What Does Food Sovereignty Look Like?

The common principle of food sovereignty movements worldwide is the right to democratic participation in the food system. But a prerequisite for realising this right is a ”˜moral universalism' that may sit uncomfortably with its advocates, writes...

July 3, 2009 | Source: Journal of Peasant Studies | by Raj Patel

There is, among those who use the term, a strong sense that while ‘food sovereignty’ might be hard to define, it is the sort of thing one knows when one sees. This is a little unsatisfactory, and this section marks an attempt to put a little more flesh on the concept’s bones, beyond the widely agreed notion that food sovereignty isn’t what we have at the moment. Before introducing the papers that make up the rest of this section, it is worth looking at the etymology of the term ‘food sovereignty’.

It is, admittedly, the first instinct of an uninspired scholar to head toward definitions. I have, far more frequently than I’d care to remember, plundered the Oxford English Dictionary for an authoritative statement of terms against which I then tilted. The problem with food sovereignty is, however, a reverse one. Food sovereignty is, if anything, over defined. There are so many versions of the concept, it is hard to know exactly what it means. The proliferation of overlapping definitions is, however, a symptom of food sovereignty itself, woven into the fabric of food sovereignty by necessity. Since food sovereignty is a call for peoples’ rights to shape and craft food policy, it can hardly be surprising that this right is not used to explore and expand the covering political philosophy. The result of this exploration has sometimes muddled and masked some difficult contradictions within the notion of food sovereignty, and these are contradictions worth exploring.

Before going into those definitions and contradictions, though, it is worth contrasting food sovereignty with the concept against which it has traditionally been ranged – food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has done a fine job of tracking the evolution of ‘food security’ (see FAO 2003), but it is useful to be reminded that the first official definition in 1974 of ‘food security’ was

 the availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices. (United Nations 1975 cited in FAO 2003)

The utility of the term in 1974 derived from its political economic context, in the midst of the Sahelian famine, at the zenith of demands for a New International Economic Order, and the peak of Third Worldist power, which had already succeeded in establishing the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as a bastion of commodity price stabilisation (Rajagopal 2000). In such a context, when states were the sole authors of the definition, and when there was a technocratic faith in the ability of states to redistribute resources if the resources could only be made available, it made sense to talk about sufficient world supplies, and for the primary concern of the term’s authors to lie in price stabilisation. Compare the language and priorities reflected in the early 1970s definition to this more recent one:

 Food security [is] a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. (FAO 2001 cited in FAO 2003)

The source for this definition was The State of Food Insecurity 2001, and herein lies some of the tale in the widening gyre of ‘food security’. The definition in 2001 was altogether more sweeping. While it marked the success of activists and the NGO and policymaking community to both enlarge the community of authors of such statements to include non-state actors and to shift the discussion away from production issues toward broader social concerns, it was also an intervention in a very different world and series of debates. No longer was there a Non-Aligned Movement. Nor was there, at least in the world of state-level diplomacy, the possibility of an alternative to US-style neoliberal capitalism. It was an intervention at a time when neoliberal triumphalism could be seen in the break away from a commitment to the full meeting of human rights, to the watered down Millennium Development Goals, which provided, under the mantle of ‘realistically achievable goals’, a much more elastic time frame for the achievement of goals that were intended by the authors of such goals to be delivered with all due haste. The early 2000s was also a time when the institutions originally created to fight hunger, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, were looking increasingly irrelevant and cosmetic in the decision making around hunger policy. The expansion of the definition of food security in 2001, in other words, was both a cause and consequence of its increasing irrelevance as a guiding concept in the shaping of international food production and consumption priorities.

While harsh, this assessment is not unreasonable. The terms on which food is, or is not, made available by the international community has been taken away from institutions that might be oriented by concerns of ‘food security’, and given to the market, which is guided by an altogether different calculus. It is, then, possible to tell a coherent story of the evolution of ‘food security’ by using the term as a mirror of international political economy. But that story is not one in which capital is dominant -‘food security’ moved from being simply about producing and distributing food, to a whole nexus of concerns around nutrition, social control, and public health. In no small part, that broadening was a direct result of the leadership taken by Via Campesina to introduce at the World Food Summit in 1996 the idea of ‘food sovereignty’, a term that was very specifically intended as a foil to the prevailing notions of food security.