Republican food sovereignty

Abstract

This article defends a republican understanding of food sovereignty, according to which food sovereignty is the freedom of people to make choices related to food production, distribution and consumption in a non-dominated way, that is, without being subject to the arbitrary or uncontrolled interference of governments, international bodies and multinational corporations. Food sovereignty as non-domination, the article claims, should be guaranteed through the creation of (and the enhancement of existing) international agencies enforcing and monitoring impartial rules concerning food production, distribution and consumption, based on deliberation conducted according to publicly acceptable reasons both within and across states. Crucially, such agencies should be subject to the scrutiny and contestation of both official bodies and social movements. The republican model of food sovereignty, the article concludes, offers a more realistic framework than currently dominant participatory models of food sovereignty for tackling issues of food production, distribution and consumption in contemporary diverse societies.

Keywords

food security food sovereignty liberal multiculturalism non-domination republicanism

Introduction

Food sovereignty has become a growing international movement, especially among peasant farmers in developing countries, and it has increasingly attracted the interest of scholars working on the political and ethical dimensions of food.¹ According to La Via Campesina’s Nyéléni Declaration, which is considered the manifesto of the food sovereign movement:

Food sovereignty is the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers. Food sovereignty prioritizes 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 environmental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all people and the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, 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.²

The aim of this article is to examine food sovereignty through the lens of contemporary political philosophy. Indeed, it is surprising that despite the growing interest in issues of food justice in recent years,³ few authors have considered deploying the theoretical and normative tools of contemporary political philosophy to understand and critically asses food sovereignty and to clarify its strengths and limits. This is what I propose to do in this article. In doing so, I will inevitably offer a broad strokes account of food sovereignty. This is a deliberate choice. My purpose in this article is not to offer a detailed analysis of food sovereignty, or a comprehensive overview of the relevant literature, but rather to highlight what I think are the key features of food sovereignty and render them ‘legible’ to contemporary political philosophers. I will do so by employing two well-known theoretical frameworks most political philosophers are familiar with, namely liberal multiculturalism and republicanism, and by arguing that the latter is preferable to the former for understanding food sovereignty. My conclusions, it should be noted, are not exhaustive. In other words, my aim is not to say that a republican conception of food sovereignty is the best available within contemporary political philosophy. Rather my aim is to defend this conception and, by doing so, trying to generate a larger debate on this topic among political philosophers.

My analysis proceeds as follows. In the first section, I illustrate what I believe to be the main strengths of the idea of food sovereignty as it is presently conceived. These are, first, its criticism of the individualistic ethics that underlie the dominant neoliberal discourse on food security in western societies and, second, its rejection of the purely instrumentalist conception of food and dietary habits that also accompanies that discourse.

In the second section, I focus instead on the main flaws of the current understanding of food sovereignty. These are, first, its insufficient appreciation of the diversity of food-related interests that characterizes most communities, both local and national, and, second, its excessive emphasis on participatory democracy, which is not realistic within complex and diverse societies.

In the third and main section of the article, I advance a new understanding of food sovereignty grounded in republican political philosophy. More specifically, I argue that the republican idea of ‘freedom as non-domination’⁴ offers a useful lens for reconceptualizing food sovereignty in a way that avoids the aforementioned shortcomings and which can provide useful conceptual and normative tools for critically assessing existing food systems from the perspective of normative political philosophy. The idea of freedom as non-domination, as I explain at length in the article, involves the view that individuals are only free when they are not subject to ‘arbitrary’⁵ or ‘uncontrolled’⁶ interference or mastery by others. This idea has important implications for justice and democracy within political communities and, crucially, for the sovereignty of such communities, that is, for their ability to be free from arbitrary or uncontrolled interference by other political (e.g. states) or non-political (e.g. corporations) actors. I therefore illustrate how the republican understanding of food sovereignty provides a theoretical and normative framework that avoids the shortcomings of the currently dominant understanding.

What are the key strengths of food sovereignty?

The idea of food sovereignty presents, in my view, some key strengths, which also render it relevant to contexts different from those with regard to which it was originally conceived.

The first strength concerns food sovereignty advocates’ criticism of food security, which was until recently the dominant paradigm of food justice. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO),

[f]ood security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.⁷

Food security advocates have been widely criticized for avoiding ‘discussing the social control of the food system’,⁸ and therefore implicitly accepting the neoliberal economic order. I will return to this problem later in the article. Here, I would like to focus instead on another related aspect of food security, that is, its emphasis ‘on the health of the individual…[and]…on the language of individualism and self-reliance’⁹ and, relatedly, on individual responsibility. As Alison Hope Alkon and Teresa Marie Mares point out,

obsessions with individual health are a form of neoliberal subjectivity. Not only do they depict health as a measure of personal responsibility, but accepting this responsibility, rather than calling for a publicly accessible healthcare system, becomes the key to one’s well-being.¹⁰

