Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty

Abstract

Amidst increasing concerns about climate change, food shortages, and widespread environmental degradation, a demand is emerging for ways to resolve longstanding social and ecological contradictions present in contemporary capitalist models of production and social organisation. This paper first discusses how agriculture, as the most intensive historical nexus between society and nature, has played a pivotal role in social and ecological change. I explore how agriculture has been integrally associated with successive metabolic ruptures between society and nature, and then argue that these ruptures have not only led to widespread rural dislocation and environmental degradation, but have also disrupted the practice of agrarian citizenship through a series of interlinked and evolving philosophical, ideological, and material conditions. The first section of the paper thus examines the de-linking of agriculture, citizenship, and nature as a result of ongoing cycles of a metabolic rift, as a ‘crucial law of motion’ and central contradiction of changing socio-ecological relations in the countryside. I then argue that new forms of agrarian resistance, exemplified by the contemporary international peasant movement La Vía Campesina's call for food sovereignty, create a potential to reframe and reconstitute an agrarian citizenship that reworks the metabolic rift between society and nature. A food sovereignty model founded on practices of agrarian citizenship and ecologically sustainable local food production is then analysed for its potential to challenge the dominant model of large-scale, capitalist, and export-based agriculture.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• citizenship
• agrarian transformation
• nature
• metabolic rift

Notes

¹While the French Revolution brought into wide usage a notion of citizenship that stressed both the universal and egalitarian potential of the citizenship concept and the collective aspects of a citizenship in which community was united by a ‘general will’, enfranchisement was still limited by issues of class, gender, and race (Faulks 2000, Heater 2004).

²There is growing literature on ‘environmental’ or ‘ecological’ citizenship as a part of the global agenda for achieving sustainability. In this agenda, the diverse perspectives of social ecology, political science, environmental ethics, and philosophy provide a forum to debate how members of human societies can act – individually and collectively – in ways that recognise their positioning as mutually interdependent members of an earth-based cosmopolitan community (Dobson 2003, 2006, Dobson and Bell 2006). This reconsideration of a particularly ‘ecological’ citizenship by definition involves a ‘democratic politics of nature’ (Morrison 1995, Dryzek 1996, Smith 2006, Latta 2007). These authors and others argue that the way that humans think about, measure, and thus manage the environment around them ultimately depends on the culture of political community and its underlying ideologies of nature. This can be taken one step further to argue for a more democratic and socially just political system that includes rights not only for a healthy environment for human habitation and use, but one also that accounts for nature's own rights to exist on its own terms.

³The MST was one of the founding members of the La Vía Campesina, with over one million members in Brazil working on issues of agrarian reform and rural social change. While the MST neither represents the movement nor is even necessarily a microcosm of it, it is a large movement that has engaged with the principles of food sovereignty over a relatively long period of time, and thus experienced the debates and challenges inherent to such a proposition.

⁴Interview 19 November 2008.

⁵Tlaxcala Declaration of La Vía Campesina, Tlaxcala, Mexico, 18–21 April 1996.

⁶Peasant movements have collaborated with governments in Japan, Korea, and Ecuador, among others, to propose food self-sufficiency targets (e.g. in 2000, Japan set a 45 percent food self-sufficiency target for 2010). In February 2009, the Ecuadorian legislative assembly passed a Food Sovereignty Law that regulates the agricultural, fishing, and forestry sectors.

⁷Interview #233, MST member, 16 December 2004.

⁸Interview #245, MST member, 17 December 2004.

⁹Interview #243, peasant leader, Brazil, 16 June 2006.

¹⁰Mystica video, available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58alIJSyCS0[Accessed 14 October 2008].

¹¹Interview #5, 19 November 2003.

¹²Interview #164, 14 July 2006.

¹³And this is highly concentrated – 62 percent of agro-exports originate in a handful of countries that comprise only 4 percent of the agricultural population (Weis 2007, 21).

¹⁴This is especially interesting considering that many Farsul members regularly cultivate GM soy. Their opposition to the legalisation of GM rice was based on economic and environmental criteria specific to rice production.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Wittman

I am grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments that significantly strengthened the argument, and for input from Annette Desmarais, Jim Handy and Charles Geisler on earlier versions of the paper.