Getting to the core of food security and food sovereignty

It was quite the coincidence. My first reading of Lucy Jarosz’s deeply thoughtful article, ‘Comparing food security and food sovereignty discourses’, took place during a flight from Denver, Colorado (USA) to The Netherlands. My destination: The Hague. The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) was organizing a colloquium on food sovereignty. The event was held on January 24, 2014 (following a similar event held at Yale University a few months earlier). With Lucy’s idea still whispering about in my mind, I spent that day listening to peasants, activists, and scholars from around the world discuss and debate the phenomena known as food sovereignty. The event reinforced one of Lucy’s points, which is that the concepts of food sovereignty and food security (this concept came up repeatedly as well) are highly contested. But I also had the clear sense from this event that these concepts are probably best left ill defined and ambiguous—lest we forget one of the lessons learned from the green revolution about the dangers of adopting one-size-fits-all solutions.

Lucy’s mapping of the various food security and food sovereignty discourses is superb; a wonderfully concise exercise that agrifood scholars will undoubtedly find useful (as will their students). I also appreciate Lucy’s reluctance to reject one concept over the other. In the same spirit as her call in the concluding paragraph, where she states that ‘a uniform definition of food sovereignty should be resisted’, we should also be careful, as scholars, of trying to play referee in all this, such as by calling for the disqualification of one concept while elevating another. As we continue to embrace more ‘wild’ types of relational theorizing our appreciation for diversity, in all its forms, ought to make us appreciative of those practices that create more entanglements, not less (Carolan, 2013a). Anyone critically studying either term ought to appreciate the need to keep them open, contested, and mutable, which is why I prefer to think of these phenomena as no-thing at all but instead a process. And this also, coincidently, was one of my take-home messages in Reclaiming Food Security, that food security ‘ought not to be viewed as a thing—or an end in itself—but as a process that makes people and the planet better off’ (Carolan, 2013b: 142). I think on this point too, Lucy and I are in agreement, as evidenced by her call for greater ‘relationality between the discourses […] and across scales’. What we need, she argues at the article’s end, are ‘new relationships among people and with nature’; a sentiment that squares well with this emphasis on process, rather than on the idea that either can be cooked up if one just follows the right recipe.

Yet it is at this point that I always stumble. As some who studies (and occasionally partakes in) these movements, I struggle at times to find something solid to stand on as I seek to maintain a critical position about things. For instance, are new relationships an end itself or are we only looking for certain types of new relationships? If the latter, who gets to decides this? I think I know the answer to this question, as I’ve been involved in those participatory debates. Those within the movement ought to be the ones calling the shots, which brings up the ever important issue of control and the subject of food democracy. But by taking that seemingly well-intentioned position are we not giving up the ability to critique, unless we too are part of that world-making deliberative process? If, say, participants choose to engage in practices that spoil the environment or which rest of patriarchal relationships are we to just throw up our hands and say, ‘Oh well!’ What if a community, by way of autonomous, democratic, participatory means, chooses to engage in (monocropping) commodity production for global export? This latter example is not a hypothetical question, as instances of such outcomes, by way of such means, have been identified in the scholarly literature (see e.g. Murray, 2014). If we can still critique were does the justification for that critique reside? In other words, while highly relational, open, and mutable there must be at least some core to these discourses? If not, than anything goes—right?

I recall Eric Holt-Gimenez asking a related question during that colloquium on food sovereignty, expressing a concern that if the average US citizen was given a choice they would still choose more of the same—global, faceless food. He is of course fully aware of the difference between consumer ‘choice’ and the choice articulated in the food democracy literature (see e.g. Holt-Gimenez and Wang, 2011). His question was designed, as I understood it, to make those of us in the room more reflexive and critical on how we thought about things like food sovereignty. What if the ends arrived at do not fit our preconceptions of ‘the good’, ‘the just’, and ‘the right’? Is there still room for critique if those ends were arrived at through means we entirely approve of? What if those ‘new relationships among people and with nature’, to use Lucy’s phrasing, continue to perpetuate injustices, ill-health, and unsustainable practices? What then? Holt-Gimenez didn’t have an answer; nor do I. This was an underlying tension in many of the discussions on that cold January day in The Hague: how can we keep terms like this open and flexible while simultaneously maintaining some immutable core that allows for a critique of ends?

Related is the question of how (and if) Big Food fits into all this. In La Via Campesina’s Nyéléni Declaration, for instance, they write of giving control to ‘those who produce, distribute, and consume’. But that’s everyone, including CEOs of the very firms the movement rejects. Lest we forget, CEOs eat, as do their families. Perhaps the thinking is that they are few and the 99% are many. But that’s dangerous terrain to establish a food politics on. Over the last year I’ve been studying food deserts in Denver and Chicago and the attempts made in those spaces to enhance community involvement and make foodscapes that better reflect the interests and needs of community members (and the racialized, gendered, classed, and heteronormative politics therein implied). One thing continually grappled with in both spaces is this incongruity between the interests of those involved. In those food deserts there are populations that are few in number too (which gets us back to the racialized, gendered, classed, and heteronormative politics of foodscapes) but who need to be recognized if the goal is to avoid ‘whitening’ of foodscapes. In this attempt to be democratic, how do we avoid a tyranny of the majority? On what ground do we elevate some voices over other to ensure that the rights and ‘needs’ of the many do not trample over those of the few? Again, there seems to be a need for some core among all this relationality.

Finally, in this call for new relationships how do we preserve old ones and on what basis do we justify preserving some but not all? Food sovereignty discourse has always embraced the peasant and the family farmer, and increasingly food security discourse is too. There are few social relationships older than the family. There are also few as wedded to patriarchal relationships as the family. Is there a hidden core in all this discourse that might give us some guidance on what social relationships to jettison, what to keep, and what to keep but radically tweak?

I will conclude where I begun, by noting how deeply appreciative I am of Lucy’s thoughtful analysis of these discourses; a difficult task, to be sure, which she has brilliantly pulled off. I will also return to my early point about being supportive of Lucy’s reluctance to reject one concept over the other. There is no suggestion of us needing to move beyond either term. Her analysis, instead, takes us through them. As we delve below the surface of these concepts, as we explore their points of relational overlap as well as continued difference, I wonder if we’ll find anything ‘sold’ there.