This individualistic approach to food justice raises two significant concerns. First, it is reductive to consider individuals as atomistic beings who can make choices about their food and health as if these were entirely under their control and unrelated to their broader social contexts. As a growing body of literature shows,¹¹ social factors affect both people’s eating choices and, relatedly, their ability to engage in healthy or unhealthy eating. For example, socio-economic inequalities, or the growing presence of ‘food deserts’ in many western cities, often impose significant constraints on people’s ability to follow a diverse and healthy diet. This raises issues of food justice that often fail to be granted sufficient importance by defenders of food security, despite the latter’s focus on social reform.¹²

Second, and relatedly, this insufficient emphasis on the various social and economic factors that affect people’s dietary choices inevitably increases the stress on individual responsibility, as individuals are assumed to be capable of making free dietary choices within a free market system that remains mainly unchallenged. This kind of approach has influenced the dominant debate on paternalism and anti-paternalism in relation to healthy eating policy.¹³ Indeed, whether one believes that individuals should be left free to purchase and eat any foods they like, or that they should be compelled or ‘nudged’¹⁴ by the state to make healthier eating choices, this debate remains centred around a fairly limited conception of individual agency, which detaches the individual from their surrounding social, economic and political context.¹⁵ Food sovereignty aims to overcome this narrow understanding of individual agency, by focusing on the social dimensions of food production, distribution and consumption both within and beyond specific communities. This provides a useful theoretical tool for critically assessing the existing food regime in both developing and developed countries.

The second strength of the idea of food sovereignty is its critique of a purely instrumentalist conception of food, intended merely as ‘fuel’.¹⁶ Interestingly, the ‘food as fuel’ paradigm applies not only to unhealthy foods (e.g. fast foods)¹⁷ but often also to foods which are considered healthy. Indeed, healthy eating policy in western liberal democracies is often grounded in a nutritionist ideology, according to which we should ‘think about foods in terms of their nutrient composition…make the connection between particular nutrients and bodily health, and…construct “nutritionally balanced” diets on this basis’.¹⁸ This nutritionist approach has been criticized for offering a very limited and biased approach to healthy eating policy, as it overlooks many non-health-related (e.g. hedonic, cultural, artistic, etc.) dimensions of food as well as the importance of food synergy and of more holistic approaches to healthy eating.¹⁹

In the literature on food sovereignty, a critique of nutritionism has been advanced, for example, by Kyle Powys Whyte.²⁰ Many indigenous communities, Whyte argues,

are articulating a distinct value for food that is not reducible to scientifically assessable nutritional qualities or the quantities of food produced by or administered to particular populations. For the voices just featured, food production, labour, preparation, consumption and disposal are woven tightly with land tenure, a community’s way of life, reciprocal gift giving and life sustenance, connecting people in a community and respect for nonhuman life. In these ways, food’s value is that it serves as a type of hub. For food can somehow bring together, or convene, many of the relationships required for people to live well and make plans for the future. The hub-like value of certain foods, such as whale or sturgeon, allows them to convene biological, environmental, cultural, social, economic, political, and spiritual aspects of communities.²¹

Similarly, Paul Thompson²² claims that

many analyses of food security presume that food needs can be fully characterized in physiological terms…Yet this may be a profound misrecognition of who they experience themselves to be. Cultural identities are constructed through the repeated consumption of certain foods or recipes and through dietary or food preparation practices. An approach to food justice that focuses on meeting biological needs may well perpetuate acts of oppression that separated racial or ethnic groups from their cultural traditions in the first place. Such failure to recognize a person or group’s identity is an injustice in itself that is compounded by inappropriate restorative measures. In this way, even well motivated efforts to address the food security of marginalized groups simply repeat the original injustice of misrecognition.²³

Whyte and Thompson’s statements highlight the importance of the non-functional and non-health-related dimensions of food. This aspect, together with the critique of neoliberal individualism, provides the idea of food sovereignty with a critical edge that can contribute to challenging dominant understandings of food justice and food security not only in developing countries but also in developed western liberal democracies.

Food sovereignty and liberal multiculturalism

When examining these features through the lens of contemporary political philosophy and, more specifically, of liberal political philosophy,²⁴ their importance can perhaps best be grasped by referring to Will Kymlicka’s²⁵ influential theory of liberal multiculturalism. According to Kymlicka, cultures are important not per se but because they provide their members both with a context of choice within which they can exercise their individual autonomy and with an important source of self-respect. When minority cultures, Kymlicka argues, are threatened by dominant cultures, their members have access to a less stable and secure context of choice than members of dominant cultures. Since this is normally just the result of pure bad luck, it demands that the state grant minority cultures special group-differentiated rights to reduce such inequalities. Crucially, the group-differentiated rights that Kymlicka invokes with regard to national minorities and indigenous peoples are ‘self-government rights’,²⁶ that is, rights that allow such groups to achieve collective self-determination and govern themselves according to their cultural norms within a certain territory.

