The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project

Abstract

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world's rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession. The circulation of food is compounded by global financial flows into enclosing land for industrial agriculture and/or speculation, challenging small producer rights across the world. Under these conditions, the terms of struggle for the food sovereignty movement are shifting towards a human rights politics on the ground as well as in global forums like the FAO's Committee on World Food Security. This includes in particular the need to develop a discursive politics to reframe what is at stake, namely the protection and support of a production model based on social co-operation, multi-functionality and ecologically restorative principles.

Extracto – El presente ensayo explora el cambiante panorama de las políticas de soberanía alimentaria a la sombre de así llamado “acaparamiento de tierras”. Mientras que los movimientos por la soberanía alimentaria surgieron en medio de una coyuntura global de crisis agraria resultante del desperdicio de alimentos de los norteños, institucionalizado en dos normas de la Organización Mundial de Comercio (OMC), las crisis del siglo XXI en materia de alimentos, energía y financiera intensificaron esta crisis del mundo rural de los pobres (por la inflación de los precios de los alimentos básicos y de los insumos agrícolas), profundizando así el proceso de desposesión de la tierra. La circulación de alimentos se ve alterada en forma compuesta por los flujos financieros de flujos financieros globales que la llevan a la delimitación de tierras para agricultura industrial y/o especulación, desafiando los derechos de los pequeños productores a lo largo y ancho del mundo. Bajo estas condiciones, los términos del conflicto por un movimiento de soberanía alimentaria se han desplazado hacia las políticas de derechos humanos tanto en sus bases como en los foros globales tales como el Comité de Seguridad Alimentaria de la FAO. Esto incluye, en particular, la necesidad de desarrollar una política discursiva para dar nueva forma a lo que se encuentra en juego, en decir la protección y respaldo de un modelo de producción basado en la cooperación social y en principios multifuncionales y de restauración ecológica.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• land grab
• rights politics
• value chains

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to three sturdy reviewers for critical feedback.

Funding

The author acknowledges, with thanks, the support of a Research Council of Norway grant: ‘Cultures, Values, Ethics, Arguments and Justifications in the Management of Agricultural Land (FORFOOD)’, Center for Rural Research, Trondheim, 2013–2016.

Notes

1 For an argument about the originary significance of the food sovereignty movement for southern agrarian societies, with which this essay is concerned, see McMichael (2013c).

2 For a fuller account of this process, see McMichael (2012).

3 At the time, the WTO was the clearly identified enemy. According to the statement prepared by the women who participated in the Vía Campesina delegation in Seattle in 1999: ‘Despite all the protests in Seattle, we thank the WTO for unifying small farmers worldwide. During the week-long work in Seattle, we have now succeeded in globalizing the struggle and globalizing our hopes’ (Desmarais & Nicholson, 2013, p. 7).

4 A related form of ‘governance', facilitating financial investment in large-scale operations (whether plantations or value-chain complexes) is now undergoing intensification, with the Bank's recent development of a program of Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture, requested by the G8 for agricultural sector benchmarking. As the Bank states, this is ‘a new project that gives users information and objective measures to understand where their economies are in the process of agricultural transformation, and identify areas of improvement’ (2014).

5 To the claim that small producers may choose to participate in supply/value chain production, the question must first be asked: what range of choice do they have when farming for food has been progressively devalued and starved of public support, where land has been degraded, states are hungry for foreign exchange, investors scour the world and their backyard for agricultural, mining, and water in a resource-depleting world, and offset carbon credits have become the new currency? Susanti and Budidarsono note that smallholders in Indonesia may individually ‘benefit’ from commercial oil palm production, but forests and rice fields suffer (2014, p. 134), not to mention environmental chemicalization at the expense of surrounding land and waterscapes (Colchester et al., 2006).

