A comment on Henry Bernstein's way with peasants, and food sovereignty

Abstract

Food sovereignty, as a counter-movement to the food regime, includes a range of struggles, and is evidently quite elastic as a discourse and practice. Because the food regime itself is evolving and restructuring, food sovereignty embodies movement. In its ‘second generation’ phase it operates on both rural and urban fronts, separately and together, connecting producers, workers, consumers and various activist organizations. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize food sovereignty's origins in the global agrarian crisis of the last three decades. Small producers (peasants, farmers, pastoralists, fishers, forest-dwellers) continue to experience massive displacement by World Trade Organization (WTO)-style ‘free trade’, overlaid with new displacements by fiat, force and finance as land grabbing in various forms proceeds apace. This is a key theme in a response to Henry Bernstein's questions about the character of the food sovereignty movement.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• counter-movement
• pleasantness
• food regime
• capital lens
• agrarian crisis
• rights

Acknowledgement: I am grateful for helpful suggestions for revising the presentation of this comment from an anonymous reviewer.

Notes

¹‘Food regime’ refers to the political and economic structuring of food production and circulation on a world scale, underlying different phases of development of the capitalist world economy (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; McMichael 2012, 2013).

²The second conference, at the ISS, The Hague, 24 January 2014.

³The problem of typology is raised in Bernstein's question: ‘is it useful to replace a one-sided emphasis on the interests, and presumed omnipotence, of capital with a similarly one-sided narrative of resistance, on various scales from the heroic to the mundane?’ (2010, 96). As this comment notes, however, the food sovereignty movement is a product, and conditions the politics, of the food regime. That is, capital is relation, not a thing or a telos, and the food sovereignty counter-movement is an expression of its historical contradictions.

⁴By no means accounting for the totality of food provisioning systems across the world.

⁵And this held for the London-financed slave system in the southern US cotton culture, with an available land frontier lacking a peasantry as such (but not native Americans) to constrain the plantation model in the nineteenth century (McMichael 1991).

⁶Peasants produced some export crops, but were arguably not yet world-historical subjects.

⁷Thus Karl Polanyi's (1957) concept of the ‘counter-movement’ represented the challenge to value relations as integral to market regime contradictions in the nineteenth century.

⁸As in the cases of labor-intensive bio-reclamation in Niger and Burkina-Faso cited in Bernstein (2014, 18).

⁹‘By one estimate, some 200 million city dwellers produce food for the urban market, accounting for 15–20 per cent of total global food production … In West Africa, around 20 million households (20 per cent of the urban population) are engaged in urban agriculture. They supply 60–100 per cent of the fresh vegetable market in those cities …  In some cities, a notable proportion of urban residents farm for a living (most likely on land outside the city). In Egypt and Malawi, 10 per cent of urban dwellers outside major metropolitan areas claimed agriculture production as their main occupation … As much as 40 per cent of the population of some African cities and up to 50 per cent in some Latin American cities engage in urban or peri-urban agriculture’ (Cohen and Garrett 2009, 6, 8–9).

¹⁰In Canada, food sovereignty involves an increasing role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) providing food access services – in new governance sites abandoned by the state (Martin and Andreé 2014), giving rise to community food governance schemes (cf Friedmann 2011).

¹¹As a consequence of the managed dumping of artificially cheapened food commodities, peasant dispossession accelerated since the inception of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the WTO in 1994–5 (Madeley 2000; Rosset 2006), and, as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) noted, while the global South in aggregate had annual trade surpluses of $1 billion, by 2000, its food deficit amounted to $11 billion annually. In 2008, during the food crisis, Low Income Food Deficit Countries' basic cereal grain imports were in excess of $38 billion (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011, 112).

¹²I claim a strategic essentialism insofar as this is not an academic debate, nor is it simply about agrarian question-style class politics. It is also about looming environmental constraints and climatic disruptions that make an agro-industrial future absolutely problematic. And it is about collective land rights against the juggernaut of capital and its celebrated productivity in delivering ‘flex crops’ (Borras et al. 2012) to a minority of the world's population.

¹³In the same vein, see Wolford's analysis of the Brazilian Landless-Workers' Movement (2010).

¹⁴ This is a key demand from the Civil Society Mechanism in the FAO's Committee on World Food Security (CFS), and is comprehensively addressed in the CFS's High Level Panel of Experts report on Investing in smallholder agriculture for food security (2013).

Additional information

Philip McMichael is a Professor and Chair of Development Sociology, Cornell University. His current research is on agrarian movements, land questions and food regimes. Author of Settlers and the agrarian question (1984), Development and social change: a global perspective (2012), and Food regimes and agrarian questions (2013), he also edited The global restructuring of agro-food systems (1994), New directions in the sociology of global development (2005, with F.H. Buttel), and Contesting development: critical struggles for social change (2010). He has worked with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Via Campesina and the International Planning Committee (IPC) for Food Sovereignty, and is a participant in the Civil Society Mechanism of the FAO's Committee on World Food Security.