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Abstract
The concept of food sovereignty has been enshrined in the constitutions of a number of countries around the world without any clear consensus around what state-sponsored ‘food sovereignty’ might entail. At the forefront of this movement are the countries of the so-called ‘pink tide’ of Latin America – chiefly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This paper examines how state commitments to food sovereignty have been put into practice in these three countries, asking if and how efforts by the state contribute to significant transformation or if they simply serve the political purposes of elites. Understanding the state as a complex arena of class struggle, we suggest that state efforts around food sovereignty open up new political spaces in an ongoing struggle around control over food systems at different scales. Embedded in food sovereignty is a contradictory notion of sovereignty, requiring simultaneously a strong developmentalist state and the redistribution of power to facilitate direct control over food systems in ways that may threaten the state. State-society relations, particularly across scales, are therefore a central problematic of food sovereignty projects.
An early version of this paper was presented at the Yale Conference on Food Sovereignty, and benefited from the comments received there. The authors would also like to acknowledge the editors of this special collection, chiefly Saturnino M. Borras Jr., and three anonymous reviewers as well as Sara Keene and Stalin Herrera, who provided helpful comments and constructive criticism. Authors are listed in alphabetical order.
Notes
1This, however, is not a point of consensus among observers and researchers. See Kappeler (Citation2013) for a very different take and argument on the Venezuelan case.
2Development Fund for Socialist Agriculture.
3Rural Development Institute.
4Agricultural Bank of Venezuela.
5National Land Institute.
6Foundation for Training and Innovation for Rural Development.
7National Institute of Agricultural Research.
8National Institute of Integral Agricultural Health.
9Venezuelan Food Corporation.
10Mercados de Alimentos.
11Productora y Distribuidora Venezolana de Alimentos.
12Communal Councils are not defined geographically by municipal boundaries.
13These new spaces developed during the Chávez era. How and the extent to which they continue to evolve in the post-Chávez period remains an open-ended question as a shift in the ‘dual power’ of the state and extreme class conflict in society could roll back these important spaces.
14National Indigenous Confederation of Ecuador (Confederación Nacional de Indígenas del Ecuador – CONAIE) is a confederation that includes some of the organizations also involved in the constituent assembly (i.e. Ecuanari).
15National Federation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peasants of Ecuador (Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas e Negras del Ecuador).
16Ecuadorian Federation of Indigenous Evangelicals (Federación Nacional de Indígenas Evangelicas).
17National Affiliated Confederation of Peasant Social Security – National Peasant Coordination (Confederación Nacional de Afiliados al Seguro Social Campesino – Coordinadora Nacional Campesina).
18National Confederation of the Quichua Community (Confederación de los Pueblos de Nacionalidad de Kichua del Ecuador).
19CONAIE's proposal can be read here: http://www.iee.org.ec/publicaciones/INDIGENA/ConaieAsamblea.pdf;
FENOCIN'S proposal can be read here: http://www.fenocin.org/.
20Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinas de Bolivia, or the Confederated Union of Rural Workers of Bolivia.
21Meaning ‘to plant’ or ‘to sow’.
22Creación de Iniciativas Alimentarias Rurales.
23Emprendimientos Organizados para el Desarrollo Rural Autogestionario.
24Authors’ calculation based on data from INE (Citation2011) and World Bank (Citation2007, 19) [(2,861,330 ha total arable land × 14%)/(660,000 total farm units × 87% smallholders) = 0.698 ha per unit].
25Closely related to the Good Living concept deployed in Ecuador, discussed above.
Additional information
Ben McKay is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, and is part of the research programme Political Economy of Resources, Environment and Populations Studies. He is currently researching agrarian transformation in Bolivia in the context of the ‘soy complex’ and the rise of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries.
Ryan Nehring is a PhD student at Cornell University in the Department of Development Sociology. His research interests include the political economy of rural development in Latin America and, more recently, the emergence of Brazilian South-South Cooperation in African agriculture. email: [email protected]
Marygold Walsh-Dilley is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her research interests include agriculture and rural development, social-ecological change and globalization, and food and land politics, with a particular focus on agrarian change among indigenous communities in Andean Bolivia. email: [email protected]