Comparing food security and food sovereignty discourses

Introduction

In 2007 and 2008, food riots erupted in Europe, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean due to the sudden and steep spike in rice, corn, and wheat prices. In October 2009 during his welcoming remarks at the World Food Day opening ceremonies in Rome, Director General of the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques Diouf stated that over 100 million more people were hungry than in 2008, pushing the number of hungry people in the world to over 1 billion. He also said that, according to the FAO research, cereal prices in sub-Saharan Africa were 25% higher than in 2007. Fertilizer prices had increased by 17% and seed prices by 70%. Diouf called for higher productivity returns from agriculture and also for increasing investments in agricultural development to meet the challenges of the rising numbers of hungry people, the increase in natural disasters, and the rising prices of agricultural inputs and of food. The dominant food security narrative of the FAO’s World Food Day ceremony held at the institution’s beautiful headquarters was one of increasing supply to meet increasing demand. Increasing global food supply through increasing and expanding agricultural production driven by better funded research and rural development strategies was central to mitigating world hunger, supplying the burgeoning demand for dairy products and grain-fed meat and for combating higher food prices everywhere.

In November of that same year, over 600 representatives of 450 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of peasants, fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, youth, women, urban dwellers, and farm workers also gathered in Rome at a place called the Alternative Economy City located on the grounds of a former slaughterhouse. The People’s Food Sovereignty Forum was the parallel set of international meetings held in Rome focusing upon the issues of hunger and food. The opening session at the forum began with the appearance of Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Right to Food. De Schutter spoke of the beneficial reforms to the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security, which now had spaces for the participation of NGOs and food producers in addition to governments, international agencies, and foundations. He said that over the last decade, small-scale farmers had increasingly become marginalized while the emphasis in agricultural development remained on exports. He noted the importance of inclusive, participatory decision making and putting pressure on states from below in order to make the human right to food a reality. Participants from the audience stood and spoke of people being displaced and dispossessed of farmland and ancestral land. A participant from Tanzania stated that large-scale land acquisitions from the United Arab Emirates were forcing pastoralists off the land, and local NGOs attempting to defend them and their rights were criminalized. In 2009, the FAO estimated that nearly 20 million hectares of farmland—an area roughly half the size of all arable land in Europe—was or had been negotiated for sale or lease in the space of just 6 months (Allen, 2010). More than 70% of these demands for land center in Africa where hunger is proportionately deeper than anywhere else in the world and where perceptions of unused, unoccupied land prevail (World Bank, 2010). De Schutter said that human rights violations include land evictions and that the human right to food encompasses the right to access food producing resources such as land and water.

Large-scale land acquisitions ensure national food and energy security for purchasers or leaseholders, while threatening or eroding food security for those who depend upon the land and water resources for their livelihoods and who are barred from them through eviction and resettlement. For example, sovereign wealth funds, most notably from the Middle East, are used to lease lands from African states in the name of regional food security for African Muslim peoples as in the case of large-scale acquisitions agreements that Egypt and Libya forged with Sudan (Tanyeri-Abur and Elamin, 2010). Landgrabs signal the importance of thinking about food sovereignty and food security discourses in relation to geopolitics at various scales of governance as these politics concern the changing dynamics of land and water use and ownership in what can be called the new scramble for Africa.

In its final declaration, the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum defined food sovereignty as a process of

Transforming the current food system to ensure that those who produce food have equitable access to, and control over, land, water, seeds, fisheries and agricultural biodiversity. All people have a right and responsibility to participate in deciding how food is produced and distributed. Governments must respect, protect and fulfill the right to food as the right to adequate, available, accessible, culturally acceptable and nutritious food. (International Planning Committee, 2009)

