Globalization and food sovereignty global and local change in the new politics of food

GLOBALIZATION AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
Global and Local Change in the New Politics of Food

In recent years, food sovereignty has emerged as a way of contesting
corporate control of agricultural markets in pursuit of a more democratic, decentralized food system. The concept unites individuals, communities, civil society organizations, and even states in opposition to
globalizing food regimes.
This collection examines expressions of food sovereignty ranging
from the direct action tactics of La Vía Campesina in Brazil to the consumer activism of the Slow Food movement and the negotiating stances
of states from the global South at WTO negotiations. With each case, the
contributors explore how claiming food sovereignty allows individuals to challenge the power of global agribusiness and reject neoliberal
market economics.
With perspectives drawn from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa,
and Australia, Globalization and Food Sovereignty is the first comparative
collection to focus on food sovereignty activism worldwide.
(Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy)
peter andrée is an associate professor in the Department of Political
Science at Carleton University.
jeffrey ayres is a professor in the Department of Political Science at
Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont.
michael j. bosia is an associate professor in the Department of Political
Science at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont.
marie-josée massicotte is an associate professor in the School of
Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.


Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy
Editors: MICHAEL HOWLETT, DAVID LAYCOCK (Simon Fraser
University), and STEPHEN MCBRIDE (McMaster University)
Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy is designed
to showcase innovative approaches to political economy and public

policy from a comparative perspective. While originating in Canada,
the series will provide attractive offerings to a wide international audience, featuring studies with local, subnational, cross-national,
and international empirical bases and theoretical frameworks.
Editorial Advisory Board
Jeffrey Ayres, St Michael’s College, Vermont
Neil Bradford, Western University
Janine Brodie, University of Alberta
William Carroll, University of Victoria
William Coleman, University of Waterloo
Rodney Haddow, University of Toronto
Jane Jenson, Université de Montréal
Laura Macdonald, Carleton University
Rianne Mahon, Wilfrid Laurier University
Michael Mintrom, Monash University
Grace Skogstad, University of Toronto
Leah Vosko, York University
Kent Weaver, Georgetown University
Linda White, University of Toronto
Robert Young, Western University
For a list of books published in the series, see page 377.


Globalization and
Food Sovereignty
Global and Local Change
in the New Politics of Food

EDITED BY PETER ANDRÉE,
JEFFREY AYRES, MICHAEL J. BOSIA,
AND MARIE-JOSÉE MASSICOTTE

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London


© University of Toronto Press 2014
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4426-4375-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4426-1228-0 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Globalization and food sovereignty: global and local change in the new politics of food/
edited by Peter Andrée, Jeffrey Ayres, Michael J. Bosia, and Marie-Josée Massicotte.
(Studies in comparative political economy and public policy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4375-8 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-1228-0 (pbk.)
1. Food sovereignty.  2. Agriculture – Economic aspects.  3. Globalization.  I. Andrée,
Peter, 1970–, editor of compilation  II. Ayres, Jeffrey McKelvey, editor of compilation 
III. Bosia, Michael J., editor of compilation  IV. Massicotte, Marie-Josée, 1971–, editor
of compilation  V. Series: Studies in comparative political economy and public policy
HD9000.5.G585 2014  338.1'9  C2013-907475-9

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program,
using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing

program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.


Contents

Contributors  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Crisis and Contention in the New Politics of Food  3
peter andrée, jeffrey ayres, michael j. bosia,
and marie-josée massicotte
Part One: Food Sovereignty in Theory and Policy Debates
1 Food Sovereignty and Globalization: Lines of Inquiry  23
peter andrée, jeffrey ayres, michael j. bosia,
and marie-josée massicotte
2 The Territory of Self-Determination: Social Reproduction,
Agro-Ecology, and the Role of the State  53
michael menser
3 Exploring the Limits of Fair Trade: The Local Food Movement
in the Context of Late Capitalism  84
noah zerbe
4 Local Food: Food Sovereignty or Myth of Alternative
Consumer Sovereignty?  111
martha mcmahon


