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FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
Philip McMichael

Introduction
Food sovereignty is a concept very much for our times. Emerging publicly in the context of
universal liberalization of farm sectors across the state system in the 1990s, ‘food sovereignty’
has inspired the largest social movement in the world (Desmarais 2007; Mann 2014), appeared
in the constitutions of several states – notably Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia (Rose 2012;
McKay et al. 2014; Giunta 2014), helped to frame a growing civil society presence in the
United Nations (UN) (McKeon 2009 and 2015), and stimulated a mushrooming of local food
system politics (Wittman et al. 2011; Andreé et al. 2014). Perhaps most of all, food sovereignty’s
arrival marks a threshold moment in humanity’s relationship to Earth, given the centrality of
agriculture to the health of both humans and the environment.
A key milestone in the affirmation of this concept was the 2008 publication of the
comprehensive UN and World Bank-sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural
Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). The Report argues that ‘agriculture is at
a crossroads’ because of the problem of expanding an unsustainable form of industrial agriculture
at the expense of farming livelihoods and practices that could ensure local, domestic food
security and ecological health. Observing that ‘business as usual is no longer an option’, in the
context of multiple crises at the start of the twenty-first century, the IAASTD questions
industrial agriculture and transgenic foods as solutions (to food insecurity, climatic emergency,
ecosystem degradation and slum expansion) since markets fail to adequately value environmental
and social harm (IAASTD 2008: 20) (see also Vaarst, chapter 7, this volume; Fanzo et al.,
chapter 20, this volume). The IAASTD Report documented increasingly unfavorable impacts
of farm sector liberalization on small producers, recommending national policy flexibility to
protect farming communities alongside subsidies for environmental stewardship and a general
reorientation to agricultural multi-functionality. Here, farming would perform social,
environmental, and nutritional functions rather than be reduced to an industrial input-output
activity largely premised on provisioning global supply chains. Further, IAASTD recommended
the subordination of current market-centrism and its externalization of environmental impacts
to a strong rights-based framework, and full-cost accounting, geared to ‘nonhierarchical
development models’ premised on valuing farmer knowledge, agro-biodiversity and common
resource management systems (IAASTD 2008: 5-7).
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As a high-water mark in addressing the role of farming in planetary sustainability, the

IAASTD Report embodied the substance of food sovereignty principles. Yet, the Report itself
was marginalized following scientific journal reaction to the withdrawal from the Assessment
by biotech and pesticide firms such as Syngenta and CropLife International (an association of
agrochemical firms).1 These interests were uncomfortable with the Report’s cautious approach
to transgenic seed technology. Nevertheless, the science and the sentiments that informed the
Report remain credible, and have underpinned ‘food sovereignty’ as a mobilizing concept and
increasing practice across the world.

Food sovereignty origins

The food sovereignty movement emerged in the early days of a global agrarian crisis
accompanying the neoliberal era (1980s to the present). While the term appeared in Central
America in the 1980s (Edelman 2013), it was in 1992, at a meeting of farmers’ organizations,
from Latin America and Europe, in Managua, that the progenitor of ‘food sovereignty’, Vía
Campesina was formed.2 As founding member, Paul Nicholson of the International Coordinating
Committee of Vía Campesina put it: ‘At that time, we issued a ‘Managua declaration’ where
we denounced the ‘agrarian crisis’ and ‘rural poverty and hunger’ resulting from the neo-liberal
policies’ (Nicholson 2008: 456). Four years later, in Tlaxcala, Mexico, a Vía Campesina working
group recommended the term ‘food sovereignty’, to be ‘adopted by the whole movement and
then defended publicly for the first time at the FAO World Food Summit in Rome’ (Vía
Campesina 1996), at which an NGO Forum declared that ‘food sovereignty’ should take
‘precedence over macro-economic policies and trade liberalization’ (Claeys 2015: 13).3 This
was one year after the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), with its Agreement
on Agriculture protocol. The latter helped bring into effect a food regime4 whereby the entry
of subsidized US/EU agro-exports into markets in the global South was institutionally
strengthened, forcing small producers to compete unfairly with imported foodstuffs.
The WTO’s formation followed an extensive period in which Structural Adjustment
Policies, deployed by the International Financial Institutions via a debt regime (McMichael
2012), mandated widespread dismantling of farm price supports, rural credit and marketing
boards across the global South. These processes contributed to the vulnerability of farm sectors
in the global South to US/EU agro-exports, and heightened international competition more
generally. For a quarter of a century, the World Bank marginalized agriculture and food
provisioning in its annual World Development Reports, deeming food security to be best facilitated
through a globally managed operation via trade liberalization and private control of agrifood
production and circulation.5 As a result, national food dependency levels arose alongside of an
intensifying peasant dispossession and deterioration of the conditions of smallholder farming
(GRAIN 2008a: 2; Madeley 2000). Vía Campesina made the connection: ‘The neo-liberal
agricultural policies have led to the destruction of our family farm economies and to a profound
crisis in our societies’ (Vía Campesina 1999).
The programmatic element of ‘food sovereignty’, then, linked the struggle for food policy
autonomy with the revaluation of rural communities. Vía Campesina’s definition of food
sovereignty emphasized ‘the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to
produce its basic foods respective cultural and productive diversity’ (Vía Campesina 1996). Later,
noting that ‘food sovereignty has become the backbone of our struggle’, particularly in proposing
ways out of the crisis. Nicholson summarized: ‘We propose local food markets, the right of any
country to protect its borders from imported food, sustainable agriculture and the defence of
biodiversity, healthy food, jobs and strong livelihood in rural areas’ (Nicholson 2008: 457).

