Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:203–213
DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9623-x
‘Rescaling’ alternative food systems: from food security to food
sovereignty
Navé Wald1 • Douglas P. Hill1
Accepted: 30 June 2015 / Published online: 14 July 2015
 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract In this paper, we critically interrogate the
benefits of an interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse
dialogue between ‘local food’ and ‘alternative food net-
works’ (AFNs) and outline how this dialogue might be
enriched by a closer engagement with discourses of food
sovereignty and the politics of scale. In arguing for a shift
towards a greater emphasis on food sovereignty, we con-
tend that contemporary discourses of food security are
inadequate for the ongoing task of ensuring a just and
sustainable economy of food. Further, rather than treating
the local and the global as ontologically given categories
around which to contest the politics of food, it is our
contention that recognising the socio-spatial aspects of the
politics of scale has the potential to reinvigorate discourses
of food security, food sovereignty and AFNs. Under-
standing scale as both fixed to a degree as well as contin-
gent and dynamic has implications for an understanding of
the role of food systems, for how the rescaled state privi-
leges certain food systems and the possibilities for resis-
tance through ‘jumping scale’ and food utopias. All of
these aspects are significant if we are to fully comprehend
and contest the challenges of envisioning and enacting real
utopias of food sovereignty.
Keywords Alternative food networks
Food security

Food sovereignty
Scale
Food utopia
& Navé Wald
nave.wald@otago.ac.nz
Douglas P. Hill
dph@geography.otago.ac.nz
1
Geography Department, University of Otago,
PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand
Abbreviations
AFNs Alternative food networks
LFNs Local food networks
FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation
GE Genetic engineering
Introduction
As with the other contributions in this Symposium, we are
interested in moving away from an undue emphasis on how
we might define ‘food security’ to concentrating instead on
how it can be achieved in a given context. We see the
relationship between AFNs and food security as important
in this regard and endorse the objective to promote an
interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse dialogue in
which ‘local food’ and ‘alternative food networks’ (AFNs)
are assumed to be pivotal but require further analysis and
scrutiny. However, whilst endorsing the aims of the Sym-
posium in drawing together food security and AFNs, in this
paper we argue that contemporary discourses of food
security are inadequate for ensuring a just and sustainable
economy of food and instead argue for a shift towards a
greater emphasis on food sovereignty.
In arguing for the shift from food security to food
sovereignty we are arguing for a different approach to
mainstream capitalism focusing in particular on the spatial
and temporal aspects that underlie its role in perpetuating
marginalisation and inequality. Indeed, whereas food
security became an important feature in mainstream views
of (neoliberal) economic development through capitalist
investment, growth and international trade, food sover-
eignty emerged as an alternative paradigm with strong
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sentiments against corporate-led globalisation and with
emphasis on local-level democratic control over production
(Jarosz 2014). From a temporal perspective, food (in)se-
curity can be conceptualised as a state of being or having
that is situated in a given time. In contrast, food sover-
eignty alludes to an ongoing and perhaps never-ending
process (Wald 2015b) in which necessary changes are
pursued in order to achieve this state of having food
security. This process is situated within and informed by a
set of overarching yet not descriptive criteria.
In doing so, we also argue that the current discourse on
food sovereignty is within itself also theoretically impov-
erished in important ways and as such could be enhanced
with a closer engagement with the core geographical con-
cept of ‘scale’. Indeed, we argue that much of the work in
AFNs and food sovereignty have a taken-for-granted set of
assumptions about the naturalness of spatial scales that
treats the local and the global as ontologically given cat-
egories around which to contest the politics of food.
Therefore, more often than not it is assumed that the local
food systems are achievable and desirable, in ways that
draw an almost binary opposition to global scale of con-
temporary agribusiness. In contrast, in the past two decades
disciplines such as geography have unseated, questioned
and contested such assumptions about how we understand
the social construction of scale (Smith 1992; Marston
2000). In that discipline scale is now seen in an entirely
different light and scale is now thought of as both fixed to a
degree as well as contingent and continually dynamic. This
has implications for an understanding of the role of food
systems, for how the rescaled state privileges certain food
systems and the possibilities for resistance and of ‘jumping
scale’ (Smith 1993; Swyngedouw 2000). It is our con-
tention that recognising the socio-spatial aspects of the
politics of scale has the potential to reinvigorate discourses
of food security, food sovereignty and to a lesser extent
AFNs. As such, discourses around food sovereignty and
food security need to have a greater engagement with this
kind of geographical thinking if they are able to fully
comprehend and contest the challenges of ensuring food
sovereignty.
We make three claims or contributions in this paper.
First, we argue for a shifting of the focus of the
engagement of AFNs beyond discourses focusing on food
security and towards discourses of food sovereignty.
Second, we argue that this task can only be adequately
achieved with a greater attention to the social construction
of scale and the implications of the politics of scale for a
range of processes underlying both the discourses of
AFNs and food sovereignty. Third, we argue for the
importance of incorporating notions of food utopias as a
progression towards a more hopeful and multi-scalar
geographies of food sovereignty.
