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Abstract
Land and food politics are intertwined. Efforts to construct food sovereignty often involve struggles to (re)constitute democratic systems of land access and control. The relationship is two-way: democratic land control may be effected but, without a strategic rebooting of the broader agricultural and food system, such democratisation may fizzle out and revert back to older or trigger newer forms of land monopoly. While we reaffirm the relevance of land reform, we point out its limitations, including its inability to capture the wide array of land questions confronting those implicated in the political project of food sovereignty. Our idea of the land framework of food sovereignty, described as ‘democratic land control’ or ‘land sovereignty’, with working peoples’ right to land at its core, is outlined, with a normative frame to kick-start a debate and possible agenda for future research.
Acknowledgements
This paper builds on a discussion paper by Borras and Franco, “A ‘Land Sovereignty’ Alternative? Towards a People’s Counter-enclosure” published by the Transnational Institute (TNI) and based on ideas first sketched out in a Food First workshop in June 2012 in California. We thank the workshop participants, including Eric Holt-Gimenez, Sergio Sauer, Tanya Kerssen, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas and Annie Shattuck, for their helpful comments. That paper was further discussed at a conference of La Via Campesina in Indonesia in July 2012, and we thank the participants, including Henry Saragih, Indra Lubis, Shalmali Guttal and Peter Rosset for useful comments. Elements of the current version appeared in a paper presented at the ‘Property Rights from Below’ workshop held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 28–March 2, 2014. We thank the workshop participants for their comments, especially the organisers: Olivier de Schutter and Balakrishnan Rajagopal. For this present paper we thank Marc Edelman and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful review and suggestions.
Notes
1. LVC, cited in Patel, “Grassroots Voices”; and McMichael, “Historicizing Food Sovereignty.”
2. The notion of ‘sovereignty’ in food sovereignty and the role of the state have recently attracted important scholarly deliberations. See Edelman, “Food Sovereignty”; Schiavoni, “Competing Sovereignties”; and Patel, “Grassroots Voices” for some of the key lines of argument.
3. For a related but broader treatment on food sovereignty and trade, see Burnett and Murphy, “What Place for International Trade?”
4. Edelman, “Food Sovereignty.”
5. Patel, “Grassroots Voices”; and McMichael, “Historicizing Food Sovereignty.”
6. Schiavoni, “Competing Sovereignties.”
7. Wolford et al., “Governing Global Land Deals”; Franco et al., “The Global Politics of Water Grabbing”; and Rosset, “Rethinking Agrarian Reform.”
8. Mehta et al., “Water Grabbing?”
9. Borras et al., Towards an Initial Understanding.
10. van der Ploeg, Peasants and the Art of Farming.
11. See Rosset, “Re-thinking Agrarian Reform”; and Monsalve Suarez, “Grassroots Voices.”
12. Rosset, “Re-thinking Agrarian Reform”; and Monsalve Suarez, “Grassroots Voices.”
13. See Assadi, “‘Khadi Curtain’.”
14. Borras and Franco, Transnational Agrarian Movements; and Monsalve Suarez, “Grassroots Voices.” ICARRD represents a turning point in several ways. (1) It is the first time that peasants, indigenous peoples, rural workers, fisherfolk, pastoralists and other civil society organisations (CSOs) have come together to start jointly framing the land question. See International NGO/CSO Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty et al., “Agrarian Reform.” (2) It is a turning point in breaking the global land policy hegemony of the World Bank, emphasising the outstanding role that agrarian reforms have to play in fighting hunger, and the need for a sustainable development model and respect for human rights. ICARRD was a unique experience enabling rural social movements and other CSOs to participate in the process of preparing and holding the conference on an equal footing with governments, and in a way that respected their autonomy. Monsalve Suárez, The FAO, 34–36. In a sense ICARRD became a forerunner of the current participatory processes at the UN Committee on Food Security (CFS).
15. Rosset, “Re-thinking Agrarian Reform.”
16. Edelman and James, “Peasants’ Rights and the UN System.”
17. The effects of using the human rights framework vary and can range from contributing during land conflicts, changing the way conflicts over resources are framed, opening up space for policy dialogue centred on people’s lives, fighting against agrarian legislation biased in favour of corporate interests and formulating alternative legal frameworks. The limitations of the human rights framework relate to the context in which this framework is applied but also to the current status of development of the framework itself. Both can change and it is up to each movement to pragmatically decide if the existing limitations can be overcome and if it is worth investing in it. Since law is one of the means par excellence of exercising power, any people’s movement trying to change power relationships cannot avoid dealing with legal issues. For an agrarian movement, therefore, the question is not whether to use legal strategies but rather which legal strategy to use. Monsalve Suarez, “Grassroots Voices,” 13.
18. Griffin et al., “Poverty and Distribution of Land.”
19. This is textbook land reform. But as Franco, “Making Land Rights Accessible”, argues, land reform laws are neither self-interpreting nor self-implementing, and the actual interpretation and implementation depend on the political interactions between state and social forces. In this process there are conservative land reform laws that can lead to outcomes that benefit the poor, while there are progressive land reform laws that can actually benefit the landed elite.
20. Fox, The Politics of Food in Mexico.
21. The notion of an ideal middle farmer who neither hires out nor hires in labour.
22. See Borras et al., Transnational Agrarian Movements.
23. Holt-Gimenez and Shattuck, “Food Crises”; Anderson, “The Role of US Consumers”; and Alkon, “Food Justice.”
24. We include the question of ‘nutrition’ in our category of consumption.
25. Burnett and Murphy, “What Place for International Trade?”
26. Holt-Gimenez and Shattuck, “Food Crises.” See also Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’.”
27. Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty.”
28. Bellows et al., Gender.
29. See Robbins in this issue.
30. Alden Wily 2012.
31. Rosset, “Re-thinking Agrarian Reform.”
32. Ribot and Peluso, “A Theory of Access.”
33. The idea of generic ‘land tenure security’ – albeit not the mainstream private property-centric version – is useful as a framework for political struggles for those who seek democratic land control. In this context it is more useful to follow and build on the General Comment of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights No. 4 on the right to adequate housing, as follows:
Tenure takes a variety of forms, including rental (public and private) accommodation, cooperative housing, lease, owner-occupation, emergency housing and informal settlements, including occupation of land or property. Notwithstanding the type of tenure, all persons should possess a degree of security of tenure which guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats. States parties should consequently take immediate measures aimed at conferring legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection, in genuine consultation with affected persons and groups.
See also the recent Guiding Principles on security of tenure for the urban poor recently issued by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G13/191/86/PDF/G1319186.pdf?OpenElement, accessed June 25, 2014. This legal development has allowed affected social groups to fight against forced evictions regardless of whether or not people hold any formal titles to the lands they are occupying and using. Security of tenure in this sense of ‘securing land rights’ (for working peoples), is fundamental to our proposed reframing and clearly fundamentally different from the technocratic approach of formalising land rights and promoting private property rights.
34. Borras and Franco, “Contemporary Discourses.”
35. See Künnemann and Monsalve Suarez, “International Human Rights,” 123–139.
36. See Fox, The Politics of Food in Mexico.
37. Scott, Seeing like a State.
38. Fox, Accountability Politics, 335.
39. Scoones et al., Zimbabwe’s Land Reform; and Moyo, “Three Decades of Agrarian Reform.”
40. Borras, Pro-poor Land Reform; and Franco, Bound by Law.