) indicates, view food sovereignty as largely a question of consumer choices and express little interest in its policy implications.

²¹In 1996, Vía Campesina simply demanded the renegotiation of ‘international trade agreements like GATT/WTO (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation), Maastricht, [and] NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)’ (Vía Campesina 1996, 23). Later, of course, it called for getting the ‘WTO out of agriculture’ (Rosset 2006). Food sovereignty advocates’ views are evolving. Some ‘see a gradual acceptance of trade under certain circumstances … , with the shift away from focusing primarily on local markets to integrating consideration for fairer trade’ (Burnett and Murphy 2013, 4).

²²Ishii-Eitman (2009) and Burnett and Murphy (2013) are among the very few exceptions to this generalization. Mohan and Stokke (2000), Hinrichs (2003) and Robotham (2005) provide unusually thoughtful and grounded discussions of the complexities of constructing ‘the local’.

²³In peri-urban areas in the United States, conservation and similar easements intended to preserve greenbelts and farmland have sometimes had the effect of creating ownership ceilings, even though this isn't their intention.

²⁴See Lenin (1964 [1917]) and Stalin's unsurprisingly meretricious essay ‘Dizzy with success’ (Stalin 1955 [1930]).

²⁵Of course many, if not most, people didn't just line up, but also worked their connections and resorted to the illegal market economy to obtain otherwise scarce necessities. Cubans sardonically refer to this as ‘sociolismo’, a play on ‘socialismo’ and ‘socio’, which means ‘partner’ but which they commonly employ to mean ‘buddy’ or ‘friend’.

²⁶He was apparently unconcerned that pineapple was produced in pesticide-intensive monocultures.

²⁷The ubiquitous plastic bags of mushy, tasteless Macintosh and ‘Delicious’ apples that were the main source of vitamin C during my childhood in 1950s and 1960s New York are but one dismal example of the alternative to long-distance trade. At least there were sometimes oranges from far-off Florida and California. The glories of summer included abundant local peaches, plums and berries.

Additional information

Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include The logic of the latifundio (1992), Peasants against globalization (1999), The anthropology of development and globalization (co-edited, 2005), Social democracy in the global periphery (co-authored, 2007), and Transnational agrarian movements confronting globalization (co-edited, 2008). Anthropology Department, Hunter College-CUNY, 695 Park Ave, New York, N.Y. 10065 United States.