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N. Wald, D. P. Hill
The article commences with a theoretical engagement
with the concept of ‘scale’ and how geographers have
theorised it. The focus then shifts to AFNs and their scalar
dimensions, especially regarding the problematic and often
critiqued manner in which analysts of AFNs deal with the
‘local’. In what follows, links are sketched out between
AFNs, food security and food sovereignty. Whereas the
relationship between the latter concepts is well established
in the literature, the nexus between AFNs and food
sovereignty has been less so. Recent critiques of food
sovereignty are used in highlighting similarities to AFNs.
In the last section before concluding and as a partial
response to recent critiques, utopia is offered as a critical
yet hopeful lens for examining the dual temporality and
multi-scalar attributes of food sovereignty.
Re-theorising the politics of scale
This section begins to interrogate the taken-for-granted
assumptions associated with notions of scale through food
security and food sovereignty discourses. It begins with the
observation that in many cognate disciplines associated
with food sovereignty discourses concerned with the notion
of scale, and in particular the scale at which food sover-
eignty ‘takes place’, is rendered in a reasonably unprob-
lematic way and as such treats scale as an ontologically
given category. The outcome of how we frame scale has
consequences in how we envisage the possibilities for
action.
It is argued that previous thinking assumed that such
social relations took place at certain global, regional or
local scales and a whole range of social and political pro-
cesses taking place at those scales were not scale depen-
dent. With the onset of globalisation in the late twentieth
century such notions became fundamentally problematised
and a whole range of writing began to emerge which
suggested that the naturalisation of spatial scales could no
longer be sustained in the way that earlier writing had done
so (Brenner 1998a; Harvey 2004; Jessop 2000). Much of
this literature developed conceptualisations by extending
on earlier seminal work by those such as Neil Smith in
Uneven Development (1984). Here, Smith put the politics
of scale at the very centre of his analysis of how processes
of capitalist transformation take place. Similarly, more
recent work has examined scalar transformation under
neoliberalism focusing in particular at what is often refer-
red to as the urban scale. Much of this work has argued that
neo-liberalisation in different parts of the world has
entailed a rescaling of the state. Thus, rather than a national
government creating the regulatory environment to
encourage the growth of the economy, it is often the
entrepreneurial city or the provincial government which is
‘Rescaling’ alternative food systems: from food security to food sovereignty
responsible for setting in place the regulatory conditions
and fiscal incentives to enable neoliberalism to become
rolled out and thus transform the conditions under which
capitalism may flourish (England and Ward 2007; Brenner
2004; Brenner and Theodore 2002). Indeed, this rescaling
provides some dynamism to capital accumulation and helps
to temporarily overcome its crisis prone tendencies (Har-
vey 2004). A similar conceptual development can be seen
in the recent work on the neo-liberalisation of nature
(Castree 2003, 2008; Bakker 2005; McCarthy and Prudham
2004), where the institutions associated with natural
resource management have been rescaled and now may be
situated at multiple scales (McCarthy 2005; Nel and Hill
2013, 2014; Ribot et al. 2006; Tipa and Welch 2006).
Again, in this work it is demonstrated that the embedding
and deepening of neo-liberalism in sectors such as water or
forestry is enhanced by the rescaling of the institutions
tasked with their governance.
While this writing has reinvigorated how we understand
the relationship between state and capital at a variety of
scales, it has also had considerable significance for
understanding how scalar processes operate. In the writing
of Erik Swyngedouw (1999, 2005), we see a contention
that socio-spatial processes change scalar configurations
and that one cannot understand the scale at which any
activity takes place—be it ecological or industrial—if we
do not also understand that scale is the result of a process of
contestation. Such discussion is particularly significant
when we begin to try and unpack what in the literature has
become known as the politics of scale. In this writing there
is a suggestion that the scale at which processes take place
is intimately connected with struggles over the economy
and society. Indeed, the rescaling of economic, political or
social processes so that they are dominated at particular
scales, whether that is through international institutions,
regional bodies or the like, is itself an important part of the
politics of scale and goes a considerable way to helping us
understand who is wielding control over particular
resources.
These processes of rescaling also have implications for
the potential for resistance, particularly with the recogni-
tion that opportunities for political mobilisation may occur
at different scales at different times. Thus, while there is an
almost intuitive endorsement of the possibilities of local
activism and resistance by many opponents of neo-liberal
globalisation, it is arguably that often a more effective
contestation may be situated at the urban, regional or even
global scales. The importance of understanding of the
contested manner of scale has become all the more sig-
nificant as scholarship has increasing acknowledged that a
range of economic social and political processes are multi-
scalar and that the emergence of these multi-scalar con-
figurations represents a significant break with the past.
205
From our perspective, the emergence of global commodity
chains around food production and consumption is one
significant example of such multi-scalar processes. Indeed,
it is arguable that such commodity chains stand in stark
contrast to the traditional notion of peasant farming, which
it is assumed, predominately takes place on a single, spatial
scale that is the local scale. What is also significant in this
discussion is the observation by geographers that institu-
tional arrangements and processes of governance are
themselves the consequence of scalar contestation. Thus
whether the movement of food across the world and the
conditions under which it grows are governed by global
organisations, national governments or networks of local
producers is itself the consequence of scalar contestation.
In the late twentieth century, we began to see a range of
writing associated with notions of ‘glocalisation’, which
were thought to be dynamic, hybridised scalar arrange-
ments of local and global processes (Brenner 1998a, b,
2001; Peck and Tickell 1994; Swyngedouw 1996, 1997).