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All this came to a head in the first decade of the new century as evidence of degrading
ecosystems (United Nations 2005) and rural displacement (Davis 2006) mounted. The long
agrarian crisis identified by the early food sovereignty movement was then aggravated by rising
food prices in the new century. Higher food prices stimulated biofuels investment by large
agro-corporate entities that displaced food crop land for fuel crops, and instigated heightened
price swings as financial speculators bid for these resources. In these ways, the emergent
corporate food regime undermined the social reproductive capacity of peasantries, contributing
to a stagnation in food supply manifest in particular during the 2007-08 ‘food crisis’, when small
farmers could not take advantage of higher agricultural prices, given the increased burden of
rising agro-input costs, notably fertilizers (GRAIN 2008a: 3 and 2008b), that were hinged to
food price inflation. At the same time, as the World Bank acknowledged in its 2008 World
Development Report, privatization had taken its toll:

Structural adjustment in the 1980s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies
that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs, and cooperative
organization…. Incomplete markets and institutional gaps impose huge costs in
forgone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness
and, in many cases, their survival.
(World Bank 2007: 138)

And so: ‘In the food crisis, for example, the governments didn’t have any political mechanisms
for recognizing the crisis, of controlling the crisis, or reacting to the crisis. All the instruments
were privatized’ (Masioli and Nicholson 2010: 40). In these various ways, the twenty-first-
century food price inflation registered the accumulation of crisis conditions experienced and
anticipated by the emergent food sovereignty movement in the 1990s (c.f. Jansen 2014).

Food sovereignty meanings

In the shadow of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture’s intensification of exposure of small
producers to unfair trade, the initial demand for ‘food sovereignty’ appealed to a conventional
understanding of state sovereignty, that is, the right of states to determine their own national
food policy, without being subordinated to monopoly trade relations. There was a momentous
intervention at the FAO in Rome, 1996, at which Vía Campesina called into question the
reigning assumption that ‘food security’ on a global scale could be accomplished privately
through market trade, by transnational firms. There were two issues at stake: first, the question
of national autonomy; and second, the fact that trade relations were asymmetrical in privileging
the corporate food trade at the expense of small producers everywhere, thereby undermining
the agrarian foundations of many states, particularly in the global South. Vía Campesina’s vision
was for ‘the right of peoples, communities and countries to define their own agricultural,
labour, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically, and
culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances’ (quoted in Ainger 2003: 11). In this way,
the peasant movement politicized ‘food security’ by challenging the trade architecture via the
conventional idiom of ‘sovereignty’ in an act of strategic essentialism, given that the FAO is a
UN organization, and therefore anchored in member states.
Via Campesina’s deployment of the terminology of ‘sovereignty’ has been debated widely.
McKay et al. (2014) claim a conventional double movement (Polanyi 1957) was at work here –
where the counter-movement simply politicized the economistic notion of ‘food security’ via
the market, initially demanding the right of nations to food sovereignty, followed later (in 2001)

