Theorizing Food Sovereignty from a Class-Analytical Lens: The Case of Agrarian Mobilization in Argentina

Introduction

As a newly flourishing research agenda, food sovereignty has generated heated discussions and controversies in agrarian studies. Only a few accounts have sparked scepticism about the explanatory potential of food sovereignty as a research framework (Agarwal, 2014; Bernstein, 2014; Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012; Hospes, 2014; Jansen, 2015). Much of the discussions have revolved around the possible ways in which the food-sovereignty agenda can be extended and enriched (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Alonso-Fradejasa, Holmes, Holt-Giménez, & Robbins, 2015; Borras, Franco, & Suárez, 2015; Burnett & Murphy, 2014; Desmarais & Wittman, 2015; Edelman, 2014; Edelman et al., 2014; Godek, 2015; Jansen, 2015; McKay, Nehring, & Walsh-Dilley, 2014; Patel, 2009a; Shattuck, Schiavoni, & Van Gelder, 2015; Thiemann, 2015; Trauger, 2014). This article reviews the key debates on conceptualizing food sovereignty and enquires into the implications of these debates for research on agrarian mobilization in Argentina. The debate on Argentina includes both food-sovereignty movements and other critical (or progressive) agrarian movements that fall within the field of interests of food-sovereignty scholars. Therefore, the objective of this article is also to demonstrate how Argentina’s case can contribute to resolving the issue of conceptual ambiguity in defining food sovereignty and shedding light on its class dynamics.

Food-sovereignty debates have been gaining momentum since the 2010s, especially with the publication of special issues and individual articles in prominent journals including The Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Studies, Globalizations, Canadian Journal of Development Studies and Journal of Agrarian Change. The intensity of these discussions in such a short span of time not only highlights the relevance of food sovereignty but also calls for an integrative evaluation of these contributions in order to set a systematic research agenda for the near future. A number of widely raised questions are thus addressed throughout the article: Where do the conceptual ambiguities of food sovereignty lie and how can they be overcome? What is the target group of food sovereignty? How can food sovereignty address the competing forms of sovereignties at the local, regional and national levels? How do scholars working in the food-sovereignty framework evaluate the often contradictory relationships between the state and agrarian communities? How does this framework tackle social and political differentiation among farmers of various sizes and with consumers, environmentalists and indigenous groups?

As is shown in this article, the Argentine case confirms that a class-analytical approach to agrarian studies from a food-sovereignty perspective can simultaneously capture sociopolitical differentiation and homogenization in agrarian communities, while also setting tangible standards for the inclusivity of movement alliances, local–national tensions and state–movement interactions. In defining food sovereignty, this article also advises against the use of fixed formulas to assess food sovereignty, profile its target population and regulate relationships with the state. It argues that excessive conceptual rigidity may obstruct a clear understanding of how the balance of class forces and historical conditions of a given geography configure the form and context of critical agrarian movements.

Before proceeding to the major subject of the article, a few words are in order to explain what is meant by ‘class-analytical’. This term refers to a social-science approach that understands social change with respect to one’s positioning vis-à-vis class conflicts. Such an approach would thus prioritize the study of how class agents are positioned across relations of exploitation (i.e., the appropriation of wealth), oppression (ideologically and politically based social exclusions and inequalities) and emancipation (the transcendence and abolition of class exploitation and oppression) (Wilson, 2013; Wright, 1997). Class-analytical approaches would be open to studying various forms of exploitation and oppression by acknowledging the interdependency of social conflicts on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age, which are mainly conceived to operate under class conflicts. As far as emancipatory politics is concerned, one’s positioning would be assessed as to how affiliated social groups organize collectively to act upon their material conditions and reach their human potential as class agents (Little, 2007; Wilson, 2013).

The article is organized as follows. The first section presents the methodological and conceptual framework. The next two sections introduce the concept of food sovereignty and address controversies surrounding the aforementioned questions, whereas the fourth section deals with how food-sovereignty scholars respond to these challenges. The final section seeks to explore the possible ways in which these challenges can be addressed in the relevant literature on Argentina. Argentina’s case is of extreme practical relevance given that this country is seen as one of the early strongholds of the neoliberal globalization of food and agriculture. This country is the ‘world’s top exporter of soy meal livestock feed and third [largest] source of beans’ (Reuters, 2015, para 7). Due to Argentina’s top soy exporter status, Argentine soybeans are called ‘green gold’, which does not only constitute the main source of foreign currency but also ‘accounts for 5.5 percent of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] and 10 percent of tax revenue’ (Frayssinet, 2015, para 3). Therefore, Argentina constitutes an extreme case that shows other countries their possible futures if they adopted the neoliberal model in a similar way. It also exemplifies how the global problem of transgenic and monocultural agriculture is challenged by agrarian movements from a food-sovereignty perspective. ¹

Methodological and Conceptual Framework

Methodologically, this article relies on the method of integrative review (Torraco, 2005). Integrative review is ‘a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrative way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated’ (ibid., p. 356). A major objective of integrative review is thus to re-conceptualize the synthesized knowledge with the aim of attaining a more diversified and systematic theoretical knowledge base on the topic in question (Torraco, 2005; Whittemore & Knafl, 2014). With this aim, integrative reviews generate a coherent conceptual restructuring of the topic and demonstrate how different ‘streams of research [come] together to create a new formulation of the topic’ (Torraco, 2005, p. 362). In this framework, the present review suggests that food sovereignty can be operationalized as a social mobilization outcome that potentially leads an agrarian class formation process with special reference to democratic inclusivity and organizational continuity, as well as interactions between the ‘local’ and ‘national’ movements and the state and rural movements and their allies. Overall, this integrative review gives weight to research published in the English language, including the work of leading Latin American scholars in their respective fields (e.g., Arancibia, 2013; Cáceres, 2015; García-López & Arizpe, 2010; Giarracca & Teubal, 2001; Lapegna, 2014).