At their best, these theorisations provide a much-needed
antidote to previous discussions of globalisation, which
typically either celebrated or lamented the homogenisation
of the globe (Swyngedouw 1997). Instead it is arguably
more helpful to consider scalar configurations as always in
the process of being reorganised, challenged and recon-
figured. Just like social processes, therefore, scale pro-
cesses are always in a state of ‘becoming’.
This view of the politics of scale and the reconfiguration
of scalar processes has much to offer a rethinking of the
connections between AFNs, food security and food
sovereignty. This is particularly because, as the next sec-
tion argues, contemporary approaches to food sovereignty
and AFNs arguably have an inadequate understanding of
the politics of scale.
Alternative food network and scale
Over the last 20 years a large body of literature has
developed on alternative food networks. Such networks
are understood to be different from dominating ‘main-
stream’ food systems, characterised by industrialised
modes of producing and processing food, based on effi-
ciency maximisation through large or global scale systems
of finance, distribution and governance. AFNs, in con-
trast, reflect a plethora of counter beliefs, ethics and
practices that are believed to generate economic, social
and environmental benefits (Tregear 2011). As such,
AFNs include a myriad of activities along the different
stages of the food chain, from production through distri-
bution and to retail. To name but a few, these include
farmers’ markets, community gardens and food coopera-
tives (Harris 2010).
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Tregear (2011) identifies three main strands of theoret-
ical approach to and engagement with AFNs. The first key
perspective approximates a Marxist political economic
approach. This perspective seeks to explain micro-level
arrangements by examining large-scale political and eco-
nomic structures, particularly of global capitalism and
neoliberal politics. The second key approach is of rural
development or sociology. Researchers adhering to this
approach tend to agree with the critical position of political
economists vis-à-vis the mainstream agrifood system, but
they prefer to have a more micro-level focus on the
implication to rural areas and favour sociological theoret-
ical frameworks. The third strand identified by Tregear
(2011) includes studies employing governance and network
theory lenses. Here food systems are conceptualised as
networks of actors operating mostly at the meso-scale of
regions and states, and which their interactions and power
relation shape the food system within regulatory and
institutional structures.
These broad perspectives on AFNs have both strengths
and weaknesses, and taken together they provide what
seems to be complementary theoretically and empirically
rich understandings of food systems at different scales.
However, it might be argued that combining these scales,
or examining the way they are imbricated, rarely occurs in
this kind of literature. As a consequence of these omis-
sions, we do not see a sufficiently multi-scalar under-
standing of AFNs. To do so would require a more nuanced
understanding of scale. For that to happen requires further
engagement with and a more nuanced understanding of
scale, which is what we propose in this contribution.
Regardless of the theoretical approach employed, ‘AFNs
seek to localize food systems and to encourage contact
between food producers and consumers, seeking to respa-
tialize food systems perceived to have become ‘‘place-
less’’’ (Harris 2010, p. 355). A focal feature of AFNs, and
especially within activist discourse, has often been their
‘local’ affixation (Goodman et al. 2012). Therefore, AFNs
are conventionally perceived as ‘local food networks’
(LFNs). The ‘localisation’ of food systems is seen as
standing in a stark contrast to the mainstream agro-indus-
trial and global food system, analysed by McMichael
(2009) as a ‘food from nowhere’1 or a ‘corporate’ food
regime. Discourses of LFNs, then, situate food in a place
and advocate for a respatialisation of food systems (Feagan
2007). This reterritorialisation and spatial reconfiguration
of food systems bring to the fore the geographic attributes
of food production and consumption.
1 necessarily have the capacity to successfully challenge
This term was coined by Bové et al. (2001) in relation to the food in
McDonald’s restaurants being uniform and cultureless anywhere in
the world.
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N. Wald, D. P. Hill
The geography of local food systems, however, is only
one key aspect. Apart from being rooted in a place, LFNs
‘aim to be economically viable for farmers and consumers,
use ecologically sound production and distribution prac-
tices, and enhance social equity and democracy for all
members of the community’ (Feenstra 1997, p. 28).
Implicit to this aim are beliefs that a globalised system is
not and perhaps cannot be economically fair, environ-
mentally sustainable and socially just.
This problematic binary that represents the local as good
and just vis-à-vis the bad and unjust global, however, has
been heavily critiqued. Food system localisation, according
to Hinrichs (2003), has two general tendencies, which are
to be either diverse and receptive or defensive. The politics
of ‘defensive localism’ assume the homogeneity of the
‘local’, the need to resist external forces and the impor-
tance of protecting local traditions. Such conventions
(wrongly) assume an ethics that is intrinsically spatial and
promote an apolitical view of the local (DuPuis and
Goodman 2005). One of the major points for which we
mobilise our understanding of the politics of scale, par-
ticularly with regard to discourses around alternative food
networks, is what has been referred to as the ‘local trap’
(Born and Purcell 2006; Purcell and Brown 2005). Not
only does such thinking potentially understate the extent of
conflict and disharmony within any given community, but
it also understates the contingent nature of the construction
of scale and scalar processes at any point in time. Whilst
agreeing that there are often significant gains to be made in
concentrating efforts of resistance at the local scale, it is
also the case that the most appropriate scale for contesta-
tion around food may not be the ‘local’. Indeed where
power operates at any given point in time is conjunctural
and contingent and as such the appropriate scale for chal-
lenging the status quo, be it local, regional or global, is
itself the consequence of a set of dynamic social, eco-
nomic, and political processes. In that sense, we welcome
the growing calls for ‘open-ended, continuous, ‘‘reflexive’’
processes… that bring together a broadly representative
group of people to explore and discuss ways of changing
their society’ (Goodman et al. 2012, p. 14). Further, we
believe that such a reflexive process must necessarily
include a greater emphasis on how the politics of scale is
conceived and contested. In this context is worth remem-
bering that the drawing of boundaries around what con-
stitutes the ‘local’ and who and what might be included
within those boundaries is itself inherently a process of
territorialisation which, while including certain groups or
economic processes also has exclusionary facets.
