The failures of food security and other policies to guarantee the right to food motivate the calls for the radical reforms to the food system called for by food sovereignty. Food sovereignty ...narratives identify neoliberal state policies and global capital as the source of the food insecurity, and seek new rights for producers and consumers. However, the nature of territorial state power and the juridical structures of the (neo)liberal state may mute the more radical aims of food sovereignty. An engagement with literature on liberal sovereignty illustrates the primacy of the neoliberal market to the exercise of liberal sovereignty by the modern nation-state. The rights of the state to govern trade, often in the interests of capital, and the rights of trade and commerce often trump the citizen's right to food. Reading political theory against the practice of food sovereignty offers insight into solutions for food sovereignty that work within, against and in between the powers of the sovereign liberal state. These include reframing property rights as use rights, engaging in non-commodified food exchanges and practicing civil disobedience to usher in reforms without compromising on essential elements of the food sovereignty agenda.
Many political ecologists and geographers study ethical diets but most are curiously silent on the topic of death in the food system, specifically what or who is allowed to live and what is let die ...in the "doing of good." This article aims to show how the practice of eating produces the socio-ecological harm most ethical consumers set out to avoid with their dietary choices. I examine the food systems that produce ethical products for 1) the hierarchical ordering of consumer health in the Global North over the health and well-being of workers in the Global South and 2) how vegetarianism involves the implicit privileging of some animals over others. The article takes take a genealogical approach to the political ecology of food ethics using Black and Indigenous studies in conversation with animal geographies. I draw on Mbembe's (2016) necropolitics, Weheliye's (2014) "not quite human" and Lowe's (2015) critique of humanism to develop a conceptual framework for what lives or dies as a result of ethical dietary choices. I use this framework to examine commodities for the socio-ecological harm that their production extends into the world under the guise of "doing good" or "being ethical." Taking a harm reduction and food sovereignty approach, I advocate for a new ethical framework that includes a limited case for consuming animals.
We Want Land to Liveexplores the current boundaries of radical approaches to food sovereignty. First coined by La Via Campesina (a global movement whose name means "the peasant's way"), food ...sovereignty is a concept that expresses the universal right to food. Amy Trauger uses research combining ethnography, participant observation, field notes, and interviews to help us understand the material and definitional struggles surrounding the decommodification of food and the transformation of the global food system's political-economic foundations.
Trauger's work is the first of its kind to analytically and coherently link a dialogue on food sovereignty with case studies illustrating the spatial and territorial strategies by which the movement fosters its life in the margins of the corporate food regime. She discusses community gardeners in Portugal; small-scale, independent farmers in Maine; Native American wild rice gatherers in Minnesota; seed library supporters in Pennsylvania; and permaculturists in Georgia.
The problem in the food system, as the activists profiled here see it, is not markets or the role of governance but that the right to food is conditioned by what the state and corporations deem to be safe, legal, and profitable-and not by what eaters think is right in terms of their health, the environment, or their communities. Useful for classes on food studies and active food movements alike,We Want Land to Livemakes food sovereignty issues real as it illustrates a range of methodological alternatives that are consistent with its discourse: direct action (rather than charity, market creation, or policy changes), civil disobedience (rather than compliance with discriminatory laws), and mutual aid (rather than reliance on top-down aid).
Human geographers, scholars in other disciplines and the wider public use outdated spatial vocabulary to reference inequality and divergent geographic histories. Most spatial heuristics in wide use ...(1st world, North/South, etc.) essentialize progress, homogenize entire nations, obscure inequality at multiple scales and deny the processes of creating difference via imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. In this paper we elaborate on a new spatial vocabulary using geographic theory to identify zones of accumulation and spaces of dispossession. We then address what theories inform this naming convention, what it means and critically reflect on some of its weaknesses, such as its binary nature and relative lack of geographic specificity. We conclude by encouraging wider adoption of these spatial heuristics because they take their logic from geographical theory, actual existing inequality on multiple scales and present-day processes of capitalism.