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by a discursive shift to the ‘rights of peoples’ ). Other commentators (Hospes 2014; Schiavoni
forthcoming) identify this discursive dualism as a contradiction between state and civil society
‘sovereignties’ within the food sovereignty phenomenon. However, since Vía Campesina
represented the voice of small producers, the demand for national autonomy was accompanied
by an additional desire for grassroots sovereignty in national food systems. Certainly the initial
food sovereignty movement had a strategic target to address in the complicity of states in a
neoliberal version of market-based food security. But this kind of strategic essentialism was
grounded in a grass-roots movement claiming the right to produce staple foods, to reproduce
society and manage local resources – expressed in the slogan: ‘not about us without us’.
Accordingly, food sovereignty chapters like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra
(MST) in Brazil (translated into English, the Landless Workers’ Movement) have been busy
constructing sub-national communities in the name of ‘agrarian citizenship’6 as an epistemic
challenge to the modernist premise of citizenship as urbanity, including a process of transforming
the (meaning of the) state by subordinating markets to social and ecological criteria. Whether
simultaneous or sequential, the question of transforming the state from within, and in particular
ensuring states recognize and empower their agrarian constituencies, is an enduring issue. That
is, it is one thing for the food sovereignty movement to envision moving on both tracks –
advocating for national food policy autonomy, and at the same time advocating the rights of
small producers within that new framework – but it is another for states to accede to both
demands. This is the subject of the following section.

The food sovereignty project

At present the relevant food sovereignty vision statement comes from the Nyéléni Declaration of
2007: ‘The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through
ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and the right to define their own food and agricultural
systems’, (Nyéléni Declaration 2009: 673). Following this is the advocacy of a Peasants’ Rights
Charter in the UN (Claeys 2015), which is emphatic about revising the UN’s International
Convention on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights from fulfillment of the right to food,
to the more fundamental fulfillment of the right to produce food (Edelman and James 2011: 85).
While the meaning of food sovereignty is anchored in the struggles of the peasant/farmer
coalition, the term has traveled beyond its identification with the countryside, being adopted
also by ‘advocacy groups associated with the turn to sustainable/organic/local food systems, as
well as development NGOs, faith-based charities, Native American rights organizations, and
environmental groups’ (Fairbairn 2012: 218). While not disengaging food sovereignty from its
producer origins, the term itself includes political alliances with urban labour and urban
consumers, as symbolized in the Slow Food project, which is geared to protecting (selective)
farming heritages and reducing distance between producers and eaters (Petrini 2003).7 Various
studies show that food sovereignty means different things across classes (McMahon 2014), and
that food sovereignty ‘is differently appropriated in local settings, where individuals and groups
have embraced it for more unique and domestically shaped acts of contention’ (Ayres and Bosia
2014). A comparison with fair trade (geared to the global market) suggests that local food
movements offer a stronger basis from which to articulate a food sovereignty vision, in particular
by substituting local for global market relations, that is, substituting short- for long- supply
chains (but see Jaffee 2007). With a community-based politics geared to social justice,
exemplified in many Community-Supported Agricultures (CSAs), initially privileged forms of
local consumption of quality foods can be transformed in a substantive food sovereignty direction
(Zerbe 2014) (see also Schnell, chapter 5, this volume).

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Food market localization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for food sovereignty.
Uneven global developments juxtapose an international peasant coalition advocating local markets
as a resistance against their elimination by global markets, and Northern locavores building local
markets to improve food quality, reduce food miles and environmental stress, and sometimes for
food justice. Here, CSAs are certainly a positive step where they sustain local farming, but this
depends additionally on public management of surrounding land relations, including mutual
recognition of rural and urban social and ecological relations involved in the production, processing
and distribution of food (Friedmann 2011). While food sovereignty in the global South begins in
the besieged countryside, food sovereignty in the global North tends to be urban/consumer
driven.8 Whether the urban point of departure addresses besieged ‘eaters’ (the malnourished) is
critical to the food sovereignty vision. But food access needs a sustaining order at the local level.
Ultimately the democratic content of food sovereignty is substantiated by close rural/urban
alliances around biodiversity and justice, and recognition of the salience of food producer rights for
general and durable socio-ecological reproduction. Such alliance building (among producers and
consumers, both urban and rural) has potential to reform states from within, from the bottom up
(see, e.g., Claeys 2012), and is arguably underway in different forms across the world. In the global
South in particular, this means anchoring food sovereignty in land-user rights to stabilize conditions
for almost a third of the world’s population. Of course the struggle is broader than ‘peasantism’,
thus: ‘How Vía Campesina will take up the challenge to keep advancing new rights while making
them relevant for the whole of society is (of) great social relevance’ (Claeys 2012: 855).