Before engaging with the food-sovereignty literature and agrarian mobilization in Argentina, it is important to distinguish between food sovereignty regarded as a mobilizing slogan or strategy and food sovereignty deployed as an academic research framework. Faced with the rise of food-sovereignty movements, agrarian studies testified to the emergence of a new topic of study known as food sovereignty in the 2000s. Therefore, while a main object of study in this article is food-sovereignty movements—that is, agrarian movements that have adopted food sovereignty as their mobilizing slogan and defining strategy—food sovereignty here is often referred to as a research framework.

‘Research frameworks’ express a basic structure of abstractions and relationships between the observed phenomena, which provides a guide to ‘the nature of the questions asked; the manner in which questions are formulated; the way the concepts, constructs, and processes of the research are defined; and the principles of discovery and justification allow[ing] for creating new “knowledge” about the topic under study’ (Lester, 2005, p. 458). In this article, the food-sovereignty framework in agrarian studies encourages a research agenda that questions the commodification of food and prioritizes the study of power dimensions in agri-food relations, driven by a deep concern with socio-environmental justice and bottom-up democracy (Gürcan, 2014b).

Introducing Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty has emerged as a social movement that produces a counter-frame to the neoliberal conceptualization of ‘food security’ by international organizations, such as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Food security is popularly defined as the ‘physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food’ (FAO, 2003, endnote 30). Beginning in the 1980s, the official emphasis on food security shifted from earlier notions of food self-sufficiency to attaining food security via trade liberalization and increasing productivity through high-tech approaches (e.g., the adoption of genetically modified seeds) (Otero, Pechlaner, & Gürcan, 2013). In opposing this paradigmatic shift in the mainstream, food sovereignty has increasingly gained currency among critical food scholars, especially following the global food crisis of 2007–2008 (Andrée, Ayres, Bosia, & Massicotte, 2014; Chappell et al., 2013; Claeys, 2015; Desmarais, 2007; Edelman, 2015; Gürcan, 2014b; Herrera & Lau, 2015; Holt-Gimenez, 2011; Holt- Giménez & Patel, 2009; McMichael, 2009a, 2009b; Otero et al., 2013; Patel, 2009b; Perfecto & Vandermeer, 2009; Rosset, Patel, & Courville, 2006; Schanbacher, 2010; Trauger, 2015; Wittman, Desmarais, & Wiebe, 2010).

One of the earlier political definitions of food sovereignty came from Vía Campesina, which defined the concept as ‘the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity’ (1996, para 2). In 2002, the focus of this definition shifted from ‘nations’ to ‘peoples’ with an additional emphasis on trade:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; 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; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets; and to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. (Vía Campesina, 2003, para 2)

The most widely accepted definition today is that provided in Vía Campesina’s 2007 Nyéléni Declaration (2007, para 3), where 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 system’.

Taking the cue from these political definitions, the proponents of food sovereignty in academia agree that food is not to be treated as a regular commodity, because it is essential to human reproduction. Unrestrained trade liberalization and technological expansion in food and agriculture are believed to severely undermine food security. Food-sovereignty scholars rather emphasize the power dimensions in agri-food relations as they apply to class polarization, loss of cultural autonomy in rural communities and absence of democratic control over resources (Wittman et al., 2010). In light of these very concerns, food-sovereignty scholars examine the convergence of economic with social and environmental resilience in agriculture. Therefore, they attach utmost importance to the role of agrarian mobilization, peasant solidarity and collective action in achieving food security (Borras, Edelman, & Kay, 2008; Desmarais, 2007; Holt-Gimenez, 2011). The ability of sustainable, diversified and associative small-farmer production to advance food security is juxtaposed to profit-driven, large-scale and monocultural practices that opt for transgenic and high-input technology (Otero, 2008, 2012; Pechlaner & Otero, 2008, 2010). Relatedly, there is broad consensus in the literature that food sovereignty is maximized through closer alliances between the urban and rural poor alongside an agrarian reform that promotes self-management, fosters small and diversified production and ensures access to local markets and resources (Gürcan, 2014a, 2014b). Overall, food sovereignty does not constitute a contrasting concept to food security. Seen as the most fundamental condition for a food-secure society, it rather challenges the neoliberal reinterpretation of food security by pointing to the urgency of addressing the sociocultural and political barriers to ‘fair’ and ‘sustainable’ agriculture (Gürcan, 2011).