The latter aspect, that is, Kymlicka’s emphasis on territory, is especially important. Indeed for Kymlicka national minorities and indigenous peoples tend to be territorially concentrated. ‘I am using “a culture”‘, he argues, ‘as synonymous with “a nation” or “a people” – that is, as an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history’.²⁷ This emphasis on territory is crucial since for many cultures the ability to control their land and resources is essential for the survival of their cultural practices. Clearly, this view resembles very closely the idea of culturally based collective self-determination that characterizes food sovereignty.²⁸ One of the key goals of the Nyéléni Declaration, we have seen earlier, is ‘[to ensure that] the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food’.²⁹ As Patel points out, ‘[t]o demand a space of food sovereignty is to demand specific arrangements to govern territory and space’.³⁰

Food sovereignty’s understanding of food, contrary to its food security counterpart, captures the idea that food and eating practices play an important role in providing members of different communities with a valuable and culturally significant context of choice. It is not sufficient for individuals to be able to access whichever foods might be available, based on the idea that food is simply a source of nutrition. Food presents cultural and social dimensions that provide individuals with a context of choice within which they can exercise their individual autonomy, in the form of autonomous dietary choices. Furthermore, food’s cultural dimensions provide individuals with an important source of self-respect. According to Korthals, for example,

[b]ecause food is an important aspect of social and cultural identities, individuals and groups deeply appreciate their food choices (and implicitly or explicitly the production processes), and they are often unwilling to change their eating habits. Food products, more than other products, are directly linked with cultural self-esteem and respect.³¹

In the absence of a ‘fair representation of food styles’,³² Korthals argues, this self-respect is undermined and people may ‘feel humiliated’.³³ For these reasons, non-recognition or misrecognition of the cultural distinctiveness of peoples’ dietary habits can be an injustice.

This does not mean, however, that the cultural value of food should be seen alongside, or even in opposition to, health concerns. On the contrary, food sovereignty also helps us to rethink the relationship between food and health by moving beyond the narrow understanding of health that underlies nutritionism and food security. For example, Whyte cites the Diné Policy Institute’s report on food sovereignty in the Navajo Nation, according to which

[i]n relation to cultivated plants, it is said that the Holy People shared with the Diné people the teachings of how to plant, nurture, prepare, eat and store our sacred cultivated crops, such as corn. The importance of these teachings to our well-being was made clear in that the Holy People shared that we would be safe and healthy until the day that we forgot our seeds, our farms, and our agriculture. It was said that when we forgot these things, we would be afflicted by disease and hardship again, which is what some elders point to as the onset of diabetes, obesity and other ills facing Diné people today.³⁴

This statement indicates that the health of members of cultural minorities (and, I would argue, of members of any communities) should be understood in a holistic sense rather than in the narrow sense that underlies nutritionism and food security. According to this holistic understanding, participating in certain cultural practices, and ensuring that such practices continue to flourish, contributes to their members’ well-being and health. It is not sufficient, in this sense, to view health as mere absence of disease.

What is wrong with food sovereignty?

In the previous section, I showed how Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism can help us to understand food sovereignty through the lens of liberal political philosophy. However, Kymlicka’s theory raises a specific problem that I think is especially relevant to the issue of food sovereignty. I am referring to the rather homogenous understanding of culture that underlies Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism. Let me explain.

For Kymlicka, we have seen, group-differentiated self-government rights are aimed at promoting a distinctive culture, which is considered to be expression of the identity of a territorially concentrated group. Take the oft-cited case of Quebec, where the Preamble of the Charter of the French Language (1977) states that

the National Assembly of Québec recognizes that Quebecers wish to see the quality and influence of the French language assured, and is resolved therefore to make of French the language of Government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business.³⁵

Following Kymlicka, one could justify Quebec’s collective self-government rights on matters of language based on individual Quebecers’ right to have a context of choice within which they and their children can continue to exercise their individual autonomy and enjoy self-respect and to protect such a context from the powerful influence of the surrounding Anglophone culture.

However, this assumption is problematic. To understand why, we should remember that for Kymlicka national cultures (and cultural groups in general) are territorially concentrated. However, it is wrong to assume that there is a perfect coincidence between specific cultures or languages and specific territories. Helder De Schutter, for example, points out that ‘linguistic and territorial boundaries do [not] overlap’,³⁶ and that ‘[t]he world we inhabit is imbued with multilingualism and linguistic opacity. It is always characterized by vague boundaries, grey zones, minorities within minorities, bi- and multilingualism, etc’.³⁷ To assume otherwise would be to endorse an outdated ‘Westphalian understanding of the relation between states and languages’,³⁸ based on the formula ‘one state/one territory/one language’,³⁹ which simply does not correspond to reality. As well as being empirically wrong, De Schutter points out, this conception may result in oppressive and illegitimate language policies which, based on the ‘linguistic territoriality principle’ (LTP),⁴⁰ impose the language identity interests of some upon all the individuals who live within a specific territory. Some of these people, however, may not speak the officially recognized language or, if they do, they may not attribute to it the same identity-related value assigned to it by the majority of the people living in that territory.⁴¹