vi Contents

Part Two: Food Sovereignty in Comparative Perspective
5 Citizen-Farmers: The Possibilities and the Limits of Australia’s
Emerging Alternative Food Networks  141
peter andrée
6 From Food Security to Food Sovereignty in Canada: Resistance
and Authority in the Context of Neoliberalism  173
sarah j. martin and peter andrée
7 Food Sovereignty in Practice: A Study of Farmer-Led Sustainable
Agriculture in the Philippines  199
sarah wright
8 Free Markets for All: Transition Economies and the European
Union’s Common Agricultural Policy  228
irena knezevic
Part Three: Food Sovereignty in Contentious Politics
9 Feminist Political Ecology and La Vía Campesina’s Struggle
for Food Sovereignty through the Experience of the Escola
Latino-Americana de Agroecologia (ELAA)  255
marie-josée massicotte
10 Food Sovereignty, Trade Rules, and the Struggle to Know
the Origins of Food  288
elizabeth smythe
11 Food Sovereignty as Localized Resistance to Globalization
in France and the United States  319
jeffrey ayres and michael j. bosia
Conclusion: The Food Sovereignty Lens  345
philip mcmichael
Index  365


Contributors

Peter Andrée, Department of Political Science, Carleton University,
Canada
Jeffrey Ayres, Department of Political Science, Saint Michael’s College,
USA
Michael J. Bosia, Department of Political Science, Saint Michael’s
College, USA
Irena Knezevic, Department of Communication and Culture, York
University, Canada
Sarah J. Martin, Program in Global Governance, University of Waterloo,
Canada
Marie-Josée Massicotte, School of Political Studies, University of
Ottawa, Canada
Martha McMahon, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria,
Canada
Philip McMichael, Department of Development Sociology, Cornell
University, USA
Michael Menser, Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, CUNY,
USA


viii Contributors

Elizabeth Smythe, Faculty of Arts and Political Science, Concordia
University College of Alberta, Canada
Sarah Wright, Discipline of Geography and Environmental Studies,
University of Newcastle, Australia
Noah Zerbe, Department of Politics, Humboldt State University, USA

Acknowledgments

Today, the study of food as a political phenomenon has become a hot
topic in and outside of academia, with political scientist James Scott,
best known for his work on peasant politics, featured in the New York
Times as much for his scholarship as for his organic farm. Moreover,
over the past several years, food prices have skyrocketed in many
places around the world, accompanied by expanding food protests and
extended policy debates about the health and safety of the food being
consumed by the general public. In response to these events, the activists, organizations, and movements behind the call for food sovereignty
have won many struggles to put a new vision of food and agriculture
on the international public agenda, including on that of some powerful institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations.
Because these changes result in part from the constant work and efforts of small farmers, peasants, and food activists, the editors of this
collection have turned their attention to the links between food, globalization, and politics. For Peter Andrée and Marie-Josée Massicotte, this
project is a direct result of their research in the field and scholarship on
peasant politics and food movements as well as the commitments they
hold in their lives. For Jeffrey Ayres and Michael J. Bosia, this volume is
as much a product of the commitments in their families and communities in the small state of Vermont, with both of their spouses directly
involved in local farming and production, as it is a reflection of their
own interest in social justice and responses among social movements
to global forces. Therefore, we owe our greatest debt to the many local activists and movements involved in food struggles in the North
and South, some of whom have been essential sources of analysis,


x Acknowledgments

inspiration, and information through exchanges and interviews, for
deepening our understanding of the complexities of today's food debates in different parts of the world.
In addition, this volume has been an interestingly evolving and growing collaboration. It began with a panel organized by Ayres and Bosia at

the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco in
2008, continued through a short course at the American Political Science
Association meeting in Toronto in 2009, where Andrée and Massicotte
joined the editorial team and where many of the contributors became
more directly involved, and evolved with a panel sequence at the
Canadian Political Science Association conference in Montreal in 2010.
During this discussion, revision, and healthy intellectual exchange, we
have gathered together a thoughtful, innovative, risk-taking, engaged,
and provocative set of contributors with strong scholarly credentials. In
fact, this is as much a volume by people who conduct research and build
theory as it is the collective work of those who care about their world
and seek to shape social change.
We also want to thank Daniel Quinlan of the University of Toronto
Press for his early enthusiasm and support for this project, for acquiring an advance contract for publication, and for securing excellent
anonymous reviewers who provided timely, insightful, and constructive criticism to further strengthen this project’s empirical and theoretical contributions. Individually, the editors extend their appreciation
to the colleagues, family, and friends who have been so supportive of
this project and of our scholarly work and social commitments more
generally. The editors also acknowledge individually the support they
received for research on this project from their home institutions, including funding for research, conferences, and publication expenses.
We gratefully acknowledge that this book has been published with
the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social
Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
Finally, the editors wish to thank especially each of the contributors
to this volume for their patience in the face of a challenging and changing world, working with us as the process of building this volume has
evolved over these past several years. With the opportunity to connect
at conferences during the writing and review, the authors have had a
chance to meet, share ideas, and exchange drafts of chapters that improved the scope of the work and advanced the dialogue, helping to