Theoretical Controversies on Food Sovereignty

Most critiques agree on the need to formulate carefully ‘operationalized’ descriptions (Thiemann, 2015, pp. 544–546) that would ensure ‘conceptual clarity’ (Godek, 2015, p. 528) in assessing food sovereignty. Definition-centred debates within the literature have been fuelled by Raj Patel’s caution about the need to be more precise on whose interests are to be prioritized and harmonized by food-sovereignty policies. Patel calls for greater lucidity as to the statement that food sovereignty represents ‘those who produce, distribute and consume’ (quoted from Vía Campesina’s 2007 Nyéléni Declaration, 2007; Patel, 2009a, p. 666), since those who produce may also include large farm owners and agribusinesses (Patel, 2009a, p. 667). Furthermore, Patel calls attention to the fact that sovereignty constitutes a multi-scalar construct that may involve municipal, regional, national and international sovereignties competing with each other. Therefore, one needs to be clear about which scale to be prioritized and the possible ways in which these scales can be harmonized with one another (Patel, 2009a, pp. 668–669).

Patel’s critiques find their counterpart in Marc Edelman’s question of ‘who is the sovereign in food sovereignty’, particularly with reference to the competing forms of sovereignty at the local, regional and national levels (Edelman, 2014, p. 967). Edelman raises policy-related concerns on how to address the regulation of long-distance trade, consumer tastes, firm sizes and, last but not least, different applications of food- sovereignty policies that may vary whether one deals with a large country (like Canada) or a tiny country (Edelman, 2014, pp. 968–973). Edelman’s remarks on the multi-scalar nature of sovereignty and the relationship of food sovereignty to international trade have found a strong echo in subsequent literature. Taking the cue from Edelman’s question on whom to include in food sovereignty, McKay et al. (2014, p. 1177) acknowledge that ‘food sovereignty simultaneously accrues to both state and communities (broadly defined)’. However, they also bring up the issue that no consensus is reached as to the ideal form of state intervention to maximize food sovereignty (McKay et al., 2014, p. 1178).

Regarding international trade, Edelman and his colleagues contend that long-distance trade does not necessarily contradict food sovereignty, mainly because food-deficit countries cannot achieve food self- sufficiency due to geographical, climatic or economic reasons, among others (Edelman et al., 2014, p. 917). For similar reasons, Kim Burnett and Sophia Murphy (2014) assert that food-sovereignty scholarship should develop a clear agenda on how to envision and regulate international trade rather than merely condemn the World Trade Organization (WTO). They believe that over-simplifying formulas like dismissing international trade per se may create a misinterpretation that food sovereignty is by definition hostile to international trade (Burnett & Murphy, 2014, pp. 1068–1069). According to Burnett and Murphy (2014, p. 1070), this situation is particularly evident in the Oakland Institute’s branding of export crops such as coffee and cocoa as a ‘colonial legacy’ that causes hunger and poverty.

Another concern raised by Burnett and Murphy (2014, pp. 1071–1072) is whether food sovereignty embraces export-driven, small-farming practices or is solely represented by farmers who stand for food self-sufficiency. A more rigorous critique of how food sovereignty approaches self-sufficiency comes from Bina Agarwal. She is not only sceptical about a uniformly imposed principle of food self-sufficiency that overlooks the import needs of food-deficit regions vulnerable to adverse climate change (Agarwal, 2014, p. 1251). By taking the cue from Raj Patel, Agarwal also points to Vía Campesina’s changing definition of food sovereignty in the 1996 version in which the emphasis was on a vague notion of ‘national food self-sufficiency’. This is no less vague than ‘local food self-sufficiency’, which has replaced the original emphasis in 2007. According to Agarwal, ‘it is not clear how small “local” may be—it could even be read as meaning household self-sufficiency’ (ibid., p. 1248).

Besides the question of self-sufficiency, moreover, Agarwal takes issue with what she sees as contradictory to Vía Campesina’s principle of ‘democratic choice’ and ‘respect for diversity’. Not only does she find the emphasis on collective decision-making and consensus somewhat vague in the Nyéléni definition of food sovereignty, she also problematizes Vía Campesina’s approach to dissenting voices. In her eyes, this approach is highly problematic, because it seems to deprive rural residents of the democratic right of not reclaiming the farming profession for reasons such as low profitability, riskiness and low social status (ibid., pp. 1248, 1256–1257). Agarwal points to a similar kind of potential clash between individual choices and collective attitudes when it comes to certain farmers’ insistence on engaging in individual production and practising transgenic agriculture, contrary to Vía Campesina’s preference for co-operative and agroecological farming. She ends up claiming that Vía Campesina somewhat relies on what she calls a ‘cooperative’ strategy of collective action, as a form of a so-called ‘agitational’ and ‘sporadic’ model that supposedly rules out ‘regular interaction, decision-making and monitoring’ (ibid., p. 1264).

An equally sceptical appraisal of food sovereignty is offered by Otto Hospes (2014), who believes that the food-sovereignty debate has ended up with nothing but a deadlock that cannot be resolved unless its common frame is re-conceptualized around liberal pluralism. Hospes (2014, pp. 124–126) puts forward a strong dichotomy between a state centrism that should be avoided at all costs and a heavenly pluralism that would drive food sovereignty towards a reformist strategy to productively cooperate with neoliberal institutions such as the WTO. In parallel with Agarwal and Hospes, Tina D. Beuchelt and Detlef Virchow (2012) cast serious doubt on the explanatory potential of food sovereignty, which needs to be replaced by a more inclusive concept. According to them, a major flaw of food sovereignty is that it supposedly ‘neglects the urban population and unemployed workers, which together make up around 40% of hungry people worldwide’ (Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012, p. 265). Beuchelt and Virchow appear to believe that food sovereignty aims for food price increases to improve the livelihood of peasants, to an extent that it would negatively affect consumers in urban areas. Other problems evoked by Beuchelt and Virchow (2012, pp. 264–265) regard the previously addressed issues related to ambiguities as to the target groups for food-sovereignty policies, the specifics of global regulatory policies and the role of international trade for food-deficit countries.