Food sovereignty and food security discourses

In this essay, I trace the discursive geohistories of food security and food sovereignty in order to identify oppositions and relationalities between them. At the international level, food security discourses emerged during the 1974 world food price crisis and developed under the influence of neoliberal globalization policies. Food sovereignty discourses emerged to counter neoliberal practices and the globalization of food and agriculture and formed one part of grassroots resistance to the implementation and effects of these policies. Food security became increasingly entangled with mainstream neoliberal notions of developmentalism and economic growth as expressed in World Bank and FAO documents, while food sovereignty served as a foil, an alternative paradigm, and an antiglobalization stance to the corporatized, global, national, and regional food systems (Patel, 2009; Pimbert, 2009). The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 marks the deepening implementation of neoliberal ideology exemplified by the interventions of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations into exchange and financial markets regionally and globally (Harvey, 2007). The international peasants’ organization, Via Campesina, first defined food sovereignty in 1996, on the heels of the 1995 Zapatista uprising in Mexico. This uprising was, in part, a response to the passage of NAFTA, which resulted in the dumping of large amounts of subsidized American corn into Mexico. This cheap corn forced many small-scale farmers out of business and into the international migration stream as farmworkers and food industry workers, among other things. The collapse of the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999 and in Doha in 2001 centered upon the issue of agricultural terms of trade and upon intellectual property rights. Food sovereignty activists pointed to unequal terms of trade, which resulted in rollbacks of protectionist policies in the Global South, while billions of dollars and euros were spent upon subsidizing agriculture and agribusiness in the North (Clapp, 2012; Weis, 2007). Initially, food sovereignty discourses were part of a larger array of antiglobalization discourses related to issues of international trade and agricultural subsidies.

Defining food security

The term ‘food security’ originally emerged from international institutional development and policy discourses of the 1970s (Maxwell, 1996). The term first appeared in a World Food Conference report published in 1975, wherein food security is defined as, ‘availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic food-stuffs…to sustain steady expansion of food consumption…and to offset fluctuations in production and prices’ (quoted in Maxwell, 2001: 14). Food security was originally aimed at governments and at international food supply with an eye to international price stabilization. Food security discourses defining the problems of food shortages and prices emerged out of the 1972–1973 Sahelian famines and the global food price crisis of 1972–1974. Between 1971 and 1974, wheat prices rose threefold in tandem with the rising oil prices and those of petroleum-based fertilizers (Jarosz, 2009). After a disastrous harvest, the Soviet Union imported 28 million tons of US grain further drawing global cereal stocks down and raising world prices (Morgan, 1979; Shaw, 2007). US secretary of state Henry Kissinger pushed to convene a World Food Conference in Rome where he stated that it was necessary to increase grain production, establish food reserves and engage in transfers of food from surplus areas to food deficit places (Kissinger, 1974). According to Kissinger (1974: 4–5), ‘A handful of countries, through good fortune and technology, can produce more than they need and are thus able to export’ while the largest growth in food production must take place in what he called ‘chronic deficit countries’. This view of the haves and have-nots separated by technological access and innovation, good fortune and geography remains popular and influential today and contributes to the persistent idea that European Union (EU) and American farmers feed the world (Fish et al., 2013). This response to the problem of famine and rising global food prices also resonates with agricultural modernization discourses of Green Revolution technology transfers. The 1974 World Food Conference adopted the FAO Director General Addeke Henrik Boerma’s plan, called the International Undertaking on World Food Security, which advocated for the establishment of regional and national food reserves, food aid from North to South, and the establishment of a global information and early warning system for impending disasters such as famine (Boerma, 1975; Shaw, 2007). The increase in food grains production was couched in terms of national self-sufficiency in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This, as Michael Watts (1983) shows in his study of the implementation of the Green Revolution strategy in Nigeria in the 1970s, resulted in large-scale, mechanized agricultural programs, following upon Boerma’s championing of the diffusion of Green Revolution technologies as head of the FAO.

In 1986, the World Bank’s Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries provided a widely cited definition of food security: ‘Food security has to do with access by all people at all times to enough food for an active and healthy life’ (World Bank, 1986: v). The report defines food security at the household level as ‘…achieved only if all households have the ability to buy food. There is no necessary link between self-sufficiency and food security’ (World Bank, 1986: 31). In this report, food security at the household level is defined as being able to buy food rather than being self-sufficient in food or producing food as a subsistence strategy revealing a shift in the objectives of food security and in its scale.