Moreover, it is an open question whether local actors
dominant economic systems or whether they will instead
simply reduce some of its worst excesses. It may be argued
‘Rescaling’ alternative food systems: from food security to food sovereignty
instead that it is only by jumping scale and engaging
through networks that a significant challenge to the con-
temporary food regime might occur. Thus, jumping scales
enables people to disband spatial boundaries that restrict
their daily lives and are usually enforced from above
(Smith 1992, 1993), and this is exactly what the transna-
tional peasant federation La Vı́a Campesina is doing across
space and scale.
Institutional assemblage of networks such as La Vı́a
Campesina suggest the possibility of a multi-scalar
approach. Food sovereignty is currently the most notable
framework advanced by La Vı́a Campesina and its allies
that challenges the logic and practice of the current food
regime across scale, and we believe that a similar reflexive
process must also occur amongst those activists and
scholars working within this multi-scalar frameworks.
Moreover, food sovereignty politicises food security and
food systems (discussed below) in a way that inherently
challenges apolitical or defensive localism. In this vein, not
only that uncritical and unreflexive attempts at localism
may be in fact conservative, they may also struggle to
contest the neoliberal capitalism that already constrains
them. Food sovereignty is precisely an ethical–political
framework that helps identifying and overcoming these
confines.
Linking AFNs with food security and food
sovereignty
Advocacy for AFNs in industrialised countries emerged to
counter the adverse effects of the capitalist global food
system. Although by no means ignored, in the past litera-
ture on AFNs within this context did not tend to emphasise
a link between AFNs and food security. A notable excep-
tion is Anderson and Cook’s (1999) work on community
food security and local food systems in the US. The
2006–2008 global food crisis, however, brought the issue
of food security to the fore not only in low-income coun-
tries but also in western economies. The significant rise in
the price of staple grains presented a potential threat to
sustained food provision and governments were pressured
to respond to the failure of the global agro-market. The
institutional response in Europe, including the UK, was,
however, not of a radical shift toward AFNs or LFNs as a
strategy for a sustainable food security; but rather, an
ecological modernisation of the global-industrialised food
system was prioritised (Goodman et al. 2012; Kirwan and
Maye 2013).
The 2008 global spike in grain prices and its localised
effects on people’s food security, therefore, serve as a
recent signpost for debates over food systems. The crisis
and the food riots that ensued seem to have given food
207
politics a renewed impetus among activists, policy makers,
scholars, the media and the public. Within this dire situa-
tion, Malthusian apprehensions about food demand out-
pacing supply due to population growth resurfaced and
received considerable popular attention. Concurrently,
AFNs and LFNs also found renewed purchase across both
Global North and South.
Concerns about food security are by no means new and
while the most recent food crisis has been a notable event,
it must be positioned within an ongoing and much longer
process of neoliberalising food policies and systems. For
decades scholars, activists and social movements have
linked hunger and malnutrition with structural problems
within food systems across the world. For them, eradicating
food insecurity entails challenging those underlying issues
and improving, or even creating, adequate institutions and
structures (Claeys and Lambek 2014).
Indeed, the 2008 food crisis resulted not from insuffi-
cient levels of agriculture output, but from inadequate
access to it (Holt-Giménez 2009). Different reasons, such
as the allocation of agriculture production for biofuels,
financial speculations, land concentration and trade agree-
ments, were given for explaining the conditions that
prompted the crisis. Claeys and Lambek (2014) suggest
that these were legal issues at the heart of the global food
system that stimulated the crisis. These include, inter alia,
legal issues relating to access to land, property rights over
land, lack of regulation or enforcement, unequal trade
agreements, and tensions between protecting farmers’
human rights and intellectual property rights. While these
reasons have merit, food (in)security today, we contend, is
ultimately a matter of different political views and values.
These are evident in debates around AFNs and particularly
in relation to enhancing food security through LFNs.
Together with AFNs, the politicisation of food (in)se-
curity and crises over the last couple of decades has been
notably captured within the concept of ‘food sovereignty’,
a term popularised by the transnational peasant movement
La Vı́a Campesina in its 1996 World Food Summit. ‘Food
sovereignty’ was meant to counter the more dominant
concept of ‘food security’, which was used by the United
Nations and its agencies, and the nexus between these two
food related concepts has been a source for an ongoing
analyses and debate (see Patel 2009; Jarosz 2014; Edelman
2014).