6 As Rosset (2013) underlines, the food sovereignty project has had to recognize and manage the multiple claims on territory by different minority cultures (e.g. indigenous vs. farmer vs. pastoralist communities)—the provisional concept of ‘land sovereignty’ (Borras & Franco, 2012) addresses this question, marking the movement's re-envisioning of ‘agrarian reform’ from a territorial perspective.

7 Whether and to what extent food sovereignty comes to organize state policy is quite variable, and hardly substantial yet (Clark, 2013; Giunta, 2013). Arguably this will only transpire via powerful grassroots movements.

8 In March 2006, the FAO Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development acknowledged the principle of ‘food sovereignty’ (Mann, 2014, p. 65). In October 2013, FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva and Ángel Strapazzón of La Vía Campesina met to formalize an agreement of cooperation acknowledging the essential role played by smallholder food producers, focusing on key areas such as strengthening peasant based agro-ecological food production, protecting small holders' rights to access to land and water, improving farmer rights over seeds in accordance with international and national seed laws, and improving access of women and youth to land and other productive resources. Rosset (2013, p. 734) emphasizes the ‘differentiated engagement’ of La Via Campesina with multilateral institutions, where the WTO, International Monetary Fund and World Bank are regarded as implacable opponents.

9 This double movement of overriding the WTO food dependency regime via national sovereignty as the historic precondition of a simultaneous grass-roots process of democratizing domestic food systems (with urban allies) helps to resolve questions regarding a possible contradiction between state and civil society sovereignties (cf. Hospes, 2014; Schiavoni, this issue). McKay and Nehring (2013) note a discursive shift in La Vía Campesina from ‘rights of nations’ to ‘rights of peoples’ between 1996 and 2001—I would argue that this meaning was implicit in the original declaration, by food producers themselves (see also Claeys, 2012, p. 849). Initially, the emphasis on national sovereignty was a form of strategic essentialism (McMichael, 2013b, p. 147).

10 The African focus is telling, as, for the World Bank:

Africa represents the ‘last frontier' in global food and agricultural markets. It has more than half of the world's uncultivated but agriculturally suitable land and has scarcely utilized its extensive water resources. As Africa's population, incomes, and cities grow and spur the development of domestic markets, the prospects for agriculture and agribusiness will be better than ever (2013, p. 2).

Africa and Latin America are the world regions where about 80% of projected expansion in arable land is expected in the future (FAO, 2009, p. 40). For Sub-Saharan Africa, the Bank views growth in agricultural productivity in developmental terms: as ‘vital for stimulating growth in other parts of the economy', compared with Asia, where the focus is on generating ‘rural jobs by diversifying into labor-intensive, high-value agriculture linked to a dynamic rural, nonfarm sector’ (2007, p. v).

11 For an extended discussion of the modalities and effects of contract farming,

entailing relations between growers and private or state enterprises that substitute for open-market exchanges by linking nominally independent family farmers of widely variant assets with a central processing, export, or purchasing unit that regulates in advance prices, production practices, product quality, and credit (see Watts (1994, pp. 26–7), and for updates, see Gibbon and Ponte (2005) and McMichael (2013a)).

12 Nielsen and Pritchard also view ‘the outsourcing of tea production in South India … as a strategic response to enhanced demands for ethical accountability along the global value chain’ (2009, p. 206).

13 I use the term ‘peasantries’ to refer to a varied grouping of small-scale producers, including family farmers, pastoralists, forest-dwellers, and fishers (cf. Ploeg, 2009).

14 For example, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Senegal.

15 Oxfam reports: ‘the negotiation between governments and companies has not been open to public scrutiny or the participation of small-scale producers’ (2013, p. 5).

16 Tanzania's Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) of 7.5 million ha includes 2 million hectares farmed by smallholders (Paul & Steinbrecher, 2013, p. 9).

17 http://growafrica.com/

18 Not only do small producers account for 80% of the food consumed in the global South, but also there is an established scientific consensus that the relative yields of organic/agro-ecological versus non-organic farming are sufficient to provision the current daily average consumption of calories across the world (Badgley et al., 2007; Pretty & Hine, 2001; Pretty, Morison, & Hine, 2003). Pretty et al. (2006) compared 286 projects across 37 million hectares in 57 southern countries, finding agro-ecological techniques increased crop productivity by an average of 79% on over 12 million farms, with improvements in environmental services.