The report (1986: 13) further claims that food security alone cannot define or stand for development issues:

The term “food security” came into use about ten years ago to describe a broad range of development issues. It is perhaps natural to put new labels on old problems that defy easy solutions, but the price of combining loosely related subjects under a new name can be high.

Geographers employing Marxist political economy analyses pointed out how the contradictions of capitalist development and its articulations with diverse forms of commodity production were key explanatory mechanisms for understanding the global food crisis of the 1970s and argued that national food security be relationally analyzed alongside household food security (Wisner et al., 1982). The relational aspects of food security in the North to food insecurity in the South were also highlighted. For example, Michael Redclift (1987: 32) asserted that ‘The illusory pursuit of ‘food security’ in North America and Western Europe has helped to produce regional structures which are a major impediment to greater self-sufficiency in food production in the South’. This is especially relevant in Africa, where slavery and cash crop production on appropriated lands fuelled the destruction of agrarian economies and the erosion of regional and national food self-sufficiency there and resulted in increased entitlements and food security in the United States and Europe (Rau, 1991).

Over the same time period, policy-based institutional food security discourses appearing in annotated bibliographies and in World Bank and FAO reports and documents explicitly using the term reveal an increasing emphasis upon an individual (such as the poor African woman) or a group’s ability (such as small farmers) to produce or purchase food (Jarosz, 2011; Smith et al., 1993). Within the highly influential publications and reports of the World Bank and the United Nations, these dynamic scalar shifts further embedded the concept of food security within neoliberal development discourse in the 1980s and 1990s and emphasized individual access to global, corporatized food systems through agricultural investment and modernization and through increasing employment opportunities or wages, resonant with the World Bank’s (1986) definition of food security. Food security had become increasingly marketized and globalized over this period, so that it could be bought by countries, regions, groups, and individuals through a market increasingly driven by commodity speculation.

Both food sovereignty and food security incorporated a human rights perspective into their definitions, but the timing and definition of rights differed. In 1996, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security affirmed ‘the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger’ (FAO, 1996a, 1996b). The Declaration identifies the root cause of world hunger as poverty. Poor people are unable to purchase the food they need as global supply and demand become unstable and as increasing world population growth places additional stress on natural resources. Trade is identified as a key element in food security while the mobilization of technology and financial resources to increase production and food aid through sustainable development inventions are identified as policy responses in this document. The sovereign rights of nations to enact policies to promote food security is recognized and affirmed. But how national sovereignty is eroded through structural adjustment conditions or the rulings of the WTO, which privileges neoliberal trade relations over national initiatives to preserve local and regional food self-sufficiency is not addressed. Publications on food security emphasize the importance of good governance at the level of multilateral international institutions and at the national level in ensuring food security. Good governance is premised upon increasing the supply and accessibility of food through purchase on the global market or increasing local production triggered by investments in productivist agriculture at the international and national levels (FAO, 2012; Paarlberg, 2002).

Recent research on famines has identified flawed processes of democratization, problematic government donor relations, market liberalization, and lack of accountability of governments to citizens as key aspects that have impeded responses to recent famines in Iraq, Bosnia, and Malawi (Devereux, 2009). Examining dynamic economic and political relations across scales has shown the extent to which famines are constructed and how economic and trade relations and policies as well as political processes and power relations can and do exacerbate food shortages and result in weakened governmental and institutional responses (Abraham, 1991; Devereux, 2009; Watts, 1983). However, this research has not fundamentally changed the definitions of food security as it appears in food policy research at the national and international levels. International food security discourse as promulgated by the World Bank and the UNs as well as by agencies such as the US Agency for International Development and foundations such as the Gates Foundation continue to stress aspects of production, supply and demand, and accessibility to groups and individuals based upon purchasing power or agricultural productivity and thereby aligning the term historically with mainstream, neoliberal development discourses about nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. International food security policy discourses do not address or map hunger and poverty in wealthy nations of North America or the EU, for example.