Edelman (2014) argues that contrary to common belief,
La Vı́a Campesina did not coin the term ‘food sovereignty’
in 1996. Rather, at that time this term had already been
used for more than a decade. Edelman traces the
genealogical origin of this term back to a national food
programme of the Mexican government in 1983. Later,
during the late 1980s and early 1990s, this term was used
by peasant movements in different parts of Central
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America. Some of these organisations were involved in
early meetings that led to the creation of La Vı́a Campesina
and this may explain the adoption of the term. Still, there is
little doubt that La Vı́a Campesina brought this term into
debate at a global level and was instrumental in promoting
it as an alternative framework to capitalist agriculture
systems.
In its 1996 articulation, La Vı́a Campesina perceived
food sovereignty as a ‘precondition to genuine food secu-
rity’ (La Vı́a Campesina, 1996, cited in Patel 2009, p. 665).
Thus, rather than being inherently oppositional, these
concepts have indeed been interrelated from the outset.
This relationship has been recently interrogated by both
Edelman (2014) and Jarosz (2014), who, through an
extensive review of key literature, have made compelling
arguments for this interconnectedness of the two concepts,
both in oppositional and relational terms.
A 2003 report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation
of the United Nations (FAO 2003) portrays the evolution of
‘food security’ from its initial conceptualisation by the UN
in the 1974 World Food Summit and until 2001. During
this period there were notable shifts in FAO’s ‘official’
definition of food security, which reflect particular and
changing political and political economic contexts. For
example, the 1974 definition2 was influenced by the
Sahelian famine, Cold War geopolitics and a belief in the
technocratic capacity of states to address food insecurity
through redistributive measures, as long as resources are
available. The 2001 definition3 is far more encompassing in
its scope and includes social and health concerns, an
achievement attributed at least in part to civil society actors
led by La Vı́a Campesina. This more socially sensitive
definition was nevertheless rooted in a context of expand-
ing global neoliberal capitalism, where institutions such as
the FAO became increasingly irrelevant in shaping inter-
national food systems (Patel 2009).
Food sovereignty can be ‘broadly defined as the right of
nations and peoples to control their own food systems,
including their own markets, production modes, food cul-
ture and environments’ (Wittman et al. 2010, p. 2). How-
ever, La Vı́a Campesina’s ‘official’ definition of food
sovereignty has also evolved since its 1996 formulation.
The core principles that demand peasants and small farm-
ers’ direct control over formulating food policies were
2 nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands,
Food security is ‘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’ (cited
in FAO 2003, p. 27 and in Patel 2009, p. 664).
3
‘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 prefer-
ences for an active and healthy life’ (cited in FAO 2003, p. 28 and in
Patel 2009, p. 664).
123
N. Wald, D. P. Hill
maintained, but in later definitions4 issues of consumption
and other rights were also incorporated (Jarosz 2014;
Agarwal 2014).
It should be noted that both food security and food
sovereignty have a myriad of definitions and thus com-
paring and contrasting the two is not without some diffi-
culty. Whereas it is possible to identify the key
characteristics of these two concepts, for a better accuracy
the discussion should shift from ‘definitions’ to ‘dis-
courses’. On the one hand, this runs the risk of creating a
(false) dichotomy that reduces the diversity within how
these concepts are interpreted; but on the other hand, this
permits a greater degree of comparison using a political
discourse analysis of the terms.
Discourses of food security tend to reflect more tech-
nocratic, neoliberal and productivist approaches, which
assign a leading role to transnational governance institu-
tions and agribusiness and which focus primarily on the
national and international levels (Jarosz 2014). More recent
conceptualisation do address the availability of and access
to food also at the individual and household levels, but
solutions are rooted in large-scale food networks. The rise
of these governance institutions are themselves a conse-
quence of scalar politics, in that the regulatory institutions
have been scaled up (transnational) and down (regional/
local).
In contrast, discourses of food sovereignty tend to
emerge from civil society organisations and reflect Marxist
views of the political economy and ecology. These dis-
courses emphasise the importance of power relations and
the impact of capitalism on agriculture production, on the
4
A frequently cited definition of food sovereignty is taken from the
2007 Declaration of Nyéléni:
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and cul-
turally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound
and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own
food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, dis-
tribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and
policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations…
Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and
markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven
agriculture, artisanal fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food
production, distribution and consumption based on environ-
mental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty
promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all
peoples and the rights of consumers to control their food and
territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the
hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty
implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality
between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes
and generations (Nyéléni 2007, p. 9).
This definition was elaborated during the first International Forum for
Food sovereignty, organised by a coalition of organisations including
La Vı́a Campesina and held in Nyéléni Village, Sélingué, Mali.
‘Rescaling’ alternative food systems: from food security to food sovereignty
environment and on human societies. Here there is a
greater emphasis on processes at the national and regional
scales (Jarosz 2014). Discourses of food sovereignty focus
more on food production: how it is being produced, by
whom and within what governing policies, and they posi-
tion peasants and small farmers as capital’s other (Bern-
stein 2014). Moreover, ‘The Food Sovereignty proposal of
La Vı́a Campesina embodies the construction of new rights
and the transformation of society as a whole’ (Martı́nez-
Torres and Rosset 2010, p. 160). Such transformative, and
even revolutionary, elements make discourses of food
sovereignty politically charged, connecting issues of food
production and consumption to wider social, economic and
environmental struggles. For Edelman (2014, p. 960),
therefore, food sovereignty ‘is at once a slogan, a para-
digm, a mix of practical policies, a movement and a uto-
pian aspiration.’