Acknowledgments xi

cement a more theoretically and thematically coherent book. The result
is a collection that is as much an internal discussion as it is a conversation with the world of activists and academics beyond our pages. This
patient collaboration has provided us with a rich and broad coverage
of the politics of food in a period of economic uncertainty, heightened
political contestation, and intense debate over what can or should be
done to improve agricultural practices, and to promote more just and
sustainable food systems in different environs.


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GLOBALIZATION AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
Global and Local Change in the New Politics of Food


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Introduction: Crisis and Contention
in the New Politics of Food
peter andrée, jeffrey ayres, michael j. bosia,
and marie-josée massicotte

The evidence speaks for itself. If we turn to the world as a source of
nutrition, we see the glaring paradox brought about by a globalizing
food system that arose in the industrial and scientific transformation of
food production in Europe and the United States and was then exported first to the most proximate agricultural economies, and in the past

three decades, carried through a series of structural reforms to every
region of the global South. The paradox is evident in a context of increasing food production and access to affordable food for many, especially in urban areas, that has brought land grabs and dislocations,
hunger and food shortages, obesity, food contamination, and environmental impacts that threaten the very resources upon which that food
production depends. This volume focuses on responses to these paradoxical crises, in which peasants and farmers, consumers and activists,
and other social movement and economic actors are coalescing around
a toolkit of participatory actions that are variously called “food sovereignty” or “food democracy.”
We take the position that the geographically diverse food crises are
interrelated and that they can be tied to McMichael’s concept of a “globalizing food regime” (McMichael 2011, 805). This view emphasizes the
intensification and expansion across borders of the industrial model
of agriculture based on capital-intensive equipment, energy-intensive
inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, water, and seeds, and favouring largescale production, often oriented towards export markets. Through increasingly concentrated and integrated processes from local producers
to state regulations, large food conglomerates, and global distribution
chains, this regime is the product of the historic and ongoing transformation of agriculture in Europe and North America, now dominated


4  Globalization and Food Sovereignty

by a tiny number of major corporations in the seed, food processing,
and distribution sectors. It is this globalizing food regime of production
and distribution that these crises reveal as intensely problematic.
Notably, McMichael’s concept also emphasizes that this food regime
emerged in the context of specific local needs, interests, and pressures,
which have diffused across borders and localities; our “globalizing”
regime continues to rely heavily on local agency, ecologies, and practices. In other words, as a “globalized localism” (Santos 2006) resulting
from the concentrating tendencies of capitalism as well as a range of
policies enacted domestically, and then diffusing internationally in recent decades, the globalizing food regime increasingly shapes the transformation of local practices in economic, political, and scientific terms
through “localized globalism.”
This way of understanding the multiple crises of the global agricultural and food system, and their rootedness in specific local dynamics,
suggests the need for researchers to examine how concretely the globalizing food regime is adopted, adapted, or resisted in multiple ways,
and with what kinds of impacts. Indeed, globalization, competition, and

inclusion for some translate into localization, dispossession, and exclusion for others. As a result, these are contested processes, and smallscale or subsistence farmers are far from disappearing. In fact, some
authors (see Douwe van der Ploeg 2010; Schneider and Niederle 2010)
examine the resurgence of a new peasantry, or re-peasantization, and
attempts to remove food from the commodity system, and the consolidation of alternative, mostly local and regional, markets for small-scale
food producers. The chapters in this volume engage the contemporary
food system as the authors, following Gibson-Graham (2006), acknowledge and explore some of the multiple alternative practices happening
below and beyond monetarized capitalist circuits that are often essential to sustain today’s market economy.
The following chapters emphasize the way that sovereignty ­– expres­
sed as control, autonomy, democratic participation, and agency – has
become a challenge to and an organizing principle for individuals and
communities, as well as some states, responding to the crises outlined
below of the globalizing food regime in the opening decades of the
twenty-first century. Our goals are fourfold: first, to emphasize the importance of the critical study of food as a political issue that addresses
both global and local power dynamics for academics and activists;
second, to bring to a political science audience the emerging discussion about food sovereignty and food democracy as alternatives to