In sum, however promising the critical and explanatory potential of food sovereignty, this term is not immune to criticism. A chief criticism laid against food sovereignty is its continuing conceptual ambiguities regarding how to address properly the tensions between states and critical agrarian movements, local movements and national interests, rural and urban populations, individual and collective choices and intermittence and continuity. Accordingly, the next section addresses how social-class approaches can help to resolve the ambiguities in the food-sovereignty discussion.

Recent Attempts to Resolve Theoretical Controversies: Class-analytical Approaches

It is also relevant at this point to define the key terms that underlie the class-analytical approach as is developed in this section. Social mobilization can be defined as a series of collective actions that press demands on the state or other opponents as a result of common grievances or dissatisfactions (Menon & Spruyt, 1999, p. 92). In turn, the term ‘social class’ refers to large groups with a common standing as defined by the place they occupy in the social division of labour (Lenin, 1974, p. 421; Poulantzas, 1976, p. 14). For traditional interpretations of Marxism, social classes represent a frequent base of social mobilization, but here the question arises of how social mobilization can transcend its initial ephemerality, intermittency and dispersion by asserting its deeper class character. By class formation, specific reference is made to Karl Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1847), in which he distinguishes between ‘class-in-itself’ and ‘class-for-itself’ (Marx, 1973, p. 173). The former notion refers to the objective existence of a class (i.e., class structures or the objective location of social groups in relations of production) but without necessarily having any awareness of itself and much less an organization to struggle for its interests. A ‘class-for-itself’, in contrast, emerges when a given class ‘becomes united’ by overcoming its previous state of social differentiation, to a degree that ‘the interests it defends become class interests’ beyond corporate, that is, the narrowly formulated, immediate, short-term and bread-and-butter demands (ibid., p. 173).

In light of the aforementioned discussion, minimum criteria for what constitute class formation are manifested in a stronger articulation of classes and movements that engage in sustained mobilization with limited (if not zero) compromise of original, especially long-term, demands beyond local organizing. Social revolutions—as usually defined in Marxist discussions with reference to ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures… accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’ (Skocpol, 1979, p. 4)—could be regarded as the maximum criteria for class formation, although even revolutions can experience interruptions. This suggests that class formation does not constitute a ‘once and for all’ occurrence that can simply be measured in absolute terms. It expresses itself as a constantly evolving convolution of several advances and setbacks that are to be viewed as a matter of degree and process, in a given historical context, rather than a simple binary outcome. For the sake of simplicity, however, the general orientation of a class formation process may be described as leaning towards either class decomposition or class formation. The former implies the loss of ‘organized political presence’ and the propensity to collective action by a given social class (Eley & Nield, 2000, p. 1), whereas the latter is characterized by the consolidation of the collective strength of class agents.

The classes of labour speak to an objective class location represented by both the proletariat and semi-proletariat, including the urban and rural self-employed and informal workers who are subjected to various ‘forms of differentiation and oppression along intersecting lines of class, gender, generation, caste, and ethnicity’ (Bernstein, 2006, p. 455). This term helps to depict the ways in which neoliberal globalization and the abolition of the full-employment Keynesian state have deeply transformed the structure of the working class and created a large mass of precarious workers relegated to the informal sector and endowed with an economically, politically and culturally heterogeneous structure. In turn, the epithet ‘agrarian’ indicates ‘both agriculture as a sector of the economy as well as the broad social structure that underlies it’ (Kumar & Raha, 2016, p. xii). In this sense, agrarian populations are represented by peasants defending their right to land and to higher prices for their goods, as well as the landless semi-proletariat in both the countryside and the city (especially, the slums). Therefore, the epithet ‘agrarian’ has a more encompassing meaning than that of the ‘rural’ and ‘agricultural’. ‘Agrarian’ class formation takes on a greater relevance once one considers the fact that the growth of capitalism and proletarianization do not automatically lead to de-peasantization insofar as rural (and peri-urban or squatter) populations manage to remain as ‘peasant producers’ without moving along a unilinear trajectory towards a purely proletarian existence in a traditional sense. They do not necessarily behave like wage earners in the political arena, form trade unions and fight for higher wages as well as better working conditions (Otero, 1999). Accordingly, the political significance of critical agrarian movements may even increase as an important component of left-leaning forces (as observed in Latin America), including Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador [CONAIE]), Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]), Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra [MST]) and the Sole Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia (Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia [CSUTCB]) (McMichael, 2006, 2008; Otero, 1989; Petras & Veltmeyer, 2011; Veltmeyer, 1997). This situation also points to the increasing relevance of food-sovereignty movements.