Discourses of food sovereignty were also critiqued in
various recent publications. Perhaps most critical was
Bernstein (2014). This author makes a number of inter-
esting points and raises several theoretical as well as
practical questions. Bernstein maintains that there are no
peasants in today’s capitalist global world. Instead, peas-
antries were transformed into petty commodity producers.
A unitary ‘peasant way’ is, therefore, put into question not
only because of the perceived absence of peasants but also
because it includes a complex and diverse groups with
sometimes conflicting interests. In addition, some food
sovereignty discourses do wrong by promoting agrarian
populism in which the peasant ‘community’ is being
essentialised. To Bernstein and his fellow travellers (such
as Tom Brass and Terence Byres) this tendency is part of a
broader conceptual embrace of the essentialised peasant,
particularly in post-structuralist scholarship, that has had
the effect of eliding the complexities of agrarian relations
and in particular the long-standing processes of peasant
differentiation and its associated politics (Bernstein 2009;
Brass 1991, 1997; Byres 1979).
Another critique offered by Bernstein stems from
problems associated with ‘scaling-up’, referring to food
sovereignty’s ambition to establish a global food system
based on small-scale producers. Accordingly, (a) it is not
clear whether small-scale producers can produce enough
surplus in order to feed non-food producers, and (b) how
will that surplus reach the latter, which constitute the
majority of the world’s population.
Moreover, the state, according to Bernstein (2014), is
the ‘elephant in the room’. Policies and practices impli-
cated by food sovereignty discourses require states, which
are often seen as being ‘against the peasant’, to change
their course of action. Discourses of food sovereignty call
for expanded rights for small-scale producers, but there is
little clarity regarding who or what should have the duty of
209
acting as a guarantor of these rights (Patel 2009). There is
an inclination in discourses of and literature on food
sovereignty to see the state as having this role of the
guarantor of rights. This is somewhat paradoxically, given
the intimate and historic relation between the liberal state
and capitalism, and the anti-capitalist sentiment of food
sovereignty-inspired rights (Trauger 2014). However,
while there is little doubt that Bernstein’s critique is an
important one, once again the state is arguably seen here in
a fairly unnuanced manner in scalar terms. Is it the case
that how the local state treats small-scale producers must
necessarily be the same as national governments? Does the
state at all scales respond to the requirements of global
capitalism in uniform ways or is there variation between
scales? Can multi-scalar networks of such producers, such
as we see with La Vı́a Campensina, be more effective in
creating political space for alternatives at some scales than
at others? In other words, are all scales of the state merely
replicating the same kinds of power relations, including
those related to global capital, or are there differences at
different scales? It is this understanding of the multiple
scales of the state which is needed for thinking through the
potential for food sovereignty to be realised.
Another critique of food sovereignty maintains that
there is a need for greater clarity regarding the role of
international trade. Since not all countries can be self-re-
liant in food, trade must not be abandoned (Agarwal 2014).
Indeed, as stated in the Nyéléni (2007, p. 25) document,
‘Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it
promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices
that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and eco-
logically sustainable production.’ Moreover, the document
calls for ‘New governance systems [that] must ensure that
the negative impacts of international trade, for example
‘‘dumping’’, are stopped and local markets are given pri-
ority’ (Nyéléni 2007, p. 26). This vision, however, has been
deemed unclear and ambiguous (Burnett and Murphy
2014). Here, our previous understanding of the scalar
politics of regulatory institutions around food becomes
significant. Must it necessarily be the case that food
sovereignty has to be pursued in an environment that
replicates the same scalar relations between producer and
consumer that predominates in the contemporary global
food regime? There are a range of examples emerging in
different parts of the world that disrupt the current hege-
mony of the globalised food regime and do so in a way that
is not just about privileging the ‘local’ but instead recon-
figure scale. Thus, commodity chains can be rescaled so
that they do not accord to a food regime where the global
scale always predominates, and instead consumers can
engage with producers in different kinds of ways. Simi-
larly, those protesting against the imposition of facets of
global agri-food complex, such as GE seeds, may
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210
participate in global justice networks that enable them to
engage with similar activists from elsewhere and collec-
tively their actions may engender changes that have
impacts at a range of scales. When we examine the already
existing examples of challenges to the global food system it
is clear that there are multi-scalar alternatives and that the
politics of scale must be part of the way that food sover-
eignty is discussed in the future.
These critiques enrich discussions over what food
sovereignty entails, both theoretically and in practice. Food
sovereignty emerged from a ‘dialogue among different
knowledges and ways of knowing’ (Martı́nez-Torres and
Rosset 2014, p. 980) and the ongoing development and
evolution of this framework is embedded in this process of
collaborative and constructive debate, which while helpful
in their current form, would be enhanced through a greater
engagement with the politics of scale.