Food sovereignty as countermovement

As a Polanyian countermovement (that is, a mode of popular resistance to the marketization of
society), food sovereignty establishes that the global market is instituted in such a way that states
serve private interests, reducing food to the status of a commodity. There is an ethical dimension
here, with material and practical applications for food and nutrition security: by what right does
the global market displace people, knowledge and cultures? Vía Campesina coordinator Henry
Saragih noted: ‘By reducing the meaning of food to a commodity only those who have money
will be able to have access to food’. 9
In shifting the emphasis from market value to social need, Vía Campesina observes: ‘Food is
first and foremost a source of nutrition and only secondarily an item of trade’ (Vía Campesina
2001: 8). Of course nation-states are by no means endowed with similar natural and economic
‘resources’, and some are ex-colonies established historically as food exporters, so some food
circulation remains necessary for populations currently dependent on food/exporting (Burnett
and Murphy 2014). Here the right to food is at once universal but not universally available
given the diversity of landscapes and of historical experiences of empire. At the same time, the
food sovereignty movement posits a substantive, rather than formal, conception of rights to
food, ‘whose content is not necessarily preordained by the state… the right is a right to self-
determination, for communities to redefine for themselves the substance of the food relations
appropriate to their geographies [and ecologies]’ (Patel and McMichael 2004: 249). The claim
is that states, and/or other international institutions, should guarantee, but not necessarily
author, the content of these rights, allowing multiple forms of realization by environmentalists,
through seed savers and landless movements, to community-supported agricultures (Da Via
2012: Kloppenburg 2014). In this way the movement represents an umbrella of resistance to
corporate-led agriculture, with a strategic vision transcending the conventional categories of
neoliberal economic development discourse. A key thread of course is the claim to respect and
value the ‘peasant way’, rejecting the development narrative that consigns peasants to the

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historical dustbin, and economistic assumptions that humans are separate from nature. Thus the
International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty states:

No agrarian reform is acceptable that is based only on land distribution. We believe

that the new agrarian reform must include a cosmic vision of the territories of
communities of peasants, the landless, indigenous peoples, rural workers, fisherfolk,
nomadic pastoralists, tribes, afrodescendents, ethnic minorities, and displaced peoples,
who base their work on the production of food and who maintain a relationship of
respect and harmony with Mother Earth and the oceans.
(IPC for Food Sovereignty 2006)

Put another way, MST leader, João Pedro Stedile observes:

From the time of Zapata in Mexico, or of Julio in Brazil, the inspiration for agrarian
reform was the idea that the land belonged to those who worked it. Today we need
to go beyond this. It’s not enough to argue that if you work the land, you have
proprietary rights over it…We want an agrarian practice that transforms farmers into
guardians of the land, and a different way of farming, that ensures an ecological
equilibrium and also guarantees that land is not seen as private property.
(Stedile 2002: 100)

In countering formal, and individualized, understandings of land reform, whether state-sponsored

or market-sponsored in the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ version promoted recently by the
World Bank (Borras 2003; 2007), ‘food sovereignty’ politics draws on substantive conceptions of
rights, economies and ecological relations. It transgresses the liberal conception of rights, rooted
in the individual and her/his derivative, private property (Patel 2007; Claeys 2015). There are
two consequences: first, neo-liberal principles are orthogonal to a politics of (collective) rights
(Harvey 2005: 178–79); and second, this politics of rights advocates realization through non-state
subjectivities. That is, the right to food sovereignty is a right to self-definition – for communities
of producers to ‘redefine for themselves the substance of food relations appropriate to their
geographies’, ecologies, and histories (Patel and McMichael 2004: 249). In the discourse of
capitalist modernity, food is conceived as a commodified input to enhance accumulation and
urban provisioning. Peasant mobilization today conceives of food as comprising social, ecological,
cultural and political relationships. As such it is increasingly understood as a source of political
identity and substantive rights, to be realized through a substantive understanding of citizenship.
In this way the food sovereignty movement reaches beyond a Polanyian double movement to
redefine possibility in and beyond the state.10 It also advocates an alternative development narrative
to reverse the social and ecological crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Thus the International Planning
Committee on Food Sovereignty declares:

In the context of food sovereignty, agrarian reform benefits all of society, providing
healthy, accessible and culturally appropriate food, and social justice. Agrarian reform
can put an end to the massive and forced rural exodus from the countryside to the city,
which has made cities grow at unsustainable rates and under inhuman conditions.…
(IPC for Food Sovereignty 2006)

The coordinates of the conjuncture, within which ‘food sovereignty’ emerged as a counter-
movement, have shifted as the food regime has entered a crisis phase. The terms of opposition

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include now a defense of ‘ways of life’ on the land against not only market forces (food surplus
dumping), but also organized physical and economic enclosure (Liberti 2013). At the same
time, the crisis has precipitated recognition of the false claims of neoliberal ‘food security’,
expressing a legitimacy crisis for the international institutional architecture of the food regime.
This, in turn, has spawned a power grab to reformulate the conditions of access to farmland,
labour and product to feed and fuel the world minority possessing purchasing power (Kerssen
2012; McMichael 2012). In its grounded-heartlands and in global forums alike, the food
sovereignty movement is confronted with protecting land-user claims (and rights) to their
landscapes and territories, and with reframing the discourse regarding what is really at stake,
namely the critical role of low-input, ecological farming in addressing food security, producer
rights, and sustainable forms of production and reproduction in an age of climate uncertainty.
Protection of land-user rights requires confronting what has been termed the modern ‘land
grab’, by which governments, investors, and companies buy or lease land in order to secure
access for food and/or biofuel production as (sometimes speculative) insurance against future
food price crises and food supply shortfalls (De Schutter 2011). Whether from the global North,
the Middle East, or East and South Asia, public and/or private investments offshore represent a
new form of agro-security mercantilism (McMichael 2013a). Land deals are twofold: 1) land
grabs that retitle and reclassify land as ‘vacant’ or ‘unused’ or ‘unproductive’, leading to the
displacement and/or marginalization of small producers from their ancestral lands, including
common lands; and 2) incorporating farmers into ‘value-chains’, which are premised on
dispossession of producer knowledge and possibly their land. As the Gates Foundation, financier
of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), suggests: commercial development
of African agriculture ‘will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total
employment involved in direct agricultural production’ (quoted in Xcroc 2009).
Either way, the market solution to putative food shortages and the more widespread use of
biofuels is to increase energy-intensive industrial agriculture. This includes not only the
replacement of smallholdings with large-scale corporate farming, but the mobilization of small
farmers as outgrowers within contract farming arrangements. This latter process is not an
outright land grab, but serves similar purposes, as it depends on controlling land-based
production through the subsumption of farm labour, regardless of whether such land remains
nominally in the hands of the contract farmer.11 The term ‘value-chain’ implicitly expresses the
power relations at work, since the process of commodification of land, water, labour and
product amounts to a longer-term property relation whereby financiers and agribusiness convert
land and livelihoods to a universal price metric, allowing the possibility of a wholesale alienation
of landscapes and enclosure of futures in the name of market rationality (McMichael 2013b).
Such enclosing of possibility by corporate markets converts land-use to singular dimensions
serving private interests elsewhere. For example, Lacandon farmers, subjected to the food
regime via dumping of subsidized corn in the Mexican markets, move on to practice carbon
forestry as a survival strategy (Osborne 2011). There is a double enclosure here: first, through
the price form, campesinos find their corn unable to compete with cheapened imported corn,
forcing them to seek sources of income other than farming; and second, they resort to carbon
forestry as an alternative income via the new value of timber/forestry production subsidized by
carbon credits. Lands are alienated via commodification of their material and offset value.
Ultimately, the extension of ‘land control’ via corporate markets, displacing milpa labour and
elaborating forestry systems as sources of carbon credits, represents the exercise of property
relations as ‘new enclosures’ (c.f. Peluso and Lund 2011).
Under these intensifying circumstances, where the ‘market’ is represented as the rational and
neutral arbiter of sustainability, food security and employment (of displaced producers), the