In this conceptual framework, Henry Bernstein’s remarks (2010, 2014) on the importance of class differentiations in understanding agrarian change have greatly encouraged the food-sovereignty scholarship to address the class-related aspects of agrarian struggles. Given the differentiated character of agrarian communities that supposedly lean towards proletarianization, however, Bernstein argues that ‘there are no “peasants” [as the bearers of food sovereignty] in the world of contemporary capitalist globalization’ (Bernstein, 2014, pp. 1044–1045). Following this orthodox Marxist line of logic, it would even be possible to label peasant food-sovereignty movements as a manifestation of some kind of ‘false consciousness’ rather than a class formation outcome.

It is a main contention of this article that class differentiations do not suffice to be a pretext for labelling food sovereignty simply as a form of ‘agrarian populism’ (ibid., p. 1041, 1045) that is conceived to be irreconcilable with class analysis. On the contrary, as A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (2015, p. 579) asserts:

food sovereignty requires challenging the class power that is expressed in and through the corporate food regime by constructing a broad democratic alliance of peasants, smallholders, fishers, indigenous peoples, urban workers and underserved food communities prepared to confront the power of capital in the food system by fostering alternative modes of organizing production and consumption.

The target groups of food sovereignty, as identified by Akram-Lodhi, correspond to what Bernstein (2010, pp. 110–111) calls the ‘classes of labour’, which are also part of the so-called ‘global informal working class’. Furthermore, it follows from Akram-Lodhi’s arguments that food-sovereign alliances do not embrace the entirety of the rural population but are exclusively built on those sections or strata that are explicitly willing to confront the global food regime and reverse the commodification of food.

Contrary to agrarian class reductionism, Akram-Lodhi’s emphasis on ‘being prepared to confront the global food regime’ does not only seem to show that food sovereignty can be a class-aware framework, but it also provides clarification as to the popular inquiry on who the target group of food sovereignty should be (Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012; Edelman, 2014; Patel, 2009a). With regard to Bina Agarwal’s assertion that food sovereignty contradicts its own principle of democratic choice and respecting diversity, Akram-Lodhi’s criteria for building food-sovereign alliances draw a clear boundary on whose interests are to be represented and included in the food-sovereignty project: Those sections of agrarian classes who reject to engage in collective action and practise farming for reasons of low profitability, riskiness and low social status are simply excluded from the alliance.

Finally, concerning Agarwal’s claim that food sovereignty is ambiguous about the significance of ‘local’ struggles, a class-analytical lens such as Akram-Lodhi’s would concur that the local is relevant as long as local movement claims pursue an adequate level of balance between the corporate interests of local communities and those of broader working classes so as not to undermine the livelihood of the constituents of food-sovereignty alliances. As such, a class-analytical lens can greatly contribute to the resolution of the underlying ambiguities of food sovereignty, as far as political alliances and diversities are concerned. For example, with regards to how to resolve potential conflicts between small producers and consumers (Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012), price increase claims by agrarian producers cannot overlook the economic situation of allied popular sectors from the point of view of a class-analytical food- sovereignty perspective. Similarly, when it comes to opposition to international trade (Burnett & Murphy, 2014; Edelman et al., 2014), agrarian producers simply cannot ignore the food necessities of working-class populations, especially if these very necessities cannot be produced locally. Food sovereignty as a research framework could therefore devote close attention to studying these kinds of contradictions and the ways in which critical agrarian movements attempt to mediate them.

Building on the aforementioned formulated inferences from Akram-Lodhi’s account, class-centred limitations of ‘democratic choice’ and ‘diversity’ in assessing food-sovereignty alliances can also help dissipate ambiguities arisen from the lack of a uniform definition of food sovereignty and a fixed profile of the targeted population (Agarwal, 2014; Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012). Rigid definitions and fixed profiles carry the risk of imposing a simplistic binary thinking that dichotomizes between ‘urban and rural, trade and localism, autonomy and engagement with the state’ (Shattuck et al., 2015, p. 429). On the contrary, the form and content of critical agrarian movements seem to vary according to historical conditions such as the specificity of configurations of social forces (i.e., classes) within the state and society, as well as the uneven impact of crises of accumulation and social reproduction in a given geography (Borras et al., 2015, p. 614; McMichael, 2014, pp. 933–934). In other words, the prevailing problems that may vary from energy and climate to urban food and human right crises leave a clear imprint on the character of agrarian mobilizations. Following a similar logic, Zoe Brent and her colleagues provide a descriptive account of how the US food-sovereignty movement unfolds based on the case of the United States Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA). They reveal that the cement of this alliance has been the will to confront the US institutional racism that condemns the poor black population to diet-related diseases, oppresses indigenous communities and enslaves the migrant labour represented by people of colour (Brent, Schiavonia, & Alonso-Fradejasa, 2015, pp. 626–627).

Contrary to Agarwal’s claim that food-sovereignty mobilizations tend to be ‘sporadic’ (Agarwal, 2014, p. 1264), USFSA seems to offer a stable platform that brings together a vast array of food movements including the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Friends of the Earth, Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative and National Family Farm Coalition. Echoing Henry Bernstein’s (2010, pp. 110–111) suggestion to situate agrarian movements within the framework of ‘classes of labour’, USFSA represents an initiative of ‘severely exploited labour’ (Brent et al., 2015, p. 629) deployed at the intersection of food activism and anti-racism.