The intricacies between food security and food sover-
eignty are significant for a variety of reasons, but having
established why we believe food sovereignty to be
important, we are most interested in what we consider the
obvious but yet often neglected commonalities between
food sovereignty and AFNs. These two frameworks not
only share similar values, they also face similar critiques
and challenges. For example, the problem of ‘scaling-up’
has been attributed to LFNs (see Mount 2012), and tensions
between enhancing food security through LFNs vis-à-vis
international trade also attracted attention (see Kirwan and
Maye 2013). And still, the vast North American and
European literature on AFNs and LFNs address many of
these issues but tends not to draw links or make explicit
reference to food sovereignty (Wittman 2011). Using food
security as a bridging concept, we wish to make the con-
nection between these bodies of literature, one on AFNs
and the other on food sovereignty, unequivocal.
Clearly, the wide and growing attention devoted to food
sovereignty, as means for achieving food security and more
broadly as a framework for an alternative food regime, has
the potential to expand and deepen the ongoing food
sovereignty dialogue. But critiques should be conscious of
the socio-spatial and multi-scalar dimensions within much
of this dialogue takes place. Next we suggest examining
food sovereignty through a utopian lens allows us to better
see these dimensions and assists with reconciling the above
critiques with a clearer sight of what this framework ought
to achieve.
Multi-scalar food utopias
In addressing the often overlooked nexus between AFNs
and food sovereignty, we maintain that the two frameworks
have been subject to a number of similar critiques. The
123
N. Wald, D. P. Hill
elusive and intangible geographic concept of ‘scale’, both
in terms of ‘scaling-up’ (Mount 2012; Bernstein 2014) and
the ‘local trap’ (Born and Purcell 2006), is discursively and
critically pivotal and as such features in virtually all
accounts of AFNs and food sovereignty.
While drawing such explicit links between what other-
wise seems to constitute two separate bodies of literature
and debates is of importance, we do not wish to attempt at
providing specific answers to the pertinent recent critiques.
If we had, in all likelihood these answers would be based
on what could be normatively characterised as ‘local’
experiences, hence not necessarily avoiding the local trap
and most probably coming short of scaling-up.
Instead, we wish to draw another connection that is
forward looking and hopeful at the same time. Edelman’s
(2014) understanding of food sovereignty as a utopian
aspiration is echoed by a recent collaborative endeavour to
use utopia as a framework that enables scholars and acti-
vists to go beyond merely scrutinising and critiquing
dominant agro-hegemonic models (Newell 2009) and
illuminate alternative possibilities rooted in food utopias
(Stock et al. 2015b). This approach utilises utopia as a
critical yet hopeful lens through which visions of more just
and sustainable food networks are assessed. Within this
project, Wald (2015b) provides a more explicit examina-
tion of food sovereignty as a utopian concept.
But first, since colloquial use tends to associate utopia
with impracticality and wishful thinking, a case needs to be
made for utopia as a liberating and enabling concept.
Indeed, such popular negative attributes of utopia fail to
recognise its enabling potential. A utopian lens allows
those wishing to bring about change to engage with spaces
where experimental, alternative, radical and hopeful ideas
and actions are being formed and performed. This lens is
mindful that such experimental spaces express what is
desired instead of what is (Levitas 1990) and thus we
should not expect them to have figured out all aspects
relating to their endeavour.
Whereas it is widely perceived that utopian thinking is
focused only on the future, and an unattainable idealised
future at that, in fact the emphasis in much of this recent
work is on the opportunities of the present and how utopian
visions may facilitate a realisation of the potential of the
present. In this sense the emphasis is on the possibilities
inherent in the present that may not be immediately obvi-
ous. Such utopian spaces are experimental but to suggest
that these spaces are hopeful is not the same as saying that
they are naı̈ve. Erik Olin Wright (2010, 2013) encourages
us to move between dual temporalities of the present and
future and argues that by doing so ‘real utopias’—grounded
in the actual potential of humanity—may be better realised.
The critical and transformative framework of real utopias,
as envisaged by Wright and others, is that space between
‘Rescaling’ alternative food systems: from food security to food sovereignty
what is hoped to be achieved and what can be. Such uto-
pian thinking can serve as a source of new inspiration and
encourage people to move forward, fully cognisant of the
challenges that are entailed in the present.
Since real utopias are grounded in the understanding of
the challenges of the present, our task in detailing the
possibilities for food utopias must begin with an under-
standing of current social organisation and an analysis of
how power operates within society. Such an analysis will
consider how the status quo constrains or conditions
decision-making processes and privileges particular inter-
ests or outcomes. For our purposes, this means that the
discussion of AFNs or food sovereignty must look at the
specifics of the social structures that we wish to transform,
including socially constructed scales. As Wald (2015b) has
argued in more detail, the multi-scalar food system envis-
aged in food sovereignty discourses builds on sustainable
agro-ecological practices, married with democratic partic-
ipation in decision-making.5 These discourses lay emphasis
on sustainable and just labour practices, and seek to combat
injustices as they are related to gender, class and ethnicity.
While such a vision is grounded in a set of ethical guide-
lines, it is not descriptive or teleological and the means by
which food sovereignty is enacted remains more important
than arriving at a predetermined set of conditions.
