Food Sovereignty

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Although it was first developed to challenge the neoliberal globalisation being promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the influence of the concept of food sovereignty has grown because it offers a different way of thinking about how the world food system can be organised; it offers an alternative. As developed initially by Via Campesina and further elaborated at the 2007 Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty, food sovereignty is based on the right of peoples and countries to define their own agricultural and food policy and has five interlinked and inseparable components:

(1) A focus on food for people: food sovereignty puts the right to sufficient, healthy and culturally appropriate food for all individuals, peoples and communities at the centre of food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries policies, and rejects the proposition that food is just another commodity.

(2) The valuing of food providers: food sovereignty values and supports the contributions, and respects the rights, of women and men who grow, harvest and process food and rejects those policies, actions and programmes that undervalue them and threaten their livelihoods.

(3) Localisation of food systems: food sovereignty puts food providers and food consumers at the centre of decision making on food issues; protects providers from the dumping of food in local markets; protects consumers from poor quality and unhealthy food, including food tainted with transgenic organisms; and rejects governance structures that depend on inequitable international trade and give power to corporations. It places control over territory, land, grazing, water, seeds, livestock and fish populations in the hands of local food providers and respects their rights to use and share them in socially and environmentally sustainable ways; it promotes positive interaction between food providers in different territories and from different sectors, which helps resolve conflicts; and rejects the privatisation of natural resources through laws, commercial contracts and intellectual property rights regimes.

(4) The building of knowledge and skills: food sovereignty builds on the skills and local knowledge of food providers and their local organisations that conserve, develop and manage localised food production and harvesting systems, developing appropriate research systems to support this, and rejects technologies that undermine these.

(5) Working with nature: food sovereignty uses the contributions of nature in diverse, low external-input agroecological production and harvesting methods that maximise the contribution of ecosystems and improve resilience. It rejects methods that harm ecosystem functions, and which depend on energy-intensive monocultures and livestock factories and other industrialised production methods. [1] [2]

Localization

The production of healthy, sustainable food by local farmers and workers is fundamental to transition away from globalized neoliberal industrial agriculture.[3] Within the broader framework of food sovereignty, localized food production is a key part of this movement's recipe challenging the dominant position of massive industrial ag corporations in the global food economy.[4]

As localization and its connection to food sovereignty are not static, but dynamic, it is important to determine if local food producers are contributing to a broader movement of food sovereignty. Small farm projects are often viewed as inherently antithetical to industrialized agriculture/capitalism, but small scale farmers can also employ similar methods of production as industrial agriculture. Beyond simply producing food locally it's key to note that:

Local food initiatives established with agroecological production methods fall more fully within the food sovereignty framework. Agroecology is based on enhancing small-scale farm productivity while conserving ecological resources through engagement in deeply rooted traditional practices and scientific knowledge of ecological processes. Rosset et al summarise agroecology as a set of principles that include soil conservation and soil building, recycling of nutrients, poly-cropping and biodiversity preservation, and the use of biological mechanisms for pest control. While agroecology practice is spreading through food sovereignty networks, questions remain about whether enough food can be produced, at affordable prices, to feed everyone. [5]

Localized food production, theoretically, decreases the distance food must travel to reach consumers. The decrease of distance does not necessarily end the commodification of food, but it does present the potential to end the abstraction of food into uniform mass produced commodities, which have no tangible connections between the producer and consumer.[6][7] Dr. Vandana Shiva discusses the abstraction of food within a capitalist society versus local food producers focusing on food sovereignty:

There are two kinds of markets. Markets embedded in nature and society are places of exchange, of meeting, of culture. Some are simultaneously cultural festivals and spaces for economic transactions, with real people buying and selling real things they have produced or directly need. Such markets are diverse and direct. They serve people, and are shaped by people.

The market shaped by capital, excludes people as producers. Cultural spaces of exchange are replaced by invisible processes. People's needs are substituted for by greed, profit, and consumerism. The market becomes the mystification of processes of crude capital accumulation, the mask behind which those wielding corporate power hide.