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food sovereignty movement has had to combine its call for political-economic autonomy with
a rights-based politics (Mann 2014; Claeys 2015). This centers on the rights of producers, and
the (associated) responsibilities of states. Here ‘sovereignty’ is not simply about states’ rights to
determine food policy, but also it is increasingly about the rights of small-scale producers to
their models of production and social reproduction.12 Producer rights and state responsibilities
for protecting such rights in the interests of society are food sovereignty’s most substantial
strategic initiatives for the twenty-first century.
Beyond a ‘right to food’ politics, the food sovereignty movement makes the claim for the
right to produce food, which in turn requires stabilizing the world’s small-producer population.
Small-producers are situated within a dual conundrum in the current food regime. They are
responsible for producing at least 50 per cent of the world’s food, yet account for about 50 per
cent of the world’s hungry people (ETC 2009). Reframing the question of rights in this way
connects the agenda of reducing hunger to the contradictions of market-driven assumptions
about large-scale agriculture (see also Fanzo et al., chapter 20, this volume). ‘Sovereignty’ is
understood in relation to producer rights, productive capacities, and their related infrastructural
needs. This refocusing of the meaning and politics of food sovereignty centers increasingly on an
ontological distinction between small- and medium-scale family-based farming, and corporate-
industrial agriculture. From a food sovereignty perspective, these different forms of agriculture
remain separate, notwithstanding attempts by UN/FAO member states and their private sector
allies to recast small producers as potential ‘smallholder businesses’, waiting to engage in
entrepreneurial agriculture if only provided with sufficient financial investments. The key
principle here is ‘productivism’, by which ‘smallholder’ farming is evaluated and found lacking,
in terms of ‘yield gaps’ to be resolved via ‘improvement’. Productivism imposes a standardized
yield metric on farming, measuring only plant yields (but neither efficiency of water/energy use,
nor environmental externalities), rather than the productivity of agroecological farming in terms
of what is produced (food and fuel) and what is reproduced (eg, seed, soil fertility, water cycles).
This can be understood as wealth itself, with additional socio-cultural value insofar as farming
communities are adequately reproduced (Hilmi 2012). A snapshot productivity comparison
between farms and agribusinesses ignores the neglect of small-scale farming, particularly in the
global South, since the mid-twentieth century – during which industrial agricultural research
‘enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for crop genetic improvement,
dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1’ (Holt-Giménez 2012: 1).
This ontological distinction between small producer farming and corporate agriculture is
routinely conflated in the UN/FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS) debates, in
which the food sovereignty movement is represented by the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM)
– a grouping incorporated into the CFS in 2009 in context of the legitimacy crisis of the UN
organization during the food crisis (McKeon 2009). Given the intensifying land deal context,
in addition to the notion of land as an investment refuge (Houtart 2010; Russi 2013), it serves
investor interest to represent ‘smallholders’ as potential entrepreneurs, even as the multifunctional
character of small producer communities is documented in CFS Reports. The CFS High-Level
Panel of Experts’ Report on Investing in Smallholder Agriculture for Food Security defines small-
scale farming in the following way:

Smallholder agriculture is practised by families (including one or more households)

using only or mostly family labour and deriving from that work a large but variable
share of their income, in kind or in cash... it includes crop raising, animal husbandry,
forestry and artisanal fisheries... Off-farm activities play an important role in providing
smallholders with additional income and as a way of diversifying risk... smallholders

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producing only or mainly for subsistence are not uncommon... smallholder’s families
are part of social networks within which mutual assistance and reciprocity translate
into collective investments (mainly through work exchanges) and into solidarity
systems… smallholder agriculture is the foundation of food security in many countries
and an important part of the social/economic/ecological landscape in all countries.
(CFS 2013: 10–11)

Furthermore, the ‘potential efficiency of smallholder farming relative to larger farms has been
widely documented, focusing on the capacity of smallholders to achieve high production levels
per unit of land through the use of family labour in diversified production systems’ (CFS 2013:
12). In relation to these claims, the CSM argues that there is a significant difference between
labour, and financial, investment. Labour investment is the differentia specifica of small-producer/
peasant agriculture (c.f. Ploeg 2009), and, according to the CFS, small producers are the ‘main
investors’ (2013: 16). This point is barely recognized in mainstream UN/FAO accounts because
of the singular understanding of ‘investment’ as financial (no doubt because the powers that be
are investors, not farmers). Under these circumstances, sovereignty is ultimately about securing
the small-producer mode of farming, as human-nature co-production and as a collective right
of a class of land-users who are routinely invisibilized as farmers in their own right. In this sense
food sovereignty is a countermovement posing alternative possibilities to the neo-liberal and
agro-industrial path.