Food sovereignty discourses

In 1996, the same year as that the FAO’s Rome Declaration on Food Security, was published and the same year that the Community Food Security Coalition was formally established in the United States, Via Campesina, an international peasant organization based in Brazil, published its Declaration on Food Sovereignty and defined food sovereignty as

The right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity. We have the right to produce our own food in our own territory. Food sovereignty is a precondition to genuine food security. (Via Campesina, 1996)

This initial definition of food sovereignty addresses small farmers lack of decision-making autonomy, promotes sustainable agriculture and is antiglobalization in its stance. It employs rights-based language and places the responsibility for autonomous development of food provisioning systems at the national and local level, including the state. The human right to food is the human right to farm and to control the development of local and national food systems for the benefit of the people. Five years later, in The Via Campesina’s Declaration of 2001, titled ‘Our World is Not for Sale’ food sovereignty is defined as

The right of peoples to define their own agriculture and food policies, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives, to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant, and to restrict the dumping of products in their markets. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy, and ecologically sustainable production. (Via Campesina, 2001)

These early food sovereignty declarations conceptualize hunger and poverty as emerging from the globalization of food and agriculture as directed by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the WTO, agribusiness corporations, and promoted by leading political powers such as the United States and EU. These declarations urge fundamental change of the food and agriculture system by calling for the removal of WTO adjudication in food and agriculture issues. They situate the causes for world hunger and poverty within political and economic processes of resource alienation, enclosure, and dispossession in their relation capitalist processes controlled by transnational corporations, powerful nations, and multilateral institutions.

These declarations are similar to those of the US community food security movements and programs, in that they also define an oppositional stance to the global, industrial food systems and emphasize small-scale family-owned sustainable agriculture. However, they diverge in the degree to which they articulate government responsibility and policies in support of community food security or food sovereignty. If grassroots food justice or food security movement leaders identify the state as a key oppressor that is implicated in the dispossession of food entitlements or food producing resources such as land and food, the state responsibility may be ignored in favor of self-determination or what some call self-empowerment. Examples of this stance are found among African-American food activists in Detroit and indigenous movements in Canada.

In 2007, the Declaration of Nyéléni brought over 500 representatives from 80 countries together in Mali. This declaration marks a shift in the definition of food sovereignty to include consumption. Food sovereignty is defined as the ‘right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’ (Forum for Food Sovereignty, 2007). This declaration resonates with the FAO’s 1996 definition that the human right to food is part of its definition of food security. But this declaration emphasizes a collective, transnational vision wherein food sovereignty imagines ‘new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social and economic classes and generations’ (Forum For Food Sovereignty, 2007). The collective vision and imagining of an alternative realized through food sovereignty is transnational, national, and local in its scope and in its critique of neoliberal international trade policy and of the globalized, industrial food system. This vision becomes an explicit objective in the final declaration of the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum in 2009, which declares that governments must protect and fulfill the human right to food and that transforming the current food system is necessary to the process of realizing food sovereignty.

NGOs devoted to food policy research such as Slow Food, FIAN International, Food First, the Oakland Institute, and the Community Alliance for Global Justice all champion food sovereignty as an oppositional discourse to food security, while academic research increasingly linked food sovereignty to liberation ecologies and food regime theory (Holt-Giménez, 2009; Le Heron and Lewis, 2009). This further refines the discourses as oppositional at the global level.