It is this disembodied, decontextualized market which destroys the environment and peoples' lives.[8]

Another challenge undermining the sovereignty of localized food production is the dispossession of farmers from their land[9] - today, a result of neoliberal capitalism and its leg of industrialized agriculture. This dispossession happens to small scale sustainable farmers and farmers trapped within the industrial agricultural business, which makes it difficult to exit due to costly inputs such as fertilizer and expensive large scale farm equipment necessary to plant, grow and harvest large monocultures:[10]

...Dispossession not only occurs to those caught struggling against the imposition of cheap imports flooding their national and local markets, it also happens to those who engage and participate in the same industrial food system that is eventually responsible for their dispossession. The dispossessed may be ‘adversely incorporated’ into the global food system, where they are marginalised and exploited,79 for example as migrant labourers on highly industrialised, single commodity-driven farms or as contract farmers integrated into corporate production systems. Participation is often forced by the search for higher yields to offset low prices or the consolidation of processers who prefer to contract production on their terms or by the difficulty of unhooking from the industrial system once you are connected to it through inputs and other means.[11]

Metabolic Rift

Historians have argued that the first instances of agricultural domestication, allegedly around 10,000 years ago, triggered an irreversible trend of human domination over nature.[12] This historical analysis does not take into account multiple sites of agricultural domestication across the so called Americas dating before colonization and its genocidal destruction came to the shores.[13] Ignoring these pre-colonial sites of agriculture does not consider how Capitalism affected agricultural production and assumes that the process of domestication within itself led to the alienation of nature from humanity. Karl Marx created the idea of the metabolic rift and it explains:

...the concept of a socio-ecological exchange or metabolism as a dynamic and interdependent process linking society to nature through labour: members of society appropriate the materials of nature through labour, in the process transforming the environment and simultaneously their own (human) nature. The socio-ecological metabolism in agriculture is maintained over time and space through the recycling of nutrients. Formerly small-scale, local agricultural initiatives took nutrients from the soil in the form of food, fodder, and fibre, later replenishing soil fertility with wastes to ensure continued productivity.... ....This theoretically sustainable, metabolic relationship between society and nature prior to the advent of capitalism was broken by the creation of labour markets and the commodification of nature, and of land in particular. The widening separation of rural producers from urban consumers disrupted traditional nutrient cycling, causing extensive soil depletion and an increasing dependence on imported fertilizers...[14]

As capitalism expanded, the relationship between humans, production, and nature transformed as well, creating more and more distance between consumers and producers. Through this distance, ecological symbiosis was replaced with market relations resulting in commodification of the land, which over time would transform into monocultured industrialized agriculture. Capitalist expansion ruptured of a sustainable metabolic rift,

... which resulted in unforeseen, if not entirely unintended, consequences. Water pollution, deforestation, and over time, food crises were all characteristics of transformed land and labour markets. Subsequent social and economic disruptions associated with waves of capitalist expansion and the Industrial Revolution further reorganised the landscape of production and engendered systemic cycles of agroecological transformation (Foster 1999, 2000, Moore 2000).[15]

Industrialized agriculture required a decrease in seed varieties and streamlined production to maximize commodity profits.[16] The homogenization and scaling down of genetic diversity facilitated and required increased inputs of chemical fertilizers to replenish depleted soil, which has led to water pollution, desertification, and soil degradation.[17][18] The decrease in genetic diversity caused crops to become less resistant to pests, predators, and disease.[19] All of these factors have led to the globalized food system becoming far less resilient to disturbances, which are becoming more frequent as industrial agriculture continues to massively contribute to climate collapse and ecocide.[20] [21]

Reestablishing a symbiotic metabolic rift between humanity and nature requires recognizing they are both inextricably linked.[22] Understanding the metabolic rift in conjunction with localized food production within a food sovereignty framework helps provide a path forward away from industrialized agriculture toward food justice and true food sovereignty.

Agroecology

Agroecology is the application of ecological concepts, the study of relationships between plants, animals, people, and their environment - and the balance between these relationships, and principals in farming.[23] In the context of food sovereignty and localization utilizing agroecology is key to transitioning away from and repairing the destructive effects[24] of industrial agriculture.[25]

Small Farm Food Production

https://www.globalagriculture.org/whats-new/news/en/34543.html

Agroforestry

Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Tohono O'odham Community Action

https://reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/1003879-building-together-ii.html

