Food security, food sovereignty — tomayto, tomahto?

This article explores the difference between food sovereignty and food security and why it matters

source

Recently, I’ve noticed within British food sovereignty, a growing slippage from food sovereignty to food security. This is motivated in part by shifting public discourse. It can be tempting to think following the discourse can be a fruitful move. However, just as it has been self-defeating for centrist governments to move right to try and appease fascists, it is self-defeating for the food sovereignty movement to chase food security. At a time of co-option, we must differentiate ourselves, draw the lines and argue for why we have the vision of a better future that governments lack.

In this article I’m going to explore the significance of this by tracing some basic differences between food security and food sovereignty. I’ll explore the differing trajectories related to each approach and why I think the food sovereignty movement must resist conflating the two ideas.

What’s in a name?

Food security¹ is about securing access to food, without any reference to how that food is secured. It says nothing about the rights and working conditions of food producers, it says nothing about the wider political economy, it just talks about a population having access to safe, nutritious food in broad terms.

Food sovereignty², on the other hand, make specific reference to how that food is procured including the rights of food producers (and consumers) across the world, and puts itself against markets and corporations. It also talks about the sustainability of the food system, whereas food security does not. For food sovereignty to be truly achieved would require the abolition of capitalism at all levels in all places. Whether “local” or “global”.

The argument I’m about to make isn’t one of semantics — the term ‘sovereignty’ itself is problematic when articulated within the imperial core given that our governments are involved in annihilating the sovereignty of those in the global majority. But there is a key conceptual difference between the two concepts as well as importantly a different historical trajectory surrounding each of them.

Food sovereignty arose mostly out of the demands of peasant movements in the global south, as a claim made against a global food system that was dispossessing farmers and subordinating their own needs of reproduction to the new needs of capital. To be sure this is a colonial process of subjugation that goes back centuries, with colonised people being forced, through violence, to produce food to be shipped across the world to support empires even as they themselves suffered famines. From the Transatlantic slave trade, to the superexploitation of peasants and Indigenous people, to the neocolonial methods of the IMF and the World bank.

An earlier 1996 articulation of food sovereignty by La Via Campesina, didn’t slip between it and food security, but said that true food security can only be attained through food sovereignty. This was an attempt to work away from the dominant paradigm of food security. But I’m not seeing that key distinction being made right now in the UK at least. That represents a regression and capitulation.

Tellingly, the Nyéléni Declaration of 2007 did not use the term security even once.

Food security and imperialism

Food security is the policy of nation states and the web of NGOs and academic institutions that work with them. It makes no pretence to attempting to resist the political economy of capitalism and imperialism. Because of different positions of power within the global system of imperialism, when the British government calls for food security it will come at the expense of the food security of people in food exporting countries in the global south such as Kenya. A third of the Kenyan population is facing hunger and yet it exports billions of dollars of food every year. That foreign exchange income will be necessary for them within a capitalist system, but given their position in the world economy, they will not be receiving anything like the bulk of the value for those crops. A more just world would not be built on the needs of exchange value dominating the lives of peasants in the global south.

Whilst Kenya exports billions of dollars of food it is also forced to import staple crops like wheat, maize and rice, which includes from places like the US and Europe. Clearly this system isn’t working for Kenyans. The Global Food Security Index places the UK 9th and Kenya 82nd. The only country in the top 20 that isn’t in the global north is Costa Rica (whose government violently dispossesses its Indigenous population). Every country in the bottom 20 is in the global south.

This measure needs complication given that in the UK 14% of households are suffering food insecurity, which includes 5% having to skip food for a whole day because of poverty. We mustn’t paint a slimplistic global picture that assumes a straightforward and seamless international division of labour from bottom to top. Exploitation and inequality exists everywhere under capitalism because it’s how the system works — it’s how the rich get rich. To have a billionaire you need someone else starving.

The point I am making is that food security, as pursued by government in the imperial core, is achieved at the exploitation of the poorest for the benefit of the richest which is why more than 3 billion globally cannot afford a healthy diet, and why around 800 million suffer hunger. In Gaza right now the entire population is being starved to death by the genocidal Zionist regime. Even before Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2023, food insecurity stood at 65%. Israel exports around $2.5 billion of food every year from the land they violently stole from the Palestinians as they starve them and bomb them to death.

Co-option

In 2022, the Italian government formed the Ministry for Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests. The minister in charge of this, Francesco Lollobrigida, recently claimed that the poorest eat better than the rich because they apparently shop directly from local producers. In a country where 2 million people need to use food banks. Italy’s Prime Minister is a long-time admirer of fascist dictator Mussolini. This is an example of the far right attempting to co-opt food sovereignty.

