What role for trade in food sovereignty? Insights from a small island archipelago

Abstract

The food sovereignty movement has been gathering momentum in advocating the rights of individuals and nations to control their own food systems. Alongside this is a mounting critical engagement regarding its privileging of local food production as the means through which to achieve this goal. Adopting a place-based approach, we explore the foodways of diverse communities across a small island archipelago – the Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies. Based on interviews and focus groups, we unpack narratives relating to islanders’ changing food practices and aspirations. These are understood as two competing but inter-related themes of disruption and reification of current practices shaped by wider food regimes in interaction with ecological challenges. Given that conditions of historic dependency implicate the islands in a myriad of dependent trade relationships, we argue that small island economies offer, and require, unique cases for understanding how sovereign conditions for trade might be developed in line with a food sovereignty framework. We underline the importance of an inter-disciplinary focus for bringing forth a nuanced understanding of what might be required to shape more sustainable, sovereign and secure food futures. Doing so is necessarily rooted in an appreciation of islanders’ accounts of social, economic, political and ecological change over time.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• small island states
• trade
• agriculture
• production
• consumption
• place

Acknowledgements

We are enormously grateful for Edward Hind-Ozan’s efforts to facilitate our fieldwork and likewise to Heidi Hertler and all at the School for Field Studies (South Caicos), and not least to the participants who took the time to share their experience of life on TCI.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Interviews are identified by number and the island on which the interview took place. SC = South Caicos, P = Providenciales, GT = Grand Turk, MC = Middle Caicos, NC = North Caicos.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Cardiff University’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and by The Sustainable Places Research Institute (PLACE), and expands upon interdisciplinary research undertaken in collaboration with Susan Baker, Leanne Cullen-Unsworth and Richard Unsworth, which was funded by the Darwin Initiative [grant number EIDCF010].

Notes on contributors

Jessica Paddock

Dr. Jessica Paddock is a research associate at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester, UK. Her research is informed by sociological approaches, which are employed in seeking to understand the interaction among everyday life practices, natural resource use, food consumption and social differentiation in the context of environmental change. Her work has also included interdisciplinary collaborations across the social and natural sciences, particularly while working with the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University, UK.

Alastair Michael Smith

Dr. Alastair Smith is a senior teaching fellow in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, UK. His interests are aligned with an interdisciplinary approach to researching sustainable development, and his research and publications have focused on a wide variety of related issues, including the reformulation of food systems in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition to scholarly work, Alastair has been involved in policy and practice: through involvement in trade justice organisations and consultancy projects completed for national and international non-governmental organisations, and government departments. Email: [email protected]