Introduction 5

neoliberal models of agricultural production and food distribution;1
third, to examine, through detailed case studies, how actors are organizing themselves in relation to the principles of food sovereignty and
food democracy in various parts of the world; and finally, to discuss
some of the main challenges and opportunities faced by these actors,
both North and South, in their struggles for more just, democratic, and
ecologically sound models of agricultural development and food system governance. In short, this volume explores the multilayered and
more nuanced approach to reclaiming sovereignty in the face of global agribusiness, as emerging movements build bridges between local
action and global norms, and between disciplines, theories, and approaches as well as scholarship and activism.
Global Food Crises
From October 2007 to early 2008, the news media reported widespread
global anxiety and protests over speculation, rising costs, and declining

availability of food. Locales as diverse as suburban Sam’s Clubs and
Costcos in Southern California, the slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, rural Uzbekistan, and cities in West Bengal, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan and
Afghanistan, witnessed looting and hoarding sparked by fears of food
shortages and soaring prices (McMichael 2009). The skyrocketing grain
prices were the outcome of a complex set of intermediate factors predicated on states’ adoption of agricultural trade liberalization and the
commodification of globalizing, yet locally grounded food production.
Price increases were also nurtured by mounting perceptions of upcoming scarcities (fertile land, food, and energy in particular), financial
speculation related to the rapid growth of ethanol production as an alternative market for food crops like corn and sugar cane, and wild trading in oil futures in late 2007 (Conceição and Mendoza 2009; Lang 2010;
Clapp and Cohen 2009). Observers were moved to describe the “tsunami of need” (Heffern 2008) sweeping across the world, arguing that
emerging global food shortages threatened to become one of the new
security dilemmas of the twenty-first century. These events also drew
the world’s attention back to the longer-term trends of hunger and malnutrition. Of course, recent evidence indicates that global climate
change will disrupt production, increasing shortages and driving up
food costs (Gillis 2011). While a focus on climate change is beyond the
scope of this volume, the tensions between the globalizing food regime


6  Globalization and Food Sovereignty

and food sovereignty movements that will be exacerbated by climate
change and the responses to it figure in many chapters.
Despite innovations in technologies and the development of a globalizing food production and distribution system over the last forty years,
the United Nations (UN) continues to estimate that over 850 million
people – approximately 13 per cent of the world’s population – are
chronically undernourished and lack enough daily food to sustain a
minimally healthy life (Devereux 2006; Haque 2009). With voluntary
contributions reduced by a developed world still ensnared in the financial crisis – support for the World Food Programme in 2009 hit a twentyyear low (Vidal 2009; Clapp 2012) – estimates are that the chronically
hungry surpassed the one billion mark in 2010. North Korea, Mongolia,
Guatemala, Haiti, and wide stretches of East Africa are some of the
states and regions suffering the worst from chronic food shortages, with

humanitarian crises only expected to worsen into 2015, the year the UN
Millennium Development Goals had targeted a 50 per cent reduction in
the number of hungry people globally. Thanks to policies that do not
directly challenge the political and economic reasons for continued hunger in a world of plenty, this goal is unlikely to be reached.
Meanwhile, growing meat consumption, agro-fuel production, the
damaging effects of many forms of modern agriculture and fishing, and
a changing climate all appear to be exacerbating the crisis of food access
for the poorest of the world. While most analysts agree that farmers
and fishers still produce more than enough calories to feed every human being (e.g., Nellemann et al. 2009), future global food security is
less certain. Causes include the fact that rich people tend to eat more
animal-based protein such as meat, eggs, fish, and cheese, and populations around the world are growing in their levels of wealth. In China,
for example, protein demand per person grew by a factor of ten between 1975 and 2005 (though still little more than a third of U.S. protein
consumption per person) (Food and Agriculture Organization 2007).
The consumption of animal protein places intense pressures on the
land that grows the crops to feed these animals.
More emphasis on the use of land to produce agro-fuels may also put
future food access in jeopardy. In late 2007, financial speculation about
the rapid growth of ethanol as an alternative market for food crops like
corn and sugar cane, wild trading in oil futures, and a turn to commodities to hedge against the emerging global financial crisis helped to send
the price of staple food grains through the roof (Conceição and Mendoza
2009; Lang 2010; Clapp and Cohen 2009). In terms of resource capacity,