Examining food sovereignty (and AFNs) as food utopias
does not mean all critiques can be dismissed, although
admittedly it goes some way in mitigating them. Food
sovereignty emerged and evolved from the grassroots and
this is largely still the case. It was not formulised by pro-
fessional philosophers as part of a robust intellectual
exercise. Neither is it a meta-theory that claims to provide
exact solutions to every problem. Therefore, while cri-
tiques are important for a fruitful dialogue—and food
sovereignty has evolved out of an ongoing dialogue of
knowledges (Martı́nez-Torres and Rosset 2014)—a utopian
lens reminds us of the inherent uncertainty and changing
nature of envisioning and enacting AFNs within a food
sovereignty framework. Put differently, ‘Food utopias help
us critique (and decenter) conventional narratives, docu-
ment experiments whereby food is being done differently,
and emphasize that the practice of food or doing food
differently is an often messy and always indeterminate
process’ (Stock et al. 2015a, p. 6, emphasis in original).
While a critique may indeed be constructive, a sceptical
view of food sovereignty (Bernstein 2014) must not lose
sight of the wider context within this counter-hegemonic
framework is situated and of what and how food sover-
eignty wishes to achieve.
5 Second, shifting the focus from food security to food
Wald (2015b) provides illustrative examples of the nexus between
food sovereignty practice and food utopia in North Argentina. One of
these examples is discussed in even more detail in Wald (2015a).
211
We do not know exactly how a food regime based on
ideals of food sovereignty would look like—although food
utopias could be worthwhile here—but we do know that it
would necessitate operational and governance changes at
all scales. A food utopia lens is thus useful for supporting a
transformation of the status quo, which inevitably means
re-scaling existing structures and establishing different
types of multi-scalar relationships. This re-scaling process
is part of a dynamic and ongoing socio-spatial contestation
that shapes and re-shapes food systems and how they are
governed. Thus, in the same vein that examinations of
AFNs, food security and food sovereignty should be more
attentive to scale and its intricacies, so do attempts at
envisioning real food utopias.
Conclusions
The current corporate food regime (McMichael 2009) is
being scrutinised and challenged by a diversity of alter-
native food networks that although far from being
homogenous are based on a particular set of ethics.
Research on such alternative networks is also diverse and
includes different frameworks and examination at different
scales (Tregear 2011). While scale seems to be a key term
used in food related studies, addressing issues at different
scales does not guarantee a multi-scalar understanding of
the complexities inherent to AFNs. For that to take root, a
more in-depth conceptualisation and application of scale is
required. Indeed, as our analysis has demonstrated, more
often than not there is little discussion of the way that scale
is socially constructed (Smith 1992; Marston 2000) or how
the rescaling of the state is inherently a dynamic process.
The scale at which the politics of food occurs is not
inherently fixed but is rather the consequence of a contin-
gent set of scalar relations.
Using scale as a theoretical concept allowing to better
engage with both potentials and critiques of AFNs, this
article’s contribution is threefold. First, a shift from food
security to food sovereignty is required in order to chal-
lenge capitalism’s underlying spatial and temporal logics
that created an unequal, unsustainable and crisis prone food
regime. While discourses of food security, albeit with a
‘social face’, do not tend to challenge the core principles of
the established food system, discourses of food sovereignty
do offer a clear critique. The latter’s perceived weakness,
however, is its lack of programmatic guidance for how to
create a food system that is based on small to medium-scale
producers that have control over governing policies and
gear their production towards local and domestic markets.
sovereignty requires more attention to the social con-
struction of scale and to the ways in which the politics of
123
212
scale affect discourses of AFNs and food sovereignty. It is
not sufficient to endorse a local network or initiative, as is
often done in work on AFNs, without critically interro-
gating the power relations embedded in how local identities
are constructed and how the local politics around food are
enacted. Similarly, since the regulatory institutions and
economics of food regimes are themselves the consequence
of contingent scalar relations, it is not necessarily the case
that progressive change may best be achieved by only
concentrating on the local action. In a multi-scalar food
system, resisting inequitable and unsustainable practices—
and crafting more just alternatives—may also require a
nimble scalar response; one that can jump scale and contest
at a variety of scales when required.
Third, food utopia was suggested as a critical and
hopeful framework for examining alternative forms and
discourses of food politics and praxes. By focusing on real
utopias (Wright 2010), which are situated in the space
between dreams and practice, we can remain aware of the
complexities and even contradictions within emancipatory
ideals without losing sight of what these ought to achieve.
Within real utopias, our attention is devoted to social
innovations enacted in the present and geared towards
creating change in the future. Applying a utopian lens onto
discourses and praxes of food sovereignty and AFNs, then,
is useful for a better grasp of what is envisioned and how
this vision is being promoted and enacted within a plurality
of different and changing scales, temporalities and con-
texts. A more nuanced understanding of scale, however,
should also be a feature of such hopeful food utopias.
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Navé Wald, PhD, is a recent graduate of the Geography Department
of the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, where he has also
been teaching part-time. His work focuses on issues of rural
development, food politics, radical politics and civil society. His
doctoral research focused on grassroots peasant-indigenous organisa-
tions in northwest Argentina, the challenges they face and their
responses.
Douglas P. Hill, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in
the Geography Department of the University of Otago, Dunedin, New
Zealand. He has published widely on Development issues related to
India and elsewhere in Asia, including issues related to migrant labour
and urban restructuring, India politics, rural development and
environmental management. His most recent work is concerned with
transboundary water resource in South Asia.
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