A revolutionary movement for food sovereignty in the 21st century
What does it mean to go beyond a civic liberal vision of food sovereignty towards a revolutionary theory of change?
Note: I write this from the position of the UK and the Global North more broadly, and don’t pretend to speak for the diversity of positions in the food sovereignty found around the world.
The food sovereignty movement comes out of the struggles of peasants and small farmers against the corporate food regime. La Via Campesina, the international peasants’ organisation, meaning “the peasants’ way”, was born in 1993 from this struggle, as part of the wave of alter-globalisation movements. La Via Campesina define food sovereignty as:
the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods and their right to define their food and agriculture systems. La Via Campesina insists that diverse, peasant-driven agroecological modes of production, based on centuries of experience and accumulated evidence, is central to guaranteeing healthy food to everyone while remaining in harmony with nature.
They summarise their strategy as:
To achieve food sovereignty, La Via Campesina mobilizes and advocates for agrarian reform in peasant territories and provides training on agroecological production methods. This global coalition is also a platform for its members worldwide to communicate and carry out joint solidarity actions, mobilizations, and campaigns in defence of land, water, seeds, and forests.
Today, there is clearly a need to go beyond this liberal framing of rights and a need to build beyond the rural. The destruction, genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine shows, not for the first time, but perhaps in the fullest brutality that we have ever witnessed, that the liberal international order serves imperialism and white supremacy. The interests of the UK, US and EU and their allies, comes first. War crimes are ignored. Laws and rights are powerless in the face of this overwhelming military power. As per my previous post, food sovereignty is nothing if it isn’t anti-imperialist. If it isn’t grounded in liberation for all. The tactic of getting a seat at the table of governance, which has been a focus of large aspects of the food sovereignty movement (FSM) thus far, isn’t going to bring an agroecological revolution or establish food sovereignty in this hostile world.
We’re at a critical conjuncture where more is demanded of us—“us” being those in the FSM. We are entering a period of capitalist catastrophism and eco-apartheid: a time of cascading ecological breakdown, the reinforcement of border violence and militarism, and the attempts of the imperial core to secure some sort of green transition through a further increase in the racialised super-exploitation, domination and destruction of the global peripheries. The Gramscian interregnum that follows the breakdown of the neoliberal capitalist order into something more fascistic.
To rise to this challenge and to be relevant to the revolutionary political struggles of the 21st century the FSM must go beyond being just a defence of agroecological small farming and the democratic right to nutritious, culturally appropriate food. It must build on this and seek to fundamentally break the producer/consumer split that characterises capitalist modernity and in the process build true food security. Not a food security that through capitalist markets ensures the wealthiest an abundance of choice, whilst the poorest struggle to eat enough. From the more than 2 billion globally who are malnourished, to the 21.6% of British children suffering food insecurity, to the enforced mass starvation of Palestinians.
In this lies the potential for a “repeasantisation”. Everyone must have access to food production, processing and preparation. This will take forms such as radical land reform, massive increase in urban allotments/gardens, and the development of community processing and food preparation spaces. Land must no longer be the preserve of so few—it must be accessible to all. A rebuilding of a commons worthy of the name—where people can come together to grow cereals, make bread, break bread, and rebuild collective forms of sociality. And the British FSM must find urgent ways of building solidarity with super-exploited migrant farm workers (this was done somewhere in Germany during the height of the Covid pandemic, but I can’t find the article I read though!). The investigative work of the Landworkers Alliance on this is something that can be built on. Also, the FSM must stop supporting un/underpaid illegal traineeships, as the work of the union Solidarity Across Land Trades is highlighting and combatting.
When it comes to land reform, in the UK, Land In Our Names (LION) are showing one way this can be achieved—through BPOC-led collective ownership of land. The work of Abundance starts to show how council farms can be revamped as democratic and accessible vehicles for agroecological transition and greater democratic participation in food production. The history of allotments in Britain is something that provides inspiration, as do the urban “organopónicos” in Havana, Cuba. Community kitchens exist around the country, such as Cegin Hedyn in Carmarthen. What is required to grow these to become hubs for communal food processing and preparation linked into local market gardens and small farms?
How can we build a food sovereignty movement that goes beyond just developing local food markets that tend to serve more affluent “consumers”? This will mean going beyond the realm of food and farming and acting in material solidarity with other movements such as unions, joining resistance against racist anti-immigration raids, or acting in material solidarity with Palestinian liberation, rather than accepting the liberal designation of separate spheres of civic society. Food sovereignty movements, rather than remaining a mostly white, rural, middle class/bourgeois enclave would instead become rooted in the everyday struggles of everyone and represent the wider diversity of people and working classes. There are no easy answers but I feel there is a need to broaden our horizons by asking different questions of ourselves.
Within this vision is also call for a fundamental break of the rural/urban divide—towards the abolition of the hinterlands (message for a copy of the pdf). Food sovereignty no more belongs to the rural than it does the urban. It is a movement which can bring together urban and rural populations together in common struggle. A revolutionary struggle for food sovereignty that refuses the colonial and capitalist logic that some lives are worth more than others. That is centred on a project of building material solidarity. That undermines the circuits of capital accumulation. That undoes the theft of settler colonialism and enclosures. That isn’t blind to the intertwined processes of class, race and gender that exploit and oppress. That seeks to commodify the food system, so that our access to food isn’t dependent on money.
We have then a revolutionary theory of change for a food sovereignty movement that goes beyond technocratic liberal ideals of rights and places at the negotiating table of the international liberal order. The international organising La Via Campesina has built over the last 30 years can provide a vehicle for this international revolution. Food sovereignty is now a necessity for all.
Additional thought added after posting: What good are democratic rights in a world where democracy and rights are increasingly lacking or unenforceable and rooted in the logics of class, race and gender? How does a movement grow when it is focused on the defence of a very small % of the population? A faction that lacks the political capacity to win its own aims by itself.