How oppositional becomes relational

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report, published in 2009, is the result of the cooperative efforts of 400 scientists, institutional and government policy makers (including the World Bank, FAO, and other multilateral global institutions) from 57 countries. The IAASTD also favors low input, small-scale sustainable agriculture, and defines food sovereignty as preferable to conventional, industrialized agriculture. In this document, food security and food sovereignty appear as equally important concepts. For example, the report claims that ‘agricultural knowledge, technology and science has an important role to play in both moving towards food security and food sovereignty, and breaking the malnutrition–poor health–low productivity cycle’ (IAASTD, 2009: 3). Both food security and food sovereignty are defined not as opposing discourses but as interrelated concepts that cover access, distribution, security, and equity (IAASTD, 2009: 10). While the report does not openly oppose GM seeds and food crops, it states that GM organisms (GMOs) would not solve the problems of hunger. Of the 57 countries involved in the construction of the report, Australia, Canada, and the United States refused to sign on. Syngenta, Monsanto, and country representatives argued that the report did not take biotechnology seriously enough. Further, ‘the withdrawal of Syngenta’s support and the refusal by Australia, Canada and U.S.A. to sign up is unequivocal: they did not share the vision expressed in the reports for political reasons, as it challenged their own positions in the debate’ (Labbouz and Treyer, 2010: 15). So while the report merged the discourses, the opposition to the conclusions by agribusiness and the refusal of the World Bank or the FAO to refer to this report in subsequent food crisis summits held in Rome and Madrid, affirms how these discourses continue to represent oppositional perspectives. The role of GM seeds is pivotal, because advocates for the gene revolution in agriculture claim that this technology is a significant response to increasing population growth, world hunger, and rising food prices, while critics claim it has nothing to do with productivity or fulfilling a right to food and farming as it is under the control of multinational agribusiness and part of the globalized, industrialized food system.

One of the major reasons food sovereignty and food security appear together in this report is due to the diversity of organizations involved in writing it. Some of the participating farmers’ groups and civil society organizations are dedicated to food sovereignty principles. The tension between the two discourses is also constructed as difference between ‘real’ science and social science in a statement Deborah Keith, a Syngenta employee who refuted the final report, made. Speaking about biotechnology, she said that ‘sadly, social science seems to have taken the place of scientific analysis’ (Keith, 2008 in Labbouz and Treyer, 2010: 5). This places food security in the realm of Western science (along with biotechnology and genetic engineering), while food sovereignty lies outside the fields of scientific analysis by being anchored in the social sciences because of the rejection of GMOs and capital intensive forms of production.

In 2012, the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security issued its second draft of the Global Strategic Framework for Food Security. This draft recognized the need for a consensus on the adoption the concepts of food sovereignty. The Nyéléni Declaration’s definitions of food sovereignty are inserted into this draft and signal the latest convergence of food security and food sovereignty discourses. At the same time, this inclusion also signals opposition between the two discourses due to the disagreements surrounding GMOs' contributions food security and the claim that governments should take responsibility in ensuring the human right to food. The movement toward convergence of the two discourses is further underscored by the FAO’s newest Director General, José Graziano da Silva, former Minister of Food Security in Brazil, an architect of the Zero Hunger program under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s Zero Hunger program was dedicated to eliminating hunger in the nation, and notably linked food sovereignty discourses to food security discourses in its programs and policies. For example, Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest city, passed Municipal Law No. 6.352, 15/07/1993 setting a food security policy that is committed to the concept of food sovereignty defined as the right of peoples to define their own food and agricultural policies, to protect and regulate their production and trade in such a manner as to secure sustainable development, to determine the degree of their autonomy, and to eliminate dumping on their markets (World Future Council, 2009: 4). The case of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is an example of the how food sovereignty and food security discourses are related in discourse and through practice within an urban context.