De Schutter’s argument about language can be applied to the debate on food sovereignty. More specifically, the idea of food sovereignty, at least as it is formulated in La Via Campesina’s Nyéléni Declaration, and in much of the existing literature, assumes that there is a rough coincidence between territories and food cultures, and that all the people living in a specific territory share the same food interests, that is, they have similar eating habits and attribute to them a similar kind of identity value and therefore agree on how to ‘define their own food and agriculture systems’⁴² based on those values. While this may be true of some groups, for example, some indigenous groups or national minorities, it is definitely not true of most societies in the western world, where food habits and interests, like languages and language interests, are intermingled and overlap in many different complex ways, rather than existing side by side as homogeneous units. It is partly for this reason that some scholars have been rethinking the notion of ‘territory’, arguing that the latter should no longer be understood merely as geographical space but rather as ‘a set of relationships’,⁴³ and that other authors have argued that food sovereignty should ‘extend beyond spatial and temporal frame[s]’.⁴⁴ Yet territory remains central to current understandings of food sovereignty, as signalled, for example, also by its emphasis on ‘locavorism’, that is, the consumption of locally produced food. Indeed, even those authors who have recently problematized the ‘localisation’ aspect of food sovereignty still consider it necessary (although not sufficient) for it.⁴⁵

Focusing on locavorism is also important for another reason. One might argue that food sovereignty’s emphasis on territory is not in principle incompatible with its applicability to heterogenous contexts, as testified by the existence of such diverse movements as the US Food Sovereignty Alliance,⁴⁶ Food Secure Canda⁴⁷ and Nyéléni Europe.⁴⁸ However, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that this is the case, locavorism appears to be in tension with another key aspect of food sovereignty, its aforementioned commitment to a non-functional approach to food, which associates the latter with important cultural and identity values. Marc Edelman, for example, points out that many western consumers who have become used to exotic foods (e.g. sugar, coffee, chocolate, tropical fruits, etc.) ‘are unlikely to take kindly to food sovereignty scolds who insist on their consuming only local products during those long northern winters’.⁴⁹ Edelman’s point has important implications. Not only do many autochthonous people in the west enjoy non-local foods as a source of culinary pleasure and as a key feature of their lifestyle. Such foods, and many others, are also and especially central to the dietary habits of members of the many immigrant communities which increasingly populate western societies. To ask these people to renounce their dietary habits to advance the food interests of the ‘local’ community (which in any case, we have seen, cannot be assumed to be homogeneous) would constitute a serious violation of their ability to access ‘culturally appropriate’ food.

One might then ask whether immigrant groups should be treated in the same way as indigenous groups or national minorities, and granted, like them, self-government rights. Kymlicka, for example, thinks that immigrants should only be granted ‘polyethnic’ rights that enable them to integrate into the host society on fairer grounds, but not self-government rights.⁵⁰ Setting aside the fact that in most cases immigrant groups are not territorially concentrated, it seems that if one were to grant immigrants self-government food sovereignty rights that would in many cases entail renouncing the localization aspect of food sovereignty.

In summary, it seems that a Kymlickian understanding of food sovereignty, focused on small, territorially concentrated, and culturally homogeneous autochthonous groups, is not particularly suited to understanding food sovereignty within the context of complex contemporary societies.

The second main problem with food sovereignty concerns the high level of participation in decision-making it demands, a level that is unrealistic to expect in western societies. As Daniel Weinstock points out,

[m]any people simply do not want to participate in politics, and are happy to leave the job to others, provided they have a say in determining who those others are…[I]n a context of pluralism with respect to reasonable conceptions of the good life, such preferences cannot be discredited by the proponents of the good of active citizenship.⁵¹

This critique does not detract from the value of democratic participation. It simply acknowledges the fact that people disagree on such a value, and that ignoring this disagreement when legislating about food policy may result in oppressive and illegitimate measures.

Here, a clarification should be made. The problem with participatory forms of democracy is not that they compel all citizens to participate in decision-making. After all, advocates of participatory democracy only want to offer new avenues for participation but do not expect all citizens to make use of them. The problem, however, is that if participatory forms of democratic politics are granted a significant influence upon decision-making, then laws and policies will reflect more closely the interests of those citizens who participate more actively. This seems to unduly disadvantage those who decide not to participate because they do not consider political participation a central aspect of their life and of their conception of the good.

In view of these criticisms, in the next section I will reconceptualize food sovereignty in a way that is less anchored to such concepts as locavorism, territory and cultural identity, and which I believe is more compatible with the diversity of contemporary complex societies. This reconceptualization is grounded in republican political philosophy and especially in the work of Philip Pettit.

Republicanism and non-domination

Republicanism is centred on the idea of freedom as non-domination. Freedom as non-domination differs from ‘negative’ freedom, which indicates the absence of actual (or imminent) interference, and from ‘positive’ freedom, which refers to autonomy and self-mastery. Instead, it indicates the absence of ‘arbitrary’⁵² or ‘uncontrolled’⁵³ interference or mastery by others. Republicans stress the importance of those structural factors (institutional, legal, and social) that make people’s exercise of their rights and negative liberties insecure, and render them subject to the unpredictable, capricious and unrestrained interference by others (even if such interference never actually materialises).