19 Bryceson claims pertinence here:

Historically, peasantries have formed the demographic, cultural, and political bulwark of African nation-states, providing the ethical and social foundations upon which national stability has rested. Thus, for the sake of human welfare, agricultural productivity, and national stability, smallholder agriculture is preferable to large-scale, highly capitalized agriculture (2010, p. 81).

20 See Wolford, Borras, Hall, Scoones, and White (2013) for a summary statement of the complex relations involved in land grabbing by a variety of domestic, and foreign, actors. This essay focuses on central state responsibilities.

21 Borras, Franco, Isakson, Levidow, and Vervest (2014).

22 Resistance takes a variety of forms: including government restrictions on foreign acquisitions of land in Argentina and Brazil (Borras et al., 2012; Perrone, 2013), land governance reforms in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Tanzania, and Liberia (FOLA, 2013), and use of the Voluntary Tenure Guidelines to inform land struggles in India, Mali, Uganda, Argentina, and Italy (McKeon, 2014b), documentation of land grabbing forms and extent in Europe to encourage application of the Guidelines in the EU (Transnational Institute, 2013), land occupation by social movements in Argentina (Brent, 2013), indigenous struggles to defend territory in Guatemala (Alonso-Fradejas, 2013) and Honduras (Kerssen, 2013), and socio-political struggles in Europe (Franco & Borras, 2013).

23 Thus, De Schutter challenges the WTO's prioritizing of international trade for meeting food security needs—a challenge with enhanced credibility in the wake of the food crisis and its constitutive export bans and subsequent land grabbing. Further, he points out: ‘It is precisely because the links between trade and the realization of the right to food are complex that human rights impact assessments should be conducted before free trade agreements are agreed upon’ (De Schutter, 2012, p. 5).

24 For example: ‘conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for crop genetic improvement, dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1’ (Holt-Giménez, 2012, p. 1).

25 As the Global Strategic Framework has noted:

It is recognized that the bulk of investment in agriculture is undertaken by farmers and smallholders themselves, their cooperatives and other rural enterprises, with the rest being provided by a multiplicity of private actors, large and small, along the value chain, as well as governments. Smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, play a central role in producing most of the food consumed locally in many developing regions and are the primary investors in agriculture in many developing countries (CFS, 2012, p. 13, 2nd draft).

26 ‘According to an IIED and Oxfam report, the value chain approach only works effectively for 2–10% of small producers, due to a number of factors which keeps them at the “mercy of larger producers”’ (Henriques, 2013, p. 9).

27 In this regard, ‘renationalizing and rebuilding national grain reserves and parastatal marketing boards … [including] farmer organizations' (Rosset, 2009, p. 20) is an important step. In recent WTO deliberations in Bali, India held firm to having its domestic grain reserve undefined as a restraint on trade. Kay (2014) outlines a series of public investment initiatives to strengthen ‘investment from below'.

28 It also accounts for the strong, and controversial, resistance by agro-exporting states to regulation of biofuels production and circulation.

29 For an empirical critique of this assumption in World Bank claims, see Li (2011).

30 There is an emerging set of counter-narrative stories from the grassroots front, providing credibility and sharing experiences of local practices and organization (see, e.g., Franco & Borras, 2013; Holt-Giménez & Patel, 2009; Hilmi, 2012; Kerssen, 2013; Mann, 2014; McKeon, 2014b).

Additional information

Philip McMichael is a Professor and Chair of Development Sociology, Cornell University, and is a member of the Civil Society Mechanism in the CFS/FAO. Current research is on agrarian movements, land questions, and food regimes. He is author of the award-winning Settlers and the Agrarian Question (1984), Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (2012), and Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), and editor of Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010).