The geographies of food security and food sovereignty

The interpretations of, and relations between, food security and food sovereignty vary by geography and scale as well as by the conceptual and theoretical differences within the discourses themselves. Where and when these discourses develop and emerge is central to understanding their oppositions and convergences, as is an understanding of how scale is constructed within the discourses. Differentiating between a rights-based approach that is collective and emphasizes fair access and equitable distribution and one that is individuated, holding persons and groups responsible for ensuring their food rights through jobs and access to other forms of entitlement is also significant. How the discourses understand states' interventions, responsibility, and accountability for ensuring food rights, food security and food sovereignty is also important in understanding the relationality and opposition between the discourses in specific places. Food sovereignty focuses upon a restructuring of food systems so as to realize their democratic control, ensure equitable access to resources and obtain healthy, culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable food for all. At the local level, food security discourses may align themselves with these goals, but in the arenas of national and international policy, the discourses may remain divergent and oppositional because of the difficulty of reaching consensus on GMOs and upon states' responsibilities in ensuring the human right to food. One of the enduring differences between the two discourses is that food sovereignty retains a relational analysis of how poor and wealthy countries are joined in inequitable relations of political and economic power within the global food system and that transforming social relations that are unjust, oppressive, and discriminatory are imperative. Food security discourses may bring scale into relational analysis but may not necessarily include a discussion of inequities in social relations of production and reproduction or in land and resource control and access.

At the international scale, food security discourses focus upon hunger and poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with an emphasis upon rural landscapes, agriculture, and food consumption. Critics of food security discourses charge that urban places in Africa have been overlooked as prime areas for growing food (Crush and Frayne, 2011). They argue that food security discourses privilege rural development for food security even though urban agriculture is historically present throughout urban spaces in Africa and elsewhere.

Urban agriculture can either demonstrate food sovereignty or reproduce neoliberal ideology and practice depending upon the structure, leadership, and objectives surrounding each project (Hansen, 2011; Pudup, 2008). This suggests that the conjunctural, contextual details of projects and policy as well as the political economy of the emergence and development of food networks shape their sociospatial trajectories. Relationships that link people with nature, neighborhood, and city are dynamic and negotiated. Security and sovereignty discourses are employed in those negotiations differently. Depending upon forms of governance, power relations, and particular geohistories, the discourses may be oppositional, intersectional, or parallel. In a case study in Cameroon, Page (2002) examines the discursive practices of promoting urban agriculture as a food security strategy in the wake of structural adjustment programs, rising unemployment and falling wages. Given the history of urban agriculture in Cameroon and the satisfaction of growing one’s own food, underemployed and unemployed public sector workers have embraced the discourse and the practice of urban agriculture. Drawing from Ferguson’s concept of the antipolitics machine, Page (2002) argues that urban agriculture has mitigated social unrest while leaving power relations intact. As people set out to feed themselves, the elite enabled the expansion of urban farming and perpetuated their hold on power. Urban gardens were a safety valve against social unrest. This outcome is further shaped by the cultural regard for subsistence agriculture in Cameroon and the widespread adoption of development discourse of ‘coping strategies’ that define the practices of urban agriculture for food security and development. What I find of particular interest in this case, is how the discourses of food sovereignty and food security intersect in urban agriculture as a liberating practice for some and as a development strategy underwriting elite political control for others. Urban gardeners realize benefits as do the elite power holders. Subsistence production or ‘growing one’s own’ is a central concept in defining food sovereignty and food security and in this case, both concepts are instrumental in differential outcomes among social groups and also in the maintenance of elite political and economic power. This suggests that the discourses of food security and food sovereignty are positioned within social relationships among groups close to state power and among farmers benefitting most immediately from growing urban produce through their enjoyment of cultivating and increased food security.

In the case of Honduras, Boyer (2010) investigates why food sovereignty has little traction over food security discourses among rural peasants and peasant organizations, which tend to favor discourses of food security. Food security discourses are deeply embedded in the political economy of agrarian development in Honduras and seguridad has meant land security. Self-sufficiency in food is tied to an agroecological production paradigm that is enacted within the micro-geographies of peasant to peasant knowledge exchange within centers for sustainable agriculture. Peasant unions’ support of food sovereignty’s transnational agenda ignored rising problems of hunger and poverty in the countryside, and many peasant union leaders did not see the necessity or relevance of promoting food sovereignty in lieu of the immediate and pressing food security needs, which include land reform, at the local and regional levels. This reveals the challenges of integrating transnational alliances with local discourses and realities. Via Campesina’s chapter in Honduras is currently in the midst of local land struggles and condemns the murders of peasant leaders and human rights lawyers and have been leading a land occupation involving 15,000 hectares (Via Campesina, 2013), but the relationships between food sovereignty and land reform are not uniformly accepted by all farmers.