The case of USFSA, however, invalidates the Bernsteinian argument that the so-called ‘populist tendency’ of food sovereignty turns a blind eye to questions of social class. Brent and her colleagues refer to the fact that USFSA emerges as a firm advocate for migrant workers’ rights. Although a considerable number of US small farmers tend to oppose unionization at the expense of migrant workers’ rights (ibid., p. 628), USFSA’s efforts mark a strategic phase in the class formation of those small farmers organized under its umbrella. Another crucial contribution of Brent and her colleagues has been to invalidate the unsubstantiated claim that food sovereignty ‘neglects the urban population and un- employed workers’ (Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012, p. 265). This invalidation is evidenced in USFSA’s close cooperation with African-American movements, urban agriculture activists, trade unions and workers’ centres, which has become a reason for existence for this alliance platform, regrouping nearly 40 rural and urban organizations (Brent et al., 2015).

Brent and her colleagues’ appraisal of the USFSA experience evokes the theoretical discussions in defining food sovereignty with respect to the diversity of food-sovereignty actors (Figueroa, 2015). The earlier theorizing on food sovereignty and diversity mostly relied on a ‘rights-based approach’ that was positioned against ‘privileges’ (Patel, 2009a, p. 667) granted to agribusiness actors at the expense of the multitude of ‘classes of labour’. According to Philip McMichael, rights are to be framed as ‘collective rights’ in contradistinction to the liberal conceptualization of ‘individual rights’ (McMichael, 2015, p. 440). The rights-based approach seems to have the merit of uniting movements of diverse ideological orientations, thanks to its universalizing claim of the right to food, land and seeds. However, a major limitation of this approach is that these rights are permeated by liberal-hegemonic conceptions, which have the potential to ‘incorporate[s] no imperative to look beyond rights to the social relations that make any particular set of rights appear as common moral sense’ and render class agents ‘highly vulnerable to political co-option and the re-absorption of political protest into the goal of a reworked capitalism under the framework of existing liberal rights’ (Neil Smith interviewed in Çelik, 2014, p. 425). This issue adds to the fact that the rights regimes in place ‘are built around the obligations of states, and fail to adequately address the responsibilities of private and transnational actors’ (Claeys, 2014, p. 453). While not necessarily rejecting the rights-based approach as an essential component of food sovereignty, accordingly, Meleiza Figueroa proposes a ‘people-centred approach’ that is invested in understanding how food and agriculture relates to class exploitation, racism and sexism (Figueroa, 2015, p. 500).

Referring to the multi-scalar nature of food sovereignty (Edelman, 2014; Patel, 2009a), Alastair Iles and Maywa Montenegro de Wit (2015, p. 482) provide insightful clues as to how various scales of food sovereignty can be addressed in relational terms that acknowledge the ‘spatial, temporal, epistemic and social infrastructure connections’. In simpler terms, a multi-scalar approach to food sovereignty would take into account the multiplicity of sovereignties and their relationships to each other. It would recognize that possible solutions to overcome the challenges of our current food system do not follow a pre-fixed blueprint. Instead, food sovereignty is preoccupied with how agrarian mobilization depends on the peculiarity of power configurations within local territories and in their relationship of interdependence with external institutions such as regional or national governments. Special attention is given to the ways in which the myriad forms of inequality such as classism, racism and sexism affect food sovereignty (Iles & de Wit, 2015, pp. 488–489, 492). The real challenge of food sovereignty is then not just to unveil class tensions but also simultaneously point out convergences ‘between sedentary farmers and pastoralists, agriculturalists and indigenous peoples, and rich famers and poor farmers, among others’ (Alonso-Fradejasa et al., 2015, pp. 436–437).

Worthy of mention in this regard is the research by Annette Aurélie Desmarais and Hannah Wittman (2015) who analyse points of divergence and convergence among farmers, consumers and indigenous communities in Canada. Desmarais and Wittman draw attention to how Quebecois farmers’ movements advocate different interpretations of food sovereignty. For example, the Union de Producteurs Agricole du Québec (Agricultural Producers’ Union of Québec) promotes a state-led model of food sovereignty that opts for a supply-managed industry as the representative of large producer cooperatives. On the other hand, the Union Paysanne (Peasant Union) defends a bottom-up model of food sovereignty that prioritizes social and environmental sustainability, not rejecting the idea of a supply-managed industry and the state’s critical role in building stronger food systems (Desmarais & Wittman, 2015, pp. 1160–1161). Beyond the domain of agricultural producers, the Canadian food-sovereignty movement has converged with consumers’ and indigenous movements, which find their strongest expression in the Indigenous Circle of Food Secure Canada and the British Columbia Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (ibid., 2015, p. 1163, 1165).

Finally, a social-class approach to food sovereignty would suggest that the shared interests of the classes of labour concerning agricultural production, distribution and consumption serve as the cement for a conceptually sounder treatment of food sovereignty. This shared understanding could guide food-sovereignty researchers who grapple with how to make sense of the tensions among states and social movements, local and national interests, individual and collective choices, rural and urban movements and political intermittency and organizational continuity. However, two important issues require cautious examination. First, one should give due attention to the peculiarity of the broader political and economic context that shapes the shared interests of the classes of labour, as described in USFSA’s case. This peculiarity also calls for caution against fixed and rigid definitions of food sovereignty, because these definitions may vary according to the political and economic environment in question. Second, the ‘shared’ interests of the classes of labour—as broadly conceived by traditional Marxist approaches—do not necessarily rule out the fact that the conflict of interests among the classes of labour is unavoidable. As such, class-informed food- sovereignty analyses are urged to give due attention to understanding intra-class conflicts and possibilities of reconciliation. In this context, the next section on Argentina seeks to deepen the analysis of how the aforementioned tensions of food sovereignty can be understood and resolved in view of the peculiarity of wider political–economic contexts and conflicts.