Pettit’s idea of ‘uncontrolled’ interference slightly modifies this understanding, by shifting the focus from arbitrary interference to ‘interference that is exercised at the will or discretion of the interferer; interference that is uncontrolled by the person on the receiving end’.⁵⁴ Even in the presence of recognized non-arbitrary rules, Pettit argues, ‘interference that conforms to rules, and is not arbitrary in that sense, may still be uncontrolled by you and can count as arbitrary in our sense’.⁵⁵ When present, freedom as non-domination involves ‘security in the exercise of your basic liberties’.⁵⁶ Enjoying this security, Pettit argues, means enjoying ‘the status or dignity of the free republican citizen’.⁵⁷

How is the idea of non-domination relevant to food sovereignty? To answer this question, it is important to stress that Pettit and others have recently expanded the scope of republican political theory to include the international sphere. More specifically, according to Pettit, it is important not only that individuals are not dominated by other individuals and groups within their society, or by their state, but also that their state is undominated. Only by being undominated can an undominating state protect its people from private domination. According to Pettit, when people and its state are dominated by ‘a[nother] state, a multinational corporation, or an international agency’,⁵⁸ they lack the sovereignty that they need to ensure that their individual members are not dominated.

Before looking at the implications of the republican idea of sovereignty for food sovereignty, however, it may be worth exploring how and why the idea of non-domination may also be important in relation to food sovereignty at the domestic level.

Republicanism and food sovereignty: Domestic justice

The republican idea of freedom as non-domination, we have seen, is qualitatively different from the idea of negative freedom. Liberals, and especially classical liberals and libertarians, normally endorse negative freedom and are often mainly concerned with reducing as much as possible the constraints of the state over individuals. Indeed, the idea of negative freedom provides the conceptual and normative foundations for the process of economic deregulation which has culminated in the free market orthodoxy of the late 20th century and early 21st century global order, via the anti-state rhetoric of such political leaders as Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.⁵⁹

Republicans, instead, aim to ensure that individuals are not subject to arbitrary or uncontrolled interference by others. This is compatible with the presence of laws and rules that restrict people’s negative freedom, as long as such laws are non-arbitrary and controlled by citizens, and contribute to people’s secure enjoyment of their rights and liberties. The republican idea of freedom as non-domination has important ramifications for both justice and democracy, and both dimensions are relevant to the issues surrounding food production, distribution and consumption. Let me explain.

With regard to justice, one of the most important conditions for people to be non-dominated is for them to have freedom of choice. More specifically, according to Pettit, ‘[y]ou must be able to get what you want regardless of what others want you to get. Your freedom in this sense must have depth’.⁶⁰ Freedom of choice depends not only on one’s natural physical and intellectual abilities but also on ‘the technology and infrastructure of the surrounding society’.⁶¹ This has important implications for food-related matters. One of the main problems addressed by the food sovereignty movement is the lack of a sufficient variety of food options that increasingly characterizes contemporary societies. The growing presence, in such societies, of food deserts, that is, areas where access to a variety of fresh fruit, vegetables and other healthy foods is limited due to the lack of suitable stores or markets, is a clear example of this lack of food choice. Crucially, it is a problem that food sovereignty advocates have stressed to a much greater extent than defenders of food security, who are mainly concerned with the provision of food per se, that is, regardless of its diversity, to prevent hunger and famine.

Republicanism is, of course, not only concerned with food choice but with choice across a wide range of areas. Yet, food offers an interesting example of how the republican ideal might work in practice. First of all, the availability of food options, like that of any other options, depends on personal, natural and social resources.⁶² Setting aside the former two, it is useful to focus on social resources, which include technology and infrastructure. For example, the fact that inner city dwellers in many contemporary societies are unable to access a sufficient variety of healthy foods is in most cases not due to the lack of personal or natural resources. Most of these people, that is, may be both mentally and physically able, and they may live in a natural environment which is suitable for a variety of food options (e.g. the climate is neither too hot nor too cold). Yet they may lack the social (technological and infrastructural) resources that would enable them to access a variety of food options. These include, mainly, access to suitable commercial outlets in their neighbourhood and/or to affordable private or public transportation to reach suitable outlets when the latter are located outside their neighbourhood.⁶³

Access to these and other material resources is something republicans are very sensitive to. According to Pettit, ‘there is a tight connection between equal freedom, in the republican sense and material equality’.⁶⁴ If a citizen has access to a significantly lower amount of resources (and, consequently, options) than others, she will be unable to enjoy ‘a civic status that enables…[her]…to stand on an equal footing with others’.⁶⁵ This is because she will not be able to ‘access…basic capabilities for functioning in their society’.⁶⁶ The civic equality that republican non-domination aims to guarantee, by ensuring that no citizen experiences ‘fear or deference’⁶⁷ towards other citizens, therefore requires a certain degree (though not an unlimited degree) of material equality. This involves ensuring that ‘people…have sure access to shelter and nourishment’⁶⁸ and this may require, for example, some degree of redistribution of wealth and/or the presence of publicly funded public services, including public transportation.