Global Food Sovereignty Movements

Slow Food

EKhenana Commune

The EKhenana Commune was established in 2018 after nearby residents faced evictions from their rented lodgings. Lindokuhle Mnguni, the once elected leader of the eKhenana settlement describes the aspirations of the commune, "As young people with historical poverty attached to our names, we need to start promoting the concept of developing practical pathways that... challenge the... corporate-controlled food system based on capitalism and tackle food inequality at its roots... This will enable many South Africans who are affected by poverty with limited access to information and healthy choices to develop customised alternatives that could change our relationship with food sovereignty and sustainability."[26] Mnguni was assassinated on March 8th, 2022. A press release regarding the matter was released by the commune stating:

Ayanda Ngila, a leader in the eKhenana Commune, a brave, brilliant and committed young man, a visionary leader, a shining inspiration, was murdered at eKhenana just before 3 this afternoon. Four men entered the commune from the river side, where the communal garden is, and started shooting at Ayanda as he was working on the irrigation pipping.

The attack was led Khaya Ngubane, brother to Ntokozo Ngubane and son to NS Ngubane. This is the ANC group that has constantly borne false witness against our members, directed the police who to arrest and not to arrest, moved in and out of the office of the Chief Magistrate when our comrades appear in court, burnt homes, vandalised the infrastructure on the Commune and acted with total impunity against our members.

The Commune has come under relentlessly violent attack from the ANC, the police and the anti-land invasion unit. Its leaders have regularly been arrested on bogus charges, denied bail and detained in prison. Ayanda recently did six months in prison, was released when the charges were dropped and then sent back to prison on more bogus charges.[27]

The commune was inspired by the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST,) in Brazil, a Marxist inspired organization that emphasizes transformation of society through agriculture, cooperation and the protection of the environment.[28][29] In addition to working the land the organization has created education programs to teach its residents about food sovereignty. Mnguni explains the potential of expropriating land in urban settings as well:

“The life we are trying to adopt in eKhenana allows for an opportunity to discuss how land and the debate on land expropriation can be used in the urban context, to ensure that unused unproductive vacant land in cities can be expropriated for the provision of housing and other services for the urban poor. We are not land invaders or illegal occupants. We are committed to creating a sustainable place where even the poorest can prosper. We have made efforts to try mitigate the socioeconomic problems brought about by apartheid, and the consequence of a corrupt system meant to liberate us 26 years ago.”[30]

The Landworkers' Alliance

Urban Food Sovereignty

Fruit Trees

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1618866717304387?via%3Dihub

Occupy the Farm

Klink Garden

Community Gardens

Knowledge Commons

Place-Based Knowledge

Seed Freedom

Dr.Vandana Shiva explains what seed freedom looks like:

We use the term "seed freedom" to talk about the right of the seed as a living, self-organized system that can evolve freely without the threat of extinction, genetic contamination, or termination through technologies designed to make seeds sterile. Seed freedom is the freedom of bees to pollinate freely, without threat of extinction due to poisons. Seed freedom is the freedom of the web of life to weave itself in integrity and resilience, fostering interconnectedness and well-being for all. Seed freedom is the right of farmers to save, exchange, breed, and sell farmers' varities-- seeds that have been evolved over milennia-- without interference by the state or by corporations. Seed freedom is the freedom of eaters to have access to food grown from seeds bred for diversity, taste, flavor, quality, and nutrtion[31]

Seed Banks

India

In the Indian State, Rajasthan, in the Baran District, two of the most prominenet tribes: Saharia and Bheels began creating seed banks, with the help of an NGO 'CECOEDECON,' and were primarly run by women. The Women returned to Indigenous methods of seed storage and curing- including locally available resources like neem leaves, wood of Bamboo, and ash. The impacts of this seed bank are obvious:

Control over the time of sowing and dramatic increase in crop area owing to availability of good quality seeds has been one of the major impacts of seedbanks. Before the establishment of the seed bank, only 15 out of 20 farmers could sow in the command area. Presently, all the farmers are able to because farmers are now assured they would get seed. Timely availability of seeds has increased the area under cropping and thereby the production and income. The banks also serve as an insurance against drought. Even during times of drought, the farmers are assured of seeds to sow, which was not the case earlier... ... Currently all farmers in the village use the seeds from the bank. Individual farmers created their own wheat seed banks after seeing the community rice bank leading to even greater seed security for the village. Seeing the success of the SHG seed bank in Shahpur, four seed banks were started by groups of two to three farmers in the village. There is also a significant increase in animal fodder.[32]