Food sovereignty echoes in the UN

While the Polanyian countermovements focused their attention on state regulatory institutions,
the food sovereignty movement works at all scales: grass-roots; national; international; and
global (Desmarais 2007; Kerssen 2012; Mann 2014; Andreé et al. 2014; Vergara-Camus 2014).
Within the UN, the recent Right to Food Rapporteur has recommended deepening domestic
production to reduce food dependency, observing that there are ‘approximately 500 million
small-scale farmers in developing countries making them not only the vast majority of the
world’s farmers but, taking into account their families, responsible for the well-being of over
two billion persons’ (De Schutter 2011: 13). Reclaiming this right requires a power rebalance
in order to restore integrity to domestic farm sectors and rights to producing communities, and
reducing or eliminating agribusiness, grain trader, retailer, and affluent consumer power in
order to prioritize food security as a socio-political right, rather than a market relation.
Either way, sovereignty is critical to protection or reorientation of small-scale producers. But
sovereignty also means ‘epistemic autonomy’ – that is, distinguishing economic/financial and non-
economic values such as sufficiency economy, reciprocity via seed networks, an ecological calculus,
and so on. In the UN debates, for example in the 40th Session of the Committee on World Food
Security (CFS 2013: 40), the persisting trade reflex (by which states secure their balance of payments)
reproduces the notion that agriculture is a revenue operation and is best left to ‘entrepreneurial
farming’. One representative of the Private Sector Mechanism (PSM), from an agro-food network,
made the following observations in a debate about small farmers, land, and investments:

While there is a consensus that farmers are at the center, farming needs to be understood
as a profession, and food security is about economic growth, not just growing food—
thus farmers need to break the subsistence cycle and become entrepreneurs, produce
more with less land, and stabilize via land ownership, inputs (agro-chemicals),
knowledge, and market access.13

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This representation of farmers echoes other such statements in the course of CFS debates
regarding smallholders being at the heart of a ‘transition’.14 Ultimately, the representation draws
on a form of economic reductionism, reproduced by private sector representatives: ‘we invest
in large and small’ – implying scale neutrality that obscures the incommensurability of small
farming and industrial agriculture, and: ‘agriculture investments are wonderful job creators’ –
suggesting either plantations or agro-industrial estates as job safety nets for displaced farmers
where jobs are the currency of modernity. Job provision assumes that small-scale producers are
better off earning a wage (assuming that the agri-estate endures), and that small farming is no
different from farm working. This reflects considerable ontological ignorance (c.f. Ploeg 2009).
The emphasis on a financial calculus similarly discounts local common pool resources, managed
by self-organizing land users with shared rules which ‘differ from the logic of capital—they
reflect, instead the interests and perspectives of the involved producers, ecological cycles and/
or principles such as social justice, solidarity, or the containment of (potential) conflicts’ (Ploeg
et al. 2012: 164). These principles lie at the core of food sovereignty—the term is not simply
about autonomy, rather it embodies a historic, ontological alternative to the juggernaut of agro-
industrialization, and the trade regime upon which it depends.