Women throughout the West are up to three times more likely to be the operator of a farm in sustainable agricultural models than in productivist models. When women assume the role of farmer they ...transgress traditional gender identities on farms, which dictate that women are 'farmwives' and men are 'farmers'; these gender identities intersect with spaces in the agricultural community to imply appropriate behavior for women as farmwives. This research demonstrates that the sustainable agriculture community provides spaces that promote and are compatible with women's identities as farmers. Feminist analyses of space and agriculture suggest that productivist agricultural models marginalize women from spaces of knowledge, while sustainable agriculture provides spaces of empowerment for women farmers. The fieldwork for this project involved a purposive survey, in-depth interviews and participant observation with twenty women farmers over an 18-month period in the sustainable agriculture community of Central Pennsylvania.
Food deserts are demarcated areas characterized by limited food access, often defined by geographical distance from grocery stores. Literature suggests that food deserts are produced through uneven ...development, but also racial bias in the location of grocery stores. Socio-economic inequalities thus intersect with racialized landscapes, and this suggests that food deserts are both culturally and economically produced. Research on food desert solutions often emphasize narrow spatial analyses that privilege geographic solutions, as well as incorporate whitened understandings of access to food. We assert that food access is shaped by the racialized construction of places, and that small-scale grocery stores, which are understudied in food desert research, may be useful places to study how access to food is culturally produced. Using intercept interviews inside and outside of two small-scale grocery stores, we examined the production of social exclusion around food access in a USDA classified food desert in a small Southern city. We conclude that economic development that integrates community organizing and place-making activities are keys to mitigating social exclusion in food deserts, and call for further research on in the role of place in shaping access to food.
Food Justice, Hunger and the City Heynen, Nik; Kurtz, Hilda E.; Trauger, Amy
Geography compass,
05/2012, Letnik:
6, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We are amidst a long‐overdue increase of interest in issues related food, cities and inequality within geography. While there has certainly been significant scholarship done on the issue, this area ...seems to be on the verge of defining many other sub‐disciplinary trajectories as opposed to the opposite which has historically been the case. In this short review essay, we hope to signal the utility of the concepts of community food security, food sovereignty and urban agriculture for conceptually linking food, justice, and cities.
Fair Trade is a certification system designed to create social change in production and consumption patterns, primarily in agricultural products, by shaping what happens on the production end of the ...supply chain through a certification and regulatory system. Previous research on Fair Trade investigated the workings and benefits of Fair Trade production models, with little attention paid to how the Fair Trade model might fail to meet its objectives. Research on Fair Trade would suggest that if inequality and exploitation exist in the Fair Trade supply chain, it would be experienced by the most marginalized actors, such as the temporary workers hired by smallhold farmers, who are frequently invisible in the Fair Trade literature and documents on banana production in the Caribbean. Through a global ethnography of the organic and Fair Trade banana supply chain in the Dominican Republic, this research reveals how Fair Trade as a "spatial fix" for capital and a "small farm imaginary" work to marginalize a particular class of workers. It also reveals the unseen sociality of Fair Trade standards in the systemic and structural assumptions in the small farm production model that Fair Trade promotes. The study finds that smallhold workers are essential to sustaining the market for Fair Trade bananas in a form of functional dualism between smallholders and plantations. In a counterintuitive outcome of the workings of Fair Trade, workers might be better off in the medium-scale plantation model unique to the Dominican Republic.
Neoliberal climate governance, which focuses on shifting responsibility for mitigating climate change onto individuals through their consumption of techno‐scientific solutions, ignores and obscures ...the experience of differently situated subjects. This paper examines the consequences of both framing climate change as a problem of science and inducing individual behavior changes as a key point of climate policy. We build on climate governance literature and emerging feminist theorizing about climate change to understand how differently situated bodies become positioned as sites of capital accumulation in climate governance. We use the feminist lens of the “everyday”, which directs attention to embodiment, difference, and inequality. These insights provide points of leverage for feminist scholars of climate science and policy to use to resist and contest the production of neoliberal climate subjects. We argue that a focus on the “everyday” reveals the mundane decision making in climate governance that affect individuals in varying, embodied ways and which allows for climate governance to proceed as an ongoing process of capitalist accumulation.