Critical Agrarian Movements and Food Sovereignty in Argentina: A Review of the Literature

Based on insights drawn from the aforementioned discussion into the social-class dynamics of food sovereignty, the present section seeks to apply this class-based approach to the case of Argentina in order to contribute to a more in-depth theoretical refinement and resolution of the conceptual ambiguities of food sovereignty. From a food-sovereignty perspective, the literature on agrarian movements in Argentina is still glaringly sparse. Moreover, the economic and health implications of Argentina’s increasing reliance on soy monoculture lie at the centre of attention of this newly emerging literature. In Daniel M. Cáceres’ research, for example, soy monoculture is portrayed as the mainstay of Argentina’s extractivism. Cáceres (2015) argues that Argentina’s left-leaning governments (2003–2015) have adopted an extractivist strategy that surrendered the fate of the Argentine economic development to the extraction and exportation of natural resources, namely by the hands of agribusinesses through soy monoculture. Extractivism has had uneven consequences in the sense that the general macroeconomic situation has relatively benefited the poor peasantry thanks to the extractivist rent transferred to welfare programmes such as the Plan for Unemployed Household Heads and Universal Child Allowance. On the other hand, the expansion of the agricultural frontier caused large-scale land evictions (Cáceres, 2015, pp. 121–122).

Focusing on the socio-environmental impact of soy expansion in the province of Córdoba, Cáceres establishes a close correlation between soy expansion and the increase in land conflicts since 2001. He relies on interview data that reveal the extent to which local peasants are being dispossessed of their land through all sorts of intimidation, fraud or forced evictions (ibid., pp. 130–131). Peasant testimonies also demonstrate how soy expansion has been met with contested forces represented by a loose alliance of peasant food-sovereignty organizations, neighbourhood movements and environmentalists including Movimiento Campesino de Córdoba (Peasant Movement of Córdoba or MCC), Madres de Barrio Ituzaingó (Mothers of the Ituzaingó Neighbourhood [MBI]) and Paren de Fumigar (Stop Spraying) (ibid., pp. 134–136). Contrary to the claim that food sovereignty overlooks the urban question (Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012), the alliance of urban poor movements such as MBI with food-sovereignty movements like MCC reveals the convergence of peasants with the classes of labour. Similarly, this resonates with Zoe Brent and her colleagues’ study on USFSA (Brent et al., 2015), which reveals that the food-sovereignty agenda encompasses a vast array of social movements including environmentalists, anti-racists and the urban poor.

Overall, Cáceres’ research presents a bird’s eye view of how soy expansion creates opportunities or class grievances to trigger agrarian mobilization led by food-sovereignty movements and other allied organizations. Meanwhile, agrarian mobilization is described as being in its infancy, and no detailed information is presented as to the political–cultural factors underlying the development of agrarian conflicts (Cáceres, 2015, p. 142). A more detailed account of the cordobés case is presented by Florencia Arancibia, who examines how biotechnology is challenged by the bottom-up mobilization of intellectuals, experts and scientists in Argentina (Arancibia, 2013).

Agrarian mobilization in Argentina does not automatically spring from the expansion of soy monoculture and the grievances that it generates on the part of agrarian populations. The literature points to the strategic presence of a number of mediating factors that help trigger or suppress collective action in the direction of agrarian class formation. These determinants manifest themselves as to agrarian movements’ ability to sustain collective action (Brent, 2015; Wald, 2015a), forge relatively strong leadership mechanisms (Giarracca & Teubal, 2001; Lapegna, 2014), deal with state intervention (Cáceres, 2015; Lapegna, 2014) and build broader alliances with the classes of labour beyond the boundaries of local communities (Arancibia, 2013; García-López & Arizpe, 2010; Giarracca & Teubal, 2001). These mediating factors are important in terms of reasserting that food sovereignty does not conform with a romanticized notion of ‘community-based development’ that fetishizes a class-blind localism (Veltmeyer, 2001a, 2001b).

Starting with the issue of movement alliances, Arancibia’s (2013) research elaborates on the role of alliance building in agrarian mobilization based on the case of Madres de Barrio Ituzaingó. MBI is a movement of mothers who represent people suffering from illnesses associated with glyphosate in suburban neighbourhoods near soybean farms. MBI’s mobilization was initiated through struggles for regulatory changes and penal complaints with the help of human rights lawyers and activists (Arancibia, 2013, pp. 84–85). MBI also conducted surveys on the harmful impact of spraying on communities with the help of local physicians and critical scholars (social scientists, agronomists and economists) such as the Grupo de Reflexion Rural (Rural Reflection Group or GRR) (ibid., pp. 85–86). Eventually, this alliance turned the local MBI mobilization with mere regulatory reform demands into a nation-wide counter-hegemonic front that united many other non- governmental organizations (NGOs), food-sovereignty movements, environmentalists and intellectuals around more radical demands geared towards systemic changes in the nation’s agricultural system. Wider movement alliances helped not only to transform the transgenic soy monoculture issue into a national debate but also to acquire crucial legal victories at the national level (ibid., pp. 87–89). Apparently, MBI’s case—which can be categorized as an urban movement—invalidates the claim that food sovereignty neglects the urban poor (Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012). Of relevant note is that Vía Campesina members have been a constituent of the pro-MBI counter-hegemonic initiative (Arancibia, 2013, p. 87). Meanwhile, this counter-hegemonic initiative is emblematic of how compatible the food-sovereignty vision can be with Bernstein’s class-analytical account on ‘classes of labour’ (Bernstein, 2010).