Navdanya

Dr. Vandana Shiva founded Navdanya in 1987 when she

... heard the coprorations spell out their vision of total control over life through genetic engineering and patents on life and seeds... Navdanya was formed to protect our seed diversity and farmers' rights to save, breed, and exchange seed freely. For me, life-forms, plants, and seeds are all evolving, self-organized, sovereign beings. They have intrinsic worth, value, and standing. Owning life by claiming it to be a corporate invention is ethically and legally wrong. Patents on seeds are legally wrong, becasue seeds are not an invention. Patents on seeds are ethically wrong, because seeds are life-forms-- they are kin members of our Earth Family.[33]

Since its inception Navdanya has helped establish more than one hundred community seed banks in local Indian communities to help "reclaim seed diversity and seed as a commons."

Farmer Suicide

Because of overwhelming debt around 30 Indian farmers kill themselves everyday. In 2020 more than 10,000 farmers committed suicide.[34]

"Lee Kyung Hae martyred himself while wearing a sign reading "WTO kills farmers" at the Cancun WTO ministerial to attract attention to one of the worst genocides of our times -- the genocide of small farmers through the rules of globalization... Thirty thousand farmers have been killed by globalization policies in India over a decade. According to India's National Crime Burea, 16,000 farmers in India committed suicide during 2004. During one six-month span in 2004, there were 1,860 suicides by farmers in the state of Andhra Pradesh alone."[35]

Counter-Sovereignty

The Washington Consensus

“The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements… It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more… Our future security will be in their inability to injure us, the distance to which they are driven, and in their terror.”

-Orders by U.S. General George Washington, planning war crimes against the Haudenosaunee in 1779 (La Duke 2005: 154)

"Control oil, you control nations; control food and you control the people."

-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 1974 (National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interest)

English Imperialism

False Scarcity

Before colonization Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island were thriving civilizations[36] with complex societies and differing customs.[37][38][39] There were many types of agriculture, means to sustenance and land management techniques across the so called Americas.[40] A common myth is that Indigenous Nations were barely surviving before European colonization, but this is not accurate:

During my conversation with Auntie, she explained how Indigenous People had an abundance of food and “everyone would help themselves, eat when you are hungry, [there was] always food for everyone, and the fires never went out, the coals were always kept going… food was communal with a preference for the youth and elderly to eat first.” As she explained this to me, it brought me back to a time at the garden when she emphasized that “we need to get rid of this idea that we were barely getting by and starving. We had vast food reserves and never went hungry – there was much abundance.”[41]

Transition

Just Transition

"We must build visionary economy that is very different than the one we now are in. This requires stopping the bad while at the same time as building the new. We must change the rules to redistribute resources and power to local communities. Just transition initiatives are shifting from dirty energy to energy democracy, from funding highways to expanding public transit, from incinerators and landfills to zero waste, from industrial food systems to food sovereignty, from gentrification to community land rights, from military violence to peaceful resolution, and from rampant destructive development to ecosystem restoration. Core to a just transition is deep democracy in which workers and communities have control over the decisions that affect their daily lives.

To liberate the soil and to liberate our souls we must decolonize our imaginations, remember our way forward and divorce ourselves from the comforts of empire. We must trust that deep in our cultures and ancestries is the diverse wisdom we need to navigate our way towards a world where we live in just relationships with each other and with the earth."[42]