The republican framework therefore helps us to reconceptualize the issue of self-respect already examined earlier in relation to Kymlicka’s theory. This time, however, the threat to self-respect caused by the lack of food diversity is not grounded in a concern for people’s cultural membership (an important value but one which, we have seen, raises problems when associated with the idea of territorially concentrated cultural groups) but rather in the asymmetry of power resulting from material inequalities that also affect access to diverse and culturally appropriate food. As Laborde points out, ‘large inequality leads to abuses of power and control of the poor by the rich…[and]…large inequality undermines the sense of dignity and self-respect of the poor, by fostering feelings of humiliation and envy’.⁶⁹ The humiliation which, we saw earlier,⁷⁰ may result not only from hunger and total lack of food, but also from the lack of adequate food diversity, can be understood through this theoretical and normative lens.

In the case of food deserts, access to material resources should be accompanied by additional policies to address two related issues. First, food deserts result from the decision by food retailers to abandon lower income neighbourhoods to pursue more profitable options in wealthier suburban areas. Yet the presence of lower income neighbourhoods is not a natural phenomenon. Instead, it is the result of social, economic and political factors that lead to processes of gentrification and which could be reverted through appropriate policies.⁷¹

A second issue concerns the fact that retailers’ decision to relocate to wealthier neighbourhoods is also partly due to the growing presence of retail monopolies that exercise great market control, thanks to the lack of market competition. If only one or a few retailers control the food market, they will have a greater ability, due to lack of competition, to decide where to locate their outlets. Monopolies constitute a threat to non-domination,⁷² because they place some people in control of others, and render them able to control their choices. This applies to food deserts but also to food more generally, as monopolistic food producers might have a greater power to decide what foods should be available to consumers, based on profit rather than on the provision of qualitatively and nutritionally diversified foods. This does not mean that property rights should not be protected. Republicanism is committed to property rights since the latter render the co-exercise of certain choices in situations of scarcity possible.⁷³ However, limits to property rights are permissible, according to republicans, when they help avoid the formation of monopolistic conglomerates, which tend to be dominating.

The importance of choice for non-domination also involves another aspect. For republicans, it is important to have choice also to avoid the problem of ‘adaptive preferences’.⁷⁴ This involves the idea that sometimes people might adapt their preferences to their current situation because they know that other alternatives are precluded to them. When it comes to food, for example, one might gradually convince themselves that a diet of fast foods is acceptable because they do not have access to other options (due to the aforementioned structural reasons).

William D Schanbacher, for example, argues that

[i]f a rural farmer fails to keep his family farm in operation due to competition with imported goods, but in turn is able to purchase cheaper imported goods – and thus save more income…this tells us nothing about how this farmer’s condition could have improved under another economic or social arrangement, namely, an arrangement in which the farmer is able to produce his own food rather than rely on cheap imports.⁷⁵

In this case, the farmer has the resources (e.g. money, a social and economic infrastructure that makes it possible to import foods, etc.) to access certain foods. However, he lacks alternative options and especially the ability to produce food himself. His preference for buying imported foods, while made possible by the availability of social and economic resources, can in fact be considered an adaptive preference resulting from the dominating social and economic forces to which he is subject, as Schanbacher himself⁷⁶ recognizes. Republicanism demands that these and similar sources of domination be eliminated through state interventions. The latter should also aim to guarantee ‘the sustainable use of regenerating resources of food and energy – fish, timber and the like’,⁷⁷ which are an essential element of the republican infrastructure and also a central aspect of food sovereignty.

Republicanism and food sovereignty: International non-domination

Social and economic forces play an important role in reducing the ability of individual citizens to have access to a variety of options and remain undominated. We have seen how this often has serious implications with regard to food production, distribution and consumption. Republicanism is sensitive to the issues raised by corporate domination. Indeed, republican justice requires that ‘people…be insulated against the dangers associated with relationships where an asymmetry of power exists between the parties’.⁷⁸ These relationships include those ‘between individuals and corporate entities, commercial or otherwise’.⁷⁹

This takes us back to the issue of food sovereignty. According to Pettit, we have seen, it is important not only that individuals are undominated by other individuals and groups within their society, and by their state, but also that their state is undominated. Only by being undominated can an undominating state protect its people from private domination. According to Pettit, when a people and its state are dominated by ‘a[nother] state, a multinational corporation, or an international agency’,⁸⁰ they lack the sovereignty that is necessary for their individual members to be undominated. This has important implications for food sovereignty.

