Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance

Into the ambivalence that characterizes debates about the usefulness of human rights to social movements under conditions of late capitalism wades Matthew C. Canfield with his book Translating Food Sovereignty. Asking readers early and often what it means to claim sovereignty rather than rights, he doubles back on rights and regulation throughout the book, arguing that they are useful tools of liberation through the lens of translation. He argues that mobilization of alternative discourses can open the debate on the meaning of food, food security, knowledge, or rights. Armed with expanded ideas of what is possible, actors on scales from the local to the global, detailed in his book, have been able to leverage those alternative narratives to shape policy in what he calls “governance from below” (p. 7).

Canfield’s goal is to demonstrate how the discourses of food sovereignty have both internally shaped social movements by expanding their own understandings of their objectives and influenced regulatory frameworks outside their jurisdiction. Canfield does this through examining the “social practices of translation” or the way in which “social movements and other actors constitute shared networks, meanings, and norms and seek to encode them within institutional arenas” (p. 19). He uses the case examples of local food networks and farm workers organizing in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, the introduction of the super banana in Uganda, and the definition of food security in the United Nations. In each case Canfield demonstrates how the introduction of the language of food sovereignty expanded rights (or had the potential to) and shaped regulation.

The book’s strengths lie in its expansive and comprehensive summary of food sovereignty social movements, meanings, definitions, and practices. The arguments between activists, for example, on food policy councils between encouraging better consumption or expanding the meaning of community, will seem very familiar to many of us who work in and with food justice and food sovereignty social movements. Set primarily in activities that center on or emerged from the Pacific Northwest, however, the book is limited in terms of its ability to connect to or comment on food sovereignty mobilizations that might have taken very different form, such as those on the opposite end of the country. New England, for example, is the birthplace of township-scale food sovereignty ordinances, granting legal rights to food, where there have been none. Because these areas are characterized by very different political histories and contexts, I would have enjoyed a comparison of how local food became mobilized as a political object in places shaped by rural, home-rule governance with the urban, less autonomous legal environments of Seattle. This would have been especially welcome in a book that leads with a desire to “understand the relationships between law and social change” (p. 15).

Ultimately the book demonstrates not the relationship of law, so much, but the power of discourse to bring about change, or to support future change. Each chapter deals with, in its own way, a discursive battle over who or what belongs in a just food system. The anticorporate, anticommodification, and pro-people narratives of food sovereignty were effective at widening the debate of local food policy councils, expanding what it means to access food, influencing what counts as agricultural knowledge, and reasserting rights to labor organizing, as long as those voices were able to be heard. In turn, these expanded narratives affected various forms of governance in more or less effective ways.

In so doing, the book takes up a key area of debate that is ongoing within social movements and those of us who study and work with them: the roles of rights to the project of liberation, and in particular realizing the right to food. Rights as part a liberal framework have not been realized universally and some advocate for jettisoning them altogether as a way to secure justice. Other argue for a greater and wider understanding of the power of collective rights (land, water, seeds, etc.) to expand freedom and access to food. Still others advocate for prioritizing the rights of nature over people, given how protecting nature has historically brought benefits to people. Canfield weighs in on this debate with a Polanyian solution that finds its contemporary form in the “both/and” phraseology. For Canfield, “both” rights claims, followed by the “and” of regulation that responds to those claims, in a patchwork of governance above and below the scale of the nation state, are the way forward.

This might seem like a satisfying, theoretically sound, and measured conclusion, but it does leave open several questions. The first is that regulation is still prone to capture by liberal states shaped by settler colonialism and therefore is always in danger of protecting the thing that food sovereigntists set out to contest: markets, exploitative labor relations, theft of knowledge, and politicized restrictions on the access to food. This implies that struggle must be ongoing, and indeed, one does not have to look very far for Indigenous claims to the rights of food sovereignty that have been obstructed by representation and regulation in unceded territories of the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Coté 2022). This framing also leaves open an oft-asked question: If regulation can solve the problem, do we still need rights? Relatedly, do rights still matter if we all realize what we wanted to obtain through them? Rights tend to take on their meaning in the absence of them, so if we must continue to engage in a struggle for access to food when some people continue to lose rights to food, especially when those rights and regulations are established through a settler colonial state, where have we really gotten ourselves?

Canfield’s book points to openings in an ongoing and probably irresolvable debate. His careful, comprehensive, and rigorous examination of several cases invites us to step into them and explore what the right to food and other rights could look like in some places. He allows us to explore what is possible and what could be realized through collective, concerted action on multiple scales. Ultimately, the struggle and debate continues well beyond the conclusion of the book, and we can thank Canfield for offering us some new tools and insight toward carrying on the struggle.