Introduction 7

Lester Brown’s work (e.g., 2005) has demonstrated over many years
that the land and oceans relied on to produce our food are limited, and
that a variety of factors associated with industrial agricultural production are placing severe strains on this land and water, despite the fact
that these same models have also made food production more efficient,
per unit of land (Surgeoner 1990). Soil erosion and water depletion in

China and Africa may undermine food production in those regions, for
example, while the rapid exhaustion of global fish populations threatens this crucial source of protein for much of the world. We are now
also starting to see the effects of global climate change on crop productivity – with the Australian drought of the 2000s that cut its wheat supply to the world in half over several years in a row, and the heat wave
that hit the U.S. Midwest in the summer of 2012 that severely damaged
its corn crop – threatening to be a sign of things to come.
Among food consumers, what is being called a growing epidemic – a
word normally reserved to describe widespread outbreaks of infectious
disease – is raising concerns as childhood and adult obesity rates soar,
causing numerous long-term medical complications, shortening lifespans, and adding to already overstressed national health-care budgets.
We have truly become a world both “stuffed” and “starved,” to borrow
the title from Raj Patel’s incisive 2008 book. According to a 2000 study
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number
of overweight children tripled in the United States between 1980 and
2000, while the number of obese adults has increased by 50 per cent
(Centers for Disease Control Foundation 2009). A recent study by a
health economist at Duke University, moreover, suggested that over
42 per cent of adults in the United States will be obese by 2030 (Healy
2012). Changes in food processing over the past decades, including the
dramatic increase in the amount of sugar in diets, combined with a still
powerful food industry lobby in Washington, DC, and food industry
advertising (Nestle 2007), have created what has been called a “toxic
environment” for children and adults increasingly susceptible to debilitating diseases such as heart attacks and type 2 diabetes (Brown 2006).
First Lady Michelle Obama has even made battling childhood obesity
in the United States her signature cause. In February 2009, she launched
a new initiative designed to reverse the obesity trends in the United
States, while British chef Jamie Oliver brought his healthy eating “food
revolution” television series to the United States’ most obese city in
West Virginia. Yet, dramatically, the high-calorie, low-fibre diet characteristic of the burgers and soda fast food lifestyle embraced for decades

8  Globalization and Food Sovereignty

is no longer restricted to the developed world. The World Health Orga­
nization now reports that obesity rates are increasing at a faster rate in
the developing world than the developed, with “globalization and
modernization” major culprits in this spreading crisis (Sinha 2010).
Moreover, concerns over the growing connections between longterm obesity and chronic health problems have been matched in recent
years by acute fears over the seemingly inexhaustible supply of tainted
food products in diets around the world. North Americans, for example, could be forgiven for losing track of the number of food scares and
recalls in recent years, as a wide variety of tainted foods have been implicated in sickness and death. Canadians experienced a crisis of confidence in pre-cooked deli meats in the summer of 2009, when a listeria
outbreak at one of Canada’s largest meat packers, a Maple Leaf plant in
Toronto, led to twenty-three deaths coupled with a massive product
recall (Canada, Agriculture and Agrifood Canada 2009). Meanwhile,
U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service has
issued food recalls in a majority of U.S. states for salmonella outbreaks
in products as diverse as tomatoes, spinach, peanut butter, pistachios,
ground beef, pretzels, potato chips, black pepper, seafood sauce, and
vegetable dip (Walsh 2009). After U.S. pet owners began to witness the
sudden and mysterious deaths of their cats and dogs, the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration issued a major pet food recall in the spring of
2007, implicating melamine – an industrial chemical used to manufacture fertilizers and plastics – as a pollutant that had tainted food additives in pet food produced and exported from China (Food and Drug
Administration 2007). The following year in China hundreds of thousands of infants and children were sickened, with some deaths resulting from melamine-contaminated milk and infant formula, which caused
kidney damage, highlighted extensive political corruption, and promoted public anger and unrest over the questionable safety of China’s
food industry and lack of quality control (Branigan 2008). Finally, an especially virulent antibiotic-resistant strain of E. coli swept across Europe
in the spring of 2011 – the deadliest on record – raising greater concerns
of potential global spread of this bacterium, and once again raised
doubts about the safety of the food supply in even the most industrialized of states with purportedly strict food safety regulations (Benedict
2011; Kristof 2011).
Beneath these immediate food scares lay deeper public concerns with
modern industrialized methods of food production and processing, including the use of pesticides, genetically modified organisms, and food