Conclusion
This chapter notes that the world is at a turning point represented by the conjunction of food,
energy and climate crises and the growing recognition that the rampant materialism of twenty-
first-century capitalism is grossly unequal and evidently unsustainable. Managing the future,
equitably, is of great urgency just as understanding the future is an issue requiring attention to
ecosystem repair and viability.
Agriculture works with/on/against nature. Farming practices, when sustainable, nurture
nature and provide food. When the food sovereignty movement claims to feed the world and
cool the planet, it is reminding us that low-input farming systems regenerate natural processes
and sequester carbon, and have the potential (if adequately supported) to provision social diets
across the world that are place-based, and healthier than chemicalized and processed global
‘food from nowhere’ (Bové and Dufour 2001; Holt-Giménez, 2012; Badgley et al 2007). Here,
managing the (or in fact ‘a’) future means prioritizing food production that reproduces (rather
than disrupts, destroys or suppresses) natural cycles, and sustains human health.
As noted, food sovereignty is a contested concept with multiple meanings. Its elasticity
reflects both the evolution of the food sovereignty movement itself, from its origins in the early
to mid-neoliberal era to the present day, and the centrality of food for a variety of social
groupings, livelihoods and places. In addition, food sovereignty potentially reflects the central
nerve in the global countermovement to market rule (Starr 2000; McMichael 2013c), given the
growing perception of ecosystem disruption and degradation and the evident dysfunction of the
WTO regime with respect to trade in agricultural commodities. At this crisis juncture, global
debates about sustaining Earth and its inhabitants inevitably gravitate to the question of food
provisioning and environmental/resource conservation.
Finally, as a slogan, food sovereignty plays the role of midwife – encouraging the labour
contractions of another world. It is not the other world yet. It may be problematic in invoking
sovereign states when ultimately we need to transcend a highly unequal state system based on
destructive economic competition. Nevertheless, it politicizes the current food system,
challenging its epistemic premises, especially ‘scale efficiency’ in production: highly subsidized
energy-intensive industrial agriculture that externalizes environmental costs (soil and genetic
erosion, GHG, chemical pollution) and social impacts (displacement, food dependence,

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pesticide contamination), supported by asymmetrical trade rules. It resonates with deepening

material limits (e.g., water crises, land degradation, toxicities), encouraging recognition of (at
least) the environmental and health deficits associated with industrial agriculture. It also resonates
with Slow Food, community-supported agriculture and public experiments in municipal food
provisioning. The values involved reintegrate ecology (and its knowledges), economy,
democracy, and security in a variety of forms of social reproduction reconnecting with natural
foundations and social, rather than marketized, visions of human futures.

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Melissa McCullough and Bill Pritchard for editorial improvements.

Notes
1 See http://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/about-the-iaastd-report/about-iaastd.html
2 An international coalition comprising 150 organizations from 70 countries. In 2000, Vía Campesina
joined with 51 other civil society organizations to form the International Planning Committee for
Food Sovereignty, which operates at the international policy level (Desmarais 2007).
3 For elaboration of this history, see: Desmarais (2007); Wittman et al. (2010 and 2011); McKeon
(2015); Claeys (2015).
4 ‘Food regime’ refers to the political ordering of food production for, and circulation via, the world
market (McMichael 2013c).
5 The Bank’s 2008 Report focused on ‘agriculture for development’.
6 Hannah Wittman defines agrarian citizenship as follows: ‘The idea that rural producers have not only
rights to the land and the environment but also responsibilities, connected to these rights, for
maintaining the diversity of social-ecological reproduction’ (Wittman 2010, 96).
7 For a critique, see Lotti (2010).
8 Arguably this reflects the settler origins of Northern America, and Australia (Andrée 2014), in contrast
to the European scene, where there is an active rural food sovereignty movement (Bové and Dufour
2001; McMichael 2011).
9 http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/biodiversity-and-genetic-resources-
mainmenu-37/544-food-sovereignty-to-answer-world-food-and-energy-crisis
10 This is distinct from Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ -- whereby social resistance to the disabling effects
of ‘market society’ resulted in the market-regulating social welfare state – insofar as the food sovereignty
countermovement posits an ontological alternative of embedding economy in ecological relations,
rather than simply embedding economy in society.
11 This is the case in particular for current forms of value-chains, where small producers are being
mobilized into corporate markets (c.f. Friedmann and McNair 2008, Nielson and Pritchard 2009).
12 Here, in addition to championing grassroots voices in domestic food security policy, the championing
is of a different, but related, order, namely the strengthening claims of the salience of small-scale
farming and their ecological communities for surviving climate crisis in the twenty-first century.
13 This is a direct quote recorded by the author at the CFS debates on ‘responsible agricultural investment’,
at the FAO, Rome, October 2013.
14 On such statement in October, 2013, in CFS 40, was that the implementation of the rai would
represent a ‘new deal for smallholders’.

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