Food sovereignty, food security and democratic choice: critical contradictions, difficult conciliations

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ has gained increasing ground among grassroots groups, taking the form of a global movement. But there is no uniform conceptualization of what food sovereignty constitutes. Indeed, the definition has been expanding over time. It has moved from its initial focus on national self-sufficiency in food production (‘the right of nations’) to local self-sufficiency (‘the rights of peoples’). There is also a growing emphasis on the rights of women and other disadvantaged groups, and on consensus building and democratic choice. This paper provides a critique of some of the major tenets of the food sovereignty movement. It recognizes that many developing countries may wish to pursue the goal of self-sufficiency in the context of the global food crises, and that it is important to promote social equality and democratic choice. Taken together, however, there can be serious contradictions between the key features of the food sovereignty vision, such as between the goals of national and local food self-sufficiency; between promoting food crops and a farmer's freedom to choose to what extent to farm, which crops to grow, and how to grow them; between strengthening family farming and achieving gender equality; and between collective and individual rights, especially over land ownership. The paper also reflects on the ways in which some of the food sovereignty goals could be better achieved through innovative institutional change, without sacrificing an individual's freedom to choose.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• food security
• democratic choice
• cooperation
• women farmers

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Corrigendum

Notes

¹The figures for all cereals were obtained directly from Ramesh Chand, Director, National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy (Delhi), and those relating to maize from Chand (2009).

²For an elaboration of these arguments, see Agarwal (2011).

³See also, Burnett and Murphy (2013).

⁴See World Bank (2007) for a global picture, and GoI (2011), for India.

⁵Although few countries collect country-level gender-disaggregated data on land or asset ownership, information gleaned from those that do, and from small-scale studies in others, shows a substantial gender inequality.

⁶See World Bank (2009), FAO (2011), and Peterman et al. (2009) for global information; and Doss (2001) for Africa.

⁷These were studies by Adesina and Djato (1997), Adeleke et al. (2008), Kumase et al. (2008), Moock (1976), Bindlish, Evenson and Gbetibouo (1993), Quisumbing et al. (2001) and Hill and Vigneri (2009).

⁸See Kumase et al. (2008), Moock (1976), Dey (1992) and Udry et al. (1995).

⁹I have focused on crops, but the argument that improving women's resource access can increase output could also be extended to other types of food, such as fish.

¹⁰La Via Campesina is only one (albeit one of the best known today) of many transnational agrarian movements that have emerged in recent decades, representing a diverse constituency of peasants, small farmers, consumers and producers, concerned variously with food politics, land and related issues (for a useful overview of such movements, see especially Borras et al. 2008).

¹¹For an elaboration on human capability, defined in terms of the freedom to choose what a person has reason to value, see Sen (1999).

¹²The total sample is slightly smaller when we exclude missing information, and also apply the definition of ‘farmer’ strictly to exclude those who are not cultivating any land even if they own some, or are landless and not leasing in land in the year of the survey. This corrected sample has been used for Tables 3, 4 and 5.

¹³The results presented here are part of an ongoing analysis by the author and a colleague, Ankush Agrawal.

¹⁴Although this was not the only reason for the groups becoming inactive – sometimes intra-group conflicts also led to a breakup – but the lack of freedom to grow non-food crops was identified as the main reason in this region.

¹⁵Also see Whitehead (2005) on the complex crop division of labour by gender in sub-Saharan Africa.

¹⁶See FIBL & IFOAM (2013), and Bhattacharyya and Chakroborty (2005, 116). For additional discussion, see also Willer and Yussefi (2007).

¹⁷Land consolidation alone can lead to substantial labour saving (Foster and Rosenzweig 2010)

¹⁸I am currently researching this.

¹⁹See, for example, Sabates-Wheeler (2002); Sabates-Wheeler and Childress (2004), and Mathijs and Swinnen (2001). See also Agarwal (2010c) for a detailed discussion.

²⁰See, for example, Mazhar et al. (2007).

²¹See, for example, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/from-pastapur-to-senegal-widening-the-network-of-millets/article5396601.ece

²²Figures provided in 2011 by the head of the Andhra Pradesh Mahila Samatha programme.

²³See also Vorley et al. (2012) who uses examples from several countries to emphasize the need to recognize and enhance small farmers' agency, and understand how they negotiate a mix in global, national and local markets.

²⁴In Bangladesh too, we can find examples of women's groups leasing in land for joint cultivation (see IFAD 2009).

Additional information

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester. She was earlier Director of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She is also President of the International Society for Ecological Economics and an award-winning author. Among her publications are several books, including A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (1994) and Gender and Green Governance (2010). Website: www.binaagarwal.com