Food Sovereignty

Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing historical capacity has withered. This “withering” is perhaps most evident in capitalism’s failure to offer a new, actually productive, agricultural model – as agro-biotechnology failed to deliver on its promissory notes. Moving from bad to worse, a second set of contradictions is now mediated through climate change. Climate change, one amongst many ongoing biospheric shifts, is interwoven with the totality of neoliberal agriculture’s contradictions to produce new contradictions: negative-value. This signals the emergence of forms of nature that are increasingly hostile to capital accumulation, and which can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasingly costly, toxic, and dangerous strategies. The rise of negative-value – whose accumulation has been latent for much of capitalist history – therefore suggests a significant and rapid erosion of opportunities for the appropriation of new streams of unpaid work/energy. As such, these new limits are qualitatively different from the nutrient- and resource-depletion of earlier, developmental crises of the longue durée Cheap Food model. These contradictions, within capital, arising from negative-value, are today encouraging an unprecedented shift towards a radical onto-logical politics, within capitalism as a whole, that destabilizes crucial points of agreement in the modern world-system: What is Food? What is Nature? What is Valuable?

This video was created as a part of an action research project and political campaign to challenge food safety regulations that many argue benefit industrial agri-food systems and marginalize any alternatives (i.e. community, sustainable, small, fair, organic, just). This video was created as a part of "The Real Manitoba Food Fight" which was launched on August 31, 2013, with the publication of an interactive website www.realmanitobafoodfight.ca.

Over the past six years the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, has vigorously defended the case for small-scale and sustainable farming and has helped to establish the political legitimacy of food sovereignty in high level expert fora. This commentary offers brief reflections on De Schutter’s contribution focussing on the welcome shift of emphasis from food to nutritional security, as well as his strong support for agroecology. The paper argues that he has offered a powerful and coherent alternative to the prevailing paradigm of productivism that has helped reshape food policy discourse.

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so.  This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security. 

In this interview, Jose Luis Vivero makes a strong case for a narrative shift in the way we all perceive food: from being merely a commodity whose utility has to be maximized by all means towards the valuation of all food dimensions and its consideration as a commons, a natural resource that is a vital element for each human being. This narrative shall be the basis for a transition to a glocalised food system which is not only more sustainable but also much fairer to the millions of hungry.
The industrial food system only values food by its price in the market: the lower the better. This “LOW COST” FOOD SYSTEM requires full mechanization and neglects the nutritional implications of healthy food or the social spill over effects of local sustainable food production undertaken by family farming. As food is cheap, it can be wasted with no net losses. Food Security is a Global Public Good that is within the mandate of every state but surely not within the mandate of every food corporation. Big Food companies are aimed at maximizing profit out of food instead of producing healthy food sustainably. That’s why we need to reclaim the citizens’ spaces where civic collective actions for food can be carried out by self-organized groups of producers and consumers, outside traditional market rules or state-driven policies.
We need a different power balance between the State, the market and citizen's collective actions. For instance, a Universal Food Coverage for every citizen could be established in the most progressive countries. In every European country there is a minimum standard of health or education that every citizen is entitled to and that standard is guaranteed by the State. Why don’t we imagine a similar scheme for food? Would it be possible a Universal Food Coverage for every citizen in Europe? What about an international binding Food Treaty to regulate those minimum standards, outside the absolute primacy of WTO rules applied to commodities? There are thousands of growing examples all over the world where alternative food initiatives are being developed by committed citizens. This narrative could provide an ethical basis to coalesce the practical actions under a counter-hegemonic discourse. Food is not a commodity, food is a vital resource for human beings, a human right, a cultural determinant, a natural resource and it shall thus be treated as a commons.       

Este documento presenta un analisis del hambre estacional en Guatemala, que se manifiesta por una variacion regular y marcadamente estacional de la desnutricion aguda infantil, alcanzando picos todos los anhos entre los meses de mayo y septiembre. Se analizan nueve factores que inciden sobre el hambre estacional, indicando las causas de su variacion y su incidencia sobre el estado nutricional de los menores de cinco anhos. Se realizan calendarios especificos de cada zona biogeografica de Guatemala y se propone un Plan de Accion para combatir el Hambre Estacional. Adicionalmente, se presenta por primera vez una propuesta para dar seguimiento a la desnutricion aguda estacional a traves de la metodologia de Corredores Endemicos de Desnutricion Aguda. 

Este documento tiene como objetivo analizar el Pacto Hambre Cero de Guatemala a la luz de las experiencias latinoamericanas, para asi proponer opciones para mejorar el disenho y la ejecucion del Pacto. Se incluye un análisis institucional, legal y financiero de cuatro programas de lucha contra el hambre en Brasil, Colombia-Antioquia, Nicaragua y Perú, que llevan bastantes anhos de operacion y que han mostrado una reducción significativa de los indicadores de desnutrición crónica y pobreza. Además, el texto presenta un análisis de las fuentes de gasto público en Guatemala y propuestas para mejorar la cantidad y calidad de ese gasto.

Este estudio se presenta como una revisión del sistema agroalimentario actual desde el punto de vista de la energía y de los impactos de su uso, por parte de los distintos modelos de producción, distribución y consumo alimentario. Se divide en tres bloques fundamentales: i) Introducción al sistema agroalimentario mundial y a las alternativas existentes al mismo, como un contenido previo fundamental para poder entender las dinámicas y relaciones económicas, sociales y ambientales en las que nuestro sistema agroalimentario se desarrolla; ii) Consumos energéticos asociados a las fases de la cadena alimentaria, en el que se introduce la importancia de la energía en la alimentación y se desglosan una a una las principales fases del sistema de producción y distribución de alimentos y iii) Casos prácticos de comparativas energéticas entre cuatro alimentos escogidos (manzana, leche, carne de cerdo y tomate).

In a study of food security and sovereignty (FSS) in 22 indigenous Mayan communities in Yucatán State, Mexico, a participatory action research (PAR) methodology was combined with an analytical framework comprised of 10 FSS indicators to measure food security in the study area and identify strengths and weaknesses of the analytical framework. While some of the FSS indicators were approaching satisfactory, the majority were only partially satisfied, and food self-sufficiency was for the most part unsatisfactory. It was also found that food security indicators are relatively easier to measure, while sovereignty indicators present challenges in terms of defining progress.