These examples illustrate that food security and sovereignty discourses and practices may enable food access and also enable individuals and households to control the production and quality of some of the foods they consume, but may also involve little or nor transformation of governance or the larger political economies of food and agrarian development evidenced at the national and international levels at least in the short term. Understanding the histories of governance at the regional and national levels as well as the dynamic operation of power through and across the political economy of food networks is crucial in assessing and understanding how food security and food sovereignty discourses are embedded within the political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of household, landscape, and nation. Food sovereignty is not necessarily a precondition to food security since it depends upon how meanings of these terms are made and grounded in life experiences, the patterns of land access and ownership and in local, regional and national cultures, and politics of food provisioning and consumption.

In the United States, food justice advocates and researchers emphasize both food security and the reestablishment of control over food production and provisioning systems among African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans drawing largely from networks in urban areas involving NGOs such as religious organizations, cooperatives, and a variety of urban gardening formations and organizations (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011). Food justice argues for a consideration of racial hierarchies and class divisions as central to restructuring food systems. These systems may provide food security and food sovereignty for different groups but may leave the larger issues of restructuring the world food economy and tying food inequities and loss of control over food and food producing resources at the national scale untouched (Alkon and Mares, 2012).

In understanding food sovereignty movements in France, ‘concepts of social class, French cuisine, the enduring respect for peasantries and anticolonialism all contribute to defining French food sovereignty in calls for state action’ (Ayres and Bosia, 2011). In contrast to an emphasis upon organic agriculture and local consumption, French food sovereignty is more closely aligned with regional forms of production and regional food origins.

Some of the most progressive and far-reaching framings of food sovereignty are happening at the national level. The Peoples’ Food Policy Project of Canada has engaged hundreds of Canadian citizens in constructing a national food policy directed at the eventual inclusion in the nation’s constitution. What is particularly striking about the initial goal of the National Food Policy initiative is that the elimination of hunger and poverty is also on the agenda, as is the strengthening of indigenous food sovereignty, establishing school meals provisioned by local farmers and encouraging in a plurality of voices in restructuring Canada’s food systems. At the national level, food security remains the dominant discourse and a human rights-based approach to addressing food insecurity in Canada is not supported by the government (Schmidt, 2012). The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance is following Canada’s example in initiating citizen comments about the transformation of Australia’s food system. The People’s Food Plan process will involve ordinary Australians discussing values and priorities for the establishment of a new fair, sustainable, and resilient food system. Both of these grassroots initiatives are deeply aligned with international food sovereignty discourses explicitly and represent citizens’ movements to transform food policy in both nations, which are currently world leaders in the export production of wheat and beef. They may also be aligned to varying degrees with indigenous food sovereignty movements stressing the production, gathering, and exchange of traditional foods as part a larger strategy of indigenous self-determination.

State sovereignty, support, and interventions may be necessary or may be rejected in the search for food security or food sovereignty. For example, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network challenges the government’s capacity to provide a safe and clean food supply (White, 2010). The network’s goal is control of Detroit’s urban food provisioning system to enhance the black community’s self-reliance. White privilege is defined as the control over the direction of urban agriculture by well-meaning young whites. Indigenous’ people’s movements in Canada and Australia also reject recognizing the state in their struggles to reclaim and transform indigenous epistemologies and ontologies and realize self-determination (Alfred, 2001; Moreton-Robinson, 2007). These rejections are related to histories of colonization, oppression, and dispossession historically suffered and endured by both groups. These histories are deeply tied to issues of land ownership and food networks, so that food security or food sovereignty discourses are one important part of this struggle, but they may diverge from international movements by not employing a human rights-based approach or bypassing a call for state intervention or action. This struggle may involve reclaiming and restoring indigenous food knowledges and provisioning practices around gathering and fishing, for example, as well as reclaiming land and water resources.