expand upon**

Sources

  1. ↑ A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, "Accelerating towards food sovereignty", Third World Quarterly, 2015 Vol. 36, No. 3, 563–583, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1002989
  2. ↑ International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, “Définition de la souveraineté alimentaire.”
  3. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/28/can-we-ditch-intensive-farming-and-still-feed-the-world
  4. ↑ Martha Jane Robbins (2015) Exploring the ‘localisation’ dimension of food sovereignty, Third World Quarterly, 36:3, 449-468, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1024966
  5. ↑ Martha Jane Robbins (2015) Exploring the ‘localisation’ dimension of food sovereignty, Third World Quarterly, 36:3, 449-468, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1024966
  6. ↑ Martha Jane Robbins (2015) Exploring the ‘localisation’ dimension of food sovereignty, Third World Quarterly, 36:3, 449-468, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1024966
  7. ↑ Downey, G. (2011). Alienation and Food. Philologia, 3(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.21061/ph.v3i1.100
  8. ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and peace, Page 16
  9. ↑ https://wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/north-carolina/durham-food-history/the-plight-of-farmers-the-tools-of-dispossession-1900-1950/
  10. ↑ https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/
  11. ↑ Martha Jane Robbins (2015) Exploring the ‘localisation’ dimension of food sovereignty, Third World Quarterly, 36:3, 449-468, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1024966
  12. ↑ Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity. First American edition. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  13. ↑ Keeler, K. (2022). Before colonization (BC) and after decolonization (AD): The Early Anthropocene, the Biblical Fall, and relational pasts, presents, and futures. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(3), 1341–1360. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211033087
  14. ↑ Hannah Wittman (2009): Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36:4, 805-826
  15. ↑ Wittman, H. (2009). Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(4), 805–826.
  16. ↑ https://www.foodsystemprimer.org/food-production/industrialization-of-agriculture/
  17. ↑ https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-pollution-101
  18. ↑ Horrigan, L., Lawrence, R. S., & Walker, P. (2002). How sustainable agriculture can address the environmental and human health harms of industrial agriculture. Environmental Health Perspectives, 110(5), 445–456. doi:10.1289/ehp.02110445
  19. ↑ Jonathan Storkey, Toby J.A. Bruce, Vanessa E. McMillan, Paul Neve, Chapter 12 - The Future of Sustainable Crop Protection Relies on Increased Diversity of Cropping Systems and Landscapes, Editor(s): Gilles Lemaire, Paulo César De Faccio Carvalho, Scott Kronberg, Sylvie Recous, Agroecosystem Diversity, Academic Press, 2019, Pages 199-209, ISBN 9780128110508, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-811050-8.00012-1.
  20. ↑ Hannah Wittman (2009): Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36:4, 805-826
  21. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/03/big-agriculture-climate-crisis-cop27
  22. ↑ Salmón, E. (2000). Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship. Ecological Applications, 10(5), 1327–1332. https://doi.org/10.2307/2641288
  23. ↑ https://www.soilassociation.org/causes-campaigns/a-ten-year-transition-to-agroecology/what-is-agroecology/
  24. ↑ https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/10-things-you-should-know-about-industrial-farming
  25. ↑ Botelho, M. I. V., Cardoso, I. M., & Otsuki, K. (2015). “I made a pact with God, with nature, and with myself”: exploring deep agroecology. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 40(2), 116–131. doi:10.1080/21683565.2015.11157
  26. ↑ https://www.newframe.com/ekhenana-residents-are-tilling-for-freedom/
  27. ↑ https://libcom.org/article/ayanda-ngila-leader-ekhenana-commune-durban-south-africa-has-been-assassinated
  28. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20171215043600/http://sdonline.org/51/the-mst-and-agrarian-reform-in-brazil/
  29. ↑ https://www.newframe.com/ekhenana-residents-are-tilling-for-freedom/
  30. ↑ https://www.newframe.com/ekhenana-residents-are-tilling-for-freedom/
  31. ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World?: The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page 79-80
  32. ↑ http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Tribal%20women%20attain%20food%20sovereignty%20through%20seed%20banks.pdf
  33. ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva,Who Really Feeds the World, page 80-81
  34. ↑ https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/opinions/india-farmer-suicide-agriculture-reform-kaur/index.html
  35. ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Page. 107
  36. ↑ https://fncaringsociety.com/sites/default/files/Indigenous%20Contributions%20to%20North%20America%20and%20the%20World.pdf
  37. ↑ Clement, R. M., & Horn, S. P. (2001). Pre-Columbian land-use history in Costa Rica: a 3000-year record of forest clearance, agriculture and fires from Laguna Zoncho. The Holocene, 11(4), 419–426.
  38. ↑ Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity. First American edition. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  39. ↑ Keeler, K. (2022). Before colonization (BC) and after decolonization (AD): The Early Anthropocene, the Biblical Fall, and relational pasts, presents, and futures. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(3), 1341–1360. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211033087
  40. ↑ https://nfu.org/2020/10/12/the-indigenous-origins-of-regenerative-agriculture/
  41. ↑ https://branchoutnow.org/growing-sovereignty-turtle-island-and-the-future-of-food/#comments
  42. ↑ https://climatejusticealliance.org/just-transition/
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