Introduction 9

irradiation. These issues are reshaping markets and the public policy
landscape. Consider the food scare in the United Kingdom associ­
ated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a brain-wasting
disease in cattle that caused at least a dozen people to contract the disease’s human equivalent (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease) in the early 1990s
(Levidow 1999). That outbreak of BSE (controlled only after the slaughter and incineration of 80,000 cows) was eventually traced to the use of
animal byproducts such as brains and spinal cords in animal feed. That
the BSE problem was exacerbated by the industrial food system, that
food safety experts did not predict the problem, and that the UK government denied the ties between BSE and the human deaths, all became
critical factors in the widespread European rejection of another set of
industrial technologies – genetically modified organisms (GMOs) – only
a few years later (Andrée 2007). These and other food scares have created growing concerns over the safety of industrialized food production and processing in general, and raised questions about the efficacy
of national food regulatory bodies in the face of huge increases in the
trade of food globally.
Among small farmers and peasants, these crises are hardly recent
phenomena. The impacts of the adoption of an industrial model of agriculture and trade liberalization have been denounced and felt by rural communities across the world for decades. As a powerful symbol of
the plight and difficulties faced by so many small producers, one will
remember Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean dairy farmer, who committed suicide outside the meeting of the WTO in Cancun, Mexico, in 2003, calling attention to free trade policies that have driven nearly three million
Korean peasants from the land. With the promotion of agro-fuel production and the recent waves of land grabbing,2 small farmers are
regularly pushed off their lands, thus destroying their way of life and
destabilizing ecological and social reproduction processes.
Small- and medium-scale farmers in the North have also paid the
price of a globalizing food system. In Canada, for example, the federal
government has emphasized the goal of trade liberalization over farm
stability in most agri-food sectors since the early 1970s, thereby furthering farm and industry consolidation, as well as deepening integration
of Canadian farms into the North American industrial “grain-livestock
complex” (Friedmann 1992). By the 1990s, some farm activists were likening the changes in agriculture taking place in Canada to the structural

adjustment programs in the global South that were putting Southern
farmers in such a precarious position (Qualman and Wiebe 2002). This


10  Globalization and Food Sovereignty

context is useful to begin to understand the growing number of suicides among farmers worldwide, whether in advanced economies like
Australia (Bryant 2006) or India (Patel 2008).
A new global land grab has further magnified the problems of inequality and democracy in agricultural production. In a 2009 report
Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, states
that over a three year period (2006–9) “between 15 and 20 million hectares of farmland, the equivalent of the total surface of France, have
been subject of negotiations by foreign investors” (De Schutter 2010).
Although this phenomenon is particularly acute in the global South,
the growing tendency among foreign governments and private investors to buy massive surfaces of fertile land has long existed and continues in new ways in the global North. For example, in Quebec and other
regions of Canada, a growing number of Chinese groups and individuals are buying lands from farmers who are willing to sell, often because
of acute financial difficulties or because new generations are uninterested or cannot afford the cost of “modern” large-scale installations. In
such cases, foreign buyers see these as good investments, since the land
remains cheaper than in many other regions of the North, and the political and financial environment is considered a secure one.
In the global South, land grabs already threaten the very survival of
poor rural communities and the food security – defined at a national
level as the ability of a country to feed itself3 – of entire countries. For
example, in Mauritania, where about 50 per cent of the population still
eke out a living from small-scale agriculture, agribusiness is rushing in
from Saudi Arabia and the United States, among other metropoles.
They are displacing whole communities, often without compensation,
and putting a large proportion of the population in a position of near
famine. These processes, as De Schutter indicates, go directly against
the right to food as part of the human rights obligations of states.
Legally in Mauritania, unoccupied land has been nationalized following Islamic rules – if no property rights are exercised for ten years, the
state becomes owner – but the president can lease it to private investors

and conglomerates who want to exploit the soil, whether they are foreigners or citizens, or if it is for mining exploitation or agricultural production. In the latter case, there certainly is no guarantee, and often
little intention, that the output will provide for domestic consumption,
especially given the climate pressures on food production in countries
like China.
Alternatively, a report produced by the Barcelona-based NGO GRAIN,
a recent article in the New York Times, and the 2010 World Bank report