First, as advocates of food sovereignty often highlight, what often prevents people from enjoying ‘healthy and culturally appropriate food’⁸¹ is the presence of multinational corporations that affect the production, distribution and consumption of food. Pettit acknowledges the importance of these non-state actors. He argues that ‘multinational corporations often dominate contemporary states, having a power over government that derives from being able to move their operations elsewhere and to beggar the economy’.⁸² Furthermore, multinational corporations also have the power to affect food and environmental standards.⁸³ For example, in reaction to recent talks about a potential UK-US trade deal following the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, many raised questions about the appropriateness of opening up the UK food market to the lower standard foods of the more unregulated US market as this, these critics stressed, would risk lowering food standards in the UK too.⁸⁴ This would create, once again, a situation in which people’s access to diverse and healthy food would be significantly jeopardized by the presence of dominating social forces.

Similarly, people may be dominated and lack sovereignty in the area of food policy when other states are able to distort market dynamics by heavily subsidizing some of their home producers, and thus enable them to outcompete producers from other countries, including developing countries.⁸⁵

These problems require solutions and interventions at the international level to guarantee the food sovereignty of peoples and states, which in turn would provide their individual citizens with access to undominated food choices. The aim of these measures would be for people to regain control over their food systems. Indeed Ian Werkheiser points out that the key aspect of food sovereignty is not so much the idea of food independence or self-sufficiency but rather the idea of ‘maximally local control over communities’ food systems’.⁸⁶ Werkheiser then adds that

[u]rban communities fighting for food sovereignty may well envision a system that includes affordable grocery stores along with urban gardens and other elements in a complex food system; for food sovereignty the important characteristic of that overall system is that it is determined by the affected communities through processes that are as democratic as possible.⁸⁷

Control over food systems requires democracy. And indeed, republican political theory assigns great importance to democratic control. It is not sufficient, according to republicans, to have access to material resources or to a variety of options. It is also important, to avoid domination, for people to be ‘in control of the different orders under consideration…not as consumers of the arrangements associated with one or another social order, but as the citizens whose duty and right it is to determine the shape of those arrangements’.⁸⁸ Having an equal share in the control of the state ensures that the very state that protects them from private domination does not become itself dominating. This, however, does not demand maximal forms of direct and participatory democracy.⁸⁹ Instead, republican democracy requires elections as well as contestatory tools that citizens can use to challenge government measures. These may include ‘public interest bodies’⁹⁰ giving voice to citizens who might otherwise find themselves in a situation of power asymmetry, for example, ‘consumers as against producers’⁹¹ and, similarly, small food producers/farmers as against multinational corporations. This kind of democratic control can guarantee both oversight and pressure for change.⁹² Crucially, it can also offer a more realistic model than the overly demanding forms of participatory democracy often associated with food sovereignty.⁹³ As Laborde points out, ‘[n]eo-Roman republicans do not advocate participatory self-government or direct democracy…The neo-Roman minimal understanding of democracy undeniably offers a useful paradigm for normative reflection on what James Bohman has called the new global circumstances of politics’.⁹⁴

The emphasis on control is also important because it offers another striking point of difference between food sovereignty and food security. As Patel highlights,

[c]ritically, the definition of food security avoided discussing the social control of the food system. As far as the terms of food security go, it is entirely possible for people to be food secure in prison or under a dictatorship. From a state perspective, the absence of specification about how food security should come about was diplomatic good sense – to introduce language that committed member states to particular internal political arrangements would have made the task of agreeing on a definition considerably more difficult.⁹⁵

The idea of food security does not place any importance on democratic control. A slave, or an entire people, can enjoy plenty of food security if they have a benevolent master or sovereign. That will not prevent them, however, from being subject to the potential arbitrary and uncontrolled interference of their master or sovereign, if they lack a voice in the design of legislation concerning food production, distribution and consumption. This voice requires control and contestation.

But democratic control at the domestic level, we now know, is not sufficient to guarantee non-domination, given the interconnectedness of global food systems and the influence that external actors, such as other states or multinational corporations, have over food production, distribution and consumption. Furthermore, it is important to stress that domination at the international level results not only from the action of specific agents but also, more generally, from a more structural form of domination that underlies the very ‘institutional framework – trade rules, global treaties, international law – which regulate international interaction’.⁹⁶ ‘For instance’, Laborde argues,

the asymmetry, within the WTO, between the continued protectionism of rich states and the forced opening of third world markets, is a striking example of the way in which powerful countries have exploited their agent-relative dominant position by entrenching and institutionalizing it through iniquitous trade rules.⁹⁷

It is therefore important that existing international institutions, including those dealing specifically with food-related matters like the FAO,⁹⁸ are reformed to be responsive to people’s ‘relevant interests’.⁹⁹ Furthermore, such institutions should ‘ensure that poor countries are better able to defend their interests and demand fairer terms of interaction’,¹⁰⁰ thus ensuring that peoples’ sovereignty and non-domination are protected. These bodies should be ‘contestable and controllable by…states’¹⁰¹ as well as by NGOs.¹⁰² These international mechanisms are important as they empower groups that might otherwise remain dominated. An example is the Cairns Group of agricultural producers, which managed to exercise significant pressure on powerful states during the Uruguay and Doha negotiations in the 1990s and early 2000s, managing to ‘stymie the efforts of more powerful states to establish rules that would restrict the trading opportunities open to the weaker’.¹⁰³