Food security and food sovereignty discourses are tied to distinctive political and economic histories, ecologies, and identities at the national and local levels. The access to and control over land and water resources, the specificity of crops in relation to their production, distribution and consumption patterns, governance, energy production and consumption, and processes of commodification and patterns of capital accumulation are foundational to both discursive practices, but they are differentially deployed depending upon geographic context and the political economy of development and underdevelopment as they are constructed across scale and in particular places. Food sovereignty may not necessarily be perceived as a liberation ecology by rural people, while food security may well inform the objective of autonomous control over an alternative food network in a metropolitan area for a specific group of people. However, differences between the discourses remain. Food security is a key discourse of public policy (Mooney and Hunt, 2009), but there is no agreement about how to restructure food systems and which social and technological changes and developments will ensure social justice, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion across scale (Kirwan and Maye, 2013; Maye and Kirwan, 2013; Sage, 2013).

Food security and food sovereignty discourses are interrelated, not solely oppositional. Both discourses are dynamic changing in relation to the wider political and cultural economies of food system dynamics across scale. Early food security discourses were related to food sovereignty discourses in their emphasis upon state responsibility to provide food for their citizens to strategies of self-reliance and food reserves. As food security discourses became increasingly embedded in developmentalist discourses of the 1980s and 1990s, food access was defined as market access and integration into the global food system, while food sovereignty discourses were found within antiglobalization discourses. Their interrelatedness has become particularly apparent at the grassroots level in community food security movements, in indigenous peoples’ movements for self-determination, and in the most FAO’s international food policy publications and the IAASTD report all appearing after the world food crisis of 2007–2008. The tension between the two discourses remains in full view and now centers on the legitimation of social and scientific knowledges and the differences between genetic modification of plants and animals and agroecology. Consensus around a ‘one size fits all’ definition of food sovereignty will be elusive, because places are unique and scaled differentially in multiple food systems. This makes it difficult to define food sovereignty at the transnational level and the national level in a simple set of catchwords due to the distinctions in the political economy of local and regional food systems and the variations in cultural values and traditional foodways. However, the tensions and oppositions between the two discourses will remain important, because they concerns genetic modification, which food sovereignty advocates reject, while some food security doctrines embrace. At the same time, that this oppositional tension is particularly evident at the international level, specific convergences and relations between the discourses at the regional and local levels is a most promising development. This convergence is not uniformly located, however and more research into how the discourses are understood and implemented in specific places is necessary, as well as continuing inquiry into how the discourses change in place and over time.

One aspect that is emerging in food sovereignty discourse is the importance of cultural identities and practices around self-determination especially in the case of indigenous people's struggles as well as among those engaged in dismantling racism within food systems. How ethnic diversity may impede or enhance food sovereignty discourses and practices remains an important research questions. The role of class divisions and relations in framing the confluence and tensions between food sovereignty and food security also remains an important area for future research. How food systems are racist, sexist, or classist and how these barriers can be addressed in blending the two discourses remains a challenge and area of debate. Reframing food security and food sovereignty as relational has the powerful effect of linking food access to autonomy and the transformation or recuperation of food systems that nourish people in multidimensional ways and are deeply anchored in ideas of justice, ethics, responsibility and caring for oneself, others and nature.

A uniform definition of food sovereignty should be resisted. Our understandings of its human geographies are just beginning. In examining the political ecology and cultural economy of food security and food sovereignty, questions about governance and the role of state, examinations of food systems' restructuring across scale and how their capabilities to address hunger and poverty with justice and equity, signal an important area of inquiry for human geographers. The relationality between the discourses must be further constructed and sought across scales and privileged over the oppositional stance, while challenging the assumption that GM seeds are the key to addressing world hunger and that the pathway to food security is through reconstructed food systems, which are built upon new relationships among people and with nature.