Introduction 11

on the subject all noted that some of the arable lands bought by foreigners are in fact left unproductive, which might indicate a more speculative than productive interest. In Mauritania, this situation left many
refugees who were pushed out of their own country during the border
war with Senegal (1989–91) over grazing rights without any legal status
to reclaim the land they used to work and live on. With the growing
demand for agro-fuels, analysts also fear that further rural community
displacement and dislocation will occur (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck
2010). Arable lands that traditionally served for subsistence farming
could become speculating areas as the demand for agro-fuel productions has already begun to transform the main purpose of these lands in
the North and in the South, with most land availability and rural vulnerability in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean
(World Bank 2010).
Looking Ahead: Plan of the Book
Food sovereignty and food democracy, as emerging and contestable
structures of resistance, are clearly unsettled frames. So it is in fact too
early to offer a settled definition of a growing movement as divergent as
that represented by the producers, processors, and consumers around
the world who have taken up these frames to respond to the neoliberal
food system. Indeed, as the contributors in this volume demonstrate,
movements engage with the contemporary food system through a range
of strategies, from outright resistance to adaptation and co-option.
Instead of conclusions, we lay the seeds for analysis, presenting the variety of arenas in which the study of food sovereignty and food democracy4 is gaining relevance to scholars and practitioners.

At the same time, we can introduce the contours for the analysis of
food sovereignty, which are interrogated, contested, examined, and applied in the chapters that follow. Broadly, food sovereignty is a set of
reactions to neoliberal globalization and the industrial food system that
is presented as an alternative approach predicated on the dispersal of
power. Neoliberalism valorizes the market as the final arbiter of efficient economic policy, as global and national institutions remove larger
and larger policy domains from democratic decision-making, walling
off powerful economic actors and industrial forces from popular accountability and local responsibility. Food sovereignty valorizes the
reverse – localized, accountable, and democratic economic decisionmaking – and does so in ways that link local communities as part of
regional and global movements. But in its local aspirations, food


12  Globalization and Food Sovereignty

sovereignty is not the equivalent of a more traditionalist movement like
Slow Food, though the emphasis on artisanal production and historic
agricultural practice among adherents of the latter is also found in the
former, nor of those notions of sovereignty that fetishize the state as the
ultimate political actor or system of social protection. Food sovereignty
instead recognizes the transformative possibilities of community empowerment in democratic processes of economic and social decisionmaking. Such transformations might sustain rural life or promote the
virtues of historical agricultural patterns, or they might seek to sustain
rural life through new rural economies. Moreover, the actors who have
articulated or invoked food sovereignty (and food democracy) are a
disparate lot: farmers and peasants, consumers and producers, as well
as distributors, men and women, young and older, entrepreneurs and
subsistence farmers, spanning the globe from South to North. This
means that food sovereignty is conceived of and deployed as diverse
and fungible.
Part One of the book, “Food Sovereignty in Theory and Policy
Debates,” examines the politics associated with the term food sovereignty as used by actors as varied as consumer activists, transnational social
movements, and local farmers. In chapter 1, the editors propose specific

conceptual and theoretical insights in an effort to offer useful tools for
researchers and to demonstrate the necessity to take food more seriously, as a central issue that cuts across social, political, economic, cultural, and ecological domains, and highlight the growing concerns of
citizens across the globe calling for substantial changes. In chapter 2,
Michael Menser reflects on the paradox of the global food movement
projecting itself outside the realm of the state while embracing sovereignty in defence of a popular right to control food policies. Menser
argues that food sovereignty practitioners are redefining the notions of
self-determination, territory, non-interference, and autonomy normally
associated with the absolutes of the Westphalian state system. After
tracing the evolution of the food sovereignty concept along this reconceptualization since 1996, Menser compares models of what he calls
state-supported and indigenous food sovereignty and considers the
challenges still facing advocates of either food sovereignty approach
from class and gender inequities.
In chapter 3, Noah Zerbe presents a study of the global fair trade
movement, comparing it to the emerging local food movement. Along
the way, his chapter offers a historical overview of the global food system from the Second World War to today. While fair trade should have