This same minster, Lollobrigida, has recently propagated the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory suggesting that ‘ethnic Italians’ are at risk of ‘ethnic replacement’ by African migrants. The same migrants who provide more than half the labour on Italian farms. To be clear this isn’t hypocrisy. It’s him doing his job. The demonisation of immigrants is central to upholding the racist system of labour apartheid that dominates agricultural systems across the global north, which enforces superexploited immigrants to do the back-breaking labour on farms for the purposes of food security. This is the opposite of food sovereignty which would require the food producers themselves to be in control, wherever they’re born, live, work and whichever passports they have. This is where the class-blind nature of the majority of the British food sovereignty movement runs into problems. Without worker control of the food system, workers will be (super)exploited. Be that agroecological interns, citizen workers, or non-citizen workers. Food sovereignty would work for equal rights for all workers as a transitional step towards full worker control of food production, not defend and extend the right of employers to exploit at levels well below the minimum wage.

The Italian ministry adopting the title food sovereignty is really a form of semantic co-option, which can lead to real co-option over time, if we allow it. The choice facing the food sovereignty movement is whether it decides to opt into³ that system or whether it chooses to resist it. By ourselves conflating the use of security and sovereignty we are not only pursuing our own co-option, and thus demise, but also are making a choice (however consciously) to opt into an inherently violent system. Perhaps with the naive (and unlikely) logic of being able to change the system from within by winning a seat at the table, which is likely to be strategically ineffective, given rising fascism, which includes with the far right Labour government in power in the UK, but also risking the entire movement for the sake of it. It means growing disconnect between radical rhetoric and actual practice.

It’s not just the Italians adopting an empty rhetoric of food sovereignty, but the French as well. And don’t be surprised if a Farage Reform UK government makes a similar move.

Abolition and liberation not security

Sovereignty as a word has problems too when it is wielded in countries with large armies and arms industries that are engaged in war, genocide and ethnic cleansing across the globe. A peasant in Bolivia fighting for sovereignty is not the same as a small farmer in Britain doing so. That doesn’t mean I neglect the (differentiated) problems facing (differentiated) farmers in the UK, which I frequently write about, just that different things are different. Both can be negatively impacted by food and agribusiness monopolies, but not to the same extent, and not in the same way.

The advantage of food sovereignty as a movement is that it calls for a common enemy, the weakness is when we forget that there are many farmers across the global north and south who actually benefit from the imperialist food system. Our enemy is the imperialist capitalism however it manifests and whatever it calls itself. But food sovereignty isn’t just a word, it’s a movement with history, organisations, funding, members and so on. It’s not an empty slogan, it has practical application. The answer isn’t to abandon it just because it needs further work, particularly from the perspective of class.

British food security is in part secured through the superexploitation of 45,000 migrant workers, which relies upon a racialised system of labour apartheid. If we’re not really explicit, calls to increase domestic food production can just further strengthen this — indeed I think that is the most logical outcome. Further, at a time of escalating warmongering the language of food security is so often tied up in the idea of national security — a central concern of liberals and fascists alike. There is nothing within the concept and practice of food security that guards against pursuing forever cheaper imports of food (or continued cheapened domestic production) and the devastating consequences of that. Indeed given rising concerns over food insecurity globally, owing to climate breakdown, I can easily see how imperialist nations will utilise their militaries to directly secure food at times of crisis. In many ways we already do given the militarisation of borders which are necessary to reproduce labour apartheid.

At a time of rising blood and soil nationalism, a form of fascism, we must do everything we can to resist imperialist capitalism. On a basic level that means holding to our principles and resisting both co-option and the so-called pragmatic logics of opting in. Struggle over state capacity doesn’t mean getting a seat at the table of a far right government. It means, in part, dialectically working towards abolishing their violent power and building our own forms of collective power. There is nothing pragmatic about fighting for an imaginary seat at the table of a far right government. The pragmatic, though challenging and less materially rewarding option, is resistance.

We do need to increase domestic food production, because importing nearly half our food in part relies upon neocolonial imperialism and is also risky as global supply chains are put under more pressure. But not at any cost. British food security as policy doesn’t want to radically change the food system to stop importing livestock feed from Amazonia, that relies upon labour apartheid in certain sectors, and that is happy using free trade as a form of economic violence.

I’m concerned that this slippage in usage, will lead to a slippage in principles, practice and demands. Food sovereignty as a concept and a movement needs more work and needs radicalising in the global north, but also let’s not abandon it for the self-defeating language and policies of food security.

1. Food security as defined by the World Food Programme:

Food security exists when people have access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development, and an active and healthy life. By contrast, food insecurity refers to when the aforementioned conditions don’t exist. Chronic food insecurity is when a person is unable to consume enough food over an extended period to maintain a normal, active and healthy life. Acute food insecurity is any type that threatens people’s lives or livelihoods.

2. Food sovereignty as defined by La Via Campesina:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers and users.

3. Thanks Sophia Doyle for helping me see this clearly by introducing the language of opt into and to Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond for their exposition of how branches of feminism has chosen fascism because they saw their own interests defended by fascism.