Once again, it is important to stress that the kind of contestation that characterizes republicanism, and a republican conception of food sovereignty, is much less demanding that the idea of participatory democracy often embraced by defenders of food sovereignty. People’s interests, rather than their democratic political agency, should guide democratization at the global level.¹⁰⁴ Control, rather than democratic participation, is what republicans believe should be guaranteed in this process. ‘[B]ecause…neo-Roman democracy’, Laborde highlights,

is centred not on the ideal of equal influence on, and direct popular participation to, power, but on the possibility of its effective contestation, it is well-equipped to underpin the effective control of international organizations by states and peoples, and is, further, well-suited to the decentralized, multifarious, network-based nature of contemporary global power.¹⁰⁵

Maximal forms of participatory democracy and food sovereignty¹⁰⁶ are praiseworthy but clearly utopian, due both to practical problems and, more importantly, to the aforementioned reasonable disagreement regarding comprehensive conceptions of the good. A life dedicated to political participation and activism is certainly valuable but cannot legitimately be used as the model based on which institutions, both national and global, should be (re-)designed.

Republican food sovereignty and public reason

In this last section, I would like to briefly focus on a final aspect. By moving from a liberal multiculturalist to a republican framework, the emphasis on the cultural dimension of food has somehow lost the centrality it had in the first part of my analysis. Republican food sovereignty, I explained, especially emphasizes control and contestation with regard to the regulation of food production, distribution and consumption, and this should guide reform of existing institutions and, where necessary, the creation of new institutional tools. Republican food sovereignty, however, is detached from the thick cultural and territorial dimensions of its liberal multiculturalist counterpart. The rationale for my move, it should be remembered, was the need to overcome the Westphalian character of the Kymlickian framework and to acknowledge the diversity of food cultures and styles both between and within different communities.

This shift, however, raises a novel question. The republican emphasis on control and contestation, one might argue, does not guarantee that the voices and interests of diverse individuals and groups with regard to food policy will always be taken into account. After all, even when there is space for contestation, decisions must eventually be made and if the contesting voices are minoritarian, they may not be able to influence policies and institutions. This criticism, however, fails to acknowledge one of the key qualifying features of democratic decision-making in republican (and much liberal) political theory. What I am referring to is the idea of public reason, that is, the view that political decisions should be justified by reasons that all citizens could accept at some level of idealization.¹⁰⁷ Pettit calls this ‘the norm of norms…[i.e. the view]…that no one is special and that the arguments made for any policy, or for any process of resolving policy differences, should be relevant from the standpoint of every adult, able-minded citizen’.¹⁰⁸

Not only does appealing to public reasons rule out appeals to self-interest and partial reasons when justifying legislation. It also requires that all citizens’ and groups’ interests are taken into account during deliberation and that, if specific citizens or groups demand ‘special assistance or privilege’¹⁰⁹ in some areas, these are given due consideration and, where possible, granted if they can be justified based on impartial public reasons.¹¹⁰ This implies that cultural accommodation, including accommodation in the realm of food policy (which, we have seen, presents strong cultural connotations according to defenders of food sovereignty), is still permissible once we exit the framework of liberal multiculturalism and enter that of public reason liberalism and republicanism. At the same time, public reason liberalism and republicanism avoid the shortcomings of the Westphalian understanding of cultural diversity that underlies liberal multiculturalism. Relatedly, a republican approach to cultural accommodation also avoids the problematic distinction between different kinds of cultural groups (e.g. national minorities as opposed to immigrant groups) that underlies Kymlicka’s theory, since members of all these groups have an interest in being subject to non-dominating and culturally sensitive food policies.¹¹¹

Crucially, public reason and the ‘norm of norms’ also apply at the transnational level. There is, admittedly, a dearth of philosophical analyses in this area. However, Pettit stresses that international rules and institutions (i.e. the rules and institutions that should secure the sovereignty and non-domination of peoples and their members) should comply with them. This implies that states, regardless of their power, ‘must be prepared to argue for any policies they support, any procedures they recommend, on the basis of considerations that can pass muster on all sides – considerations that all states, large and small, can acknowledge as relevant’.¹¹² Decisions regarding the regulation of food production, distribution and consumption at the international level, like those at the domestic level, should therefore be justified by appealing to public reasons.

Conclusion

Food sovereignty is an under-theorized concept in contemporary political philosophy. In this article, I have argued that republican political philosophy offers a valid theoretical lens through which we can understand its meaning and critical potential. By drawing on the republican ideas of non-domination, contestation and sovereignty, I have claimed, we can shed light on the often confused conceptual map of food sovereignty and render it more relevant to the social, political and economic context of developed liberal democratic societies.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Mark Navin, Daniel Weinstock, Ian Werkheiser and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to audiences at McGill University and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where earlier versions of this article were presented.

Notes

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