The role of alliance building in agrarian mobilization is also addressed by Gustavo A. García-López and Nancy Arizpe (2010), whose research examines the power dynamics of roundtable and forum meetings in Paraguay and Argentina. Initiatives such as the Roundtables on Sustainable and Responsible Soy constitute discussion platforms joined by large agri-business companies, agribusiness associations and right-wing NGOs. Their discussion outcomes have greatly impacted the formulation of government regulations and the advancement of the pro-soya agenda. The hegemonic content of these roundtables is characterized by claims to corporate responsibility and green capitalism (García-López & Arizpe, 2010, pp. 200–201). On the other hand, critical organizations such as Vía Campesina-affiliated food-sovereignty movements are excluded from corporate roundtable discussions for their allegedly radical claims, which encouraged them to hold alternative roundtables to advance a counter-hegemonic agenda, as exemplified in the Paraguayan campaign of ‘No to Sustainable Soy’ in 2005. In connection with previous discussions on the attitude of food sovereignty towards neoliberal institutions such as the WTO (Burnett & Murphy, 2014; Hospes, 2014), the exclusion of food-sovereignty movements from global platforms demonstrates that class-blind cooperation with mainstream institutions may not even be an accessible option.

The Paraguayan experience achieved significant representation among small farmers united against soya producers who mostly happened to be latifundistas (large landowners). However, the Argentine experience failed to build a coherent opposition bloc due to unresolved regional tensions among producers, particularly between mostly soy growing middle-sized farmers of the Pampa region and the poor peasantry, with indigenous movements excluded from the platform (García-López & Arizpe, 2010, pp. 202–203). García-López and Arizpe (2010, p. 205) make a case for the ‘empowering’ potential of bottom-up alliance building, while on the other hand cautioning that this potential cannot be activated unless problems of representation and asymmetrical power relationships within grass-roots initiatives are adequately addressed. Ultimately, Argentina’s case in comparison with Paraguay’s brings to surface the importance of class uniformity and differentiation (Bernstein, 2010; Desmarais & Wittman, 2015), as well as the political conflicts within the food-sovereignty movement, as discussed in the previous section (Alonso-Fradejasa et al., 2015; Beuchelt & Virchow, 2012; Desmarais & Wittman, 2015).

Agrarian mobilization is also the central theme in Norma Giarracca and Miguel Teubal’s research on the Movimiento Mujeres Agropecuarias en Lucha (Agricultural Women in Struggle Movement or MMAL). MMAL was founded as an initiative of a ‘group of farmers against the banks’ auctioning of their land and agricultural machinery to collect their debts’ (Giarracca & Teubal, 2001, p. 38). In essence, it is an Argentine rural women’s movement that emerged in the mid-1990s under the pressure of neoliberal restructuring in the agricultural sector, which had led to the disappearance of a large number of small- and medium-sized farms accompanied by the increase in production costs due to the cost of inputs and privatization of public services (ibid., pp. 41–43). Similar to the previously addressed body of research (Arancibia, 2013; García-López & Arizpe, 2010), Giarracca and Teubal highlight the importance of leadership in agrarian mobilization, hence the strategic role of resourceful leaders in building broader networks. Their research indicates that MMAL’s mobilization was triggered by peasants’ grievances from the expansion of capitalist farms and disappearance of small- and medium-sized farms, the growing pressure of taxation, and increasing rates of inputs and privatized public services to the concomitant indebtedness (Giarracca & Teubal, 2001, pp. 3–43). In turn, MMAL owes its ‘empowerment’ to the presence of knowledgeable leaders who are able to ‘secure, recognize and mobilize resources and initiate direct action’ (ibid., p. 47). Such leadership abilities have been critical in the movement’s success in getting some auctions cancelled through collective action. In terms of leadership strength, the research reveals that individual communicational skills such as the ‘ability to relate to others’ and ‘calling others together’ are equally empowering for agrarian movements (ibid.). This kind of leadership has proved to be crucial in engaging with mass and community media, which eventually led to the articulation of their presence at the national level by forging closer relationships with other agrarian movements, trade unions and human rights organizations (ibid., pp. 50–52).

Unlike the previously addressed research (Arancibia, 2013; García-López & Arizpe, 2010; Giarracca & Teubal, 2001), Pablo Lapegna’s (2014) study of the demobilization of the Movimiento Campesino de Fontana (Peasant Movement of Fontana or MoCaFoN) in Northern Argentina is exclusively invested in explaining internal movement dynamics, that is, discrepancies between leaders and rank-and-file members. Lapegna is interested in elucidating why in 2009 MoCaFoN failed to mobilize against a soy-related agrochemical drift with environmental and health consequences, differently from how they reacted to a similar situation back in 2003. Lapegna’s interviews reveal that rank-and-file members did not only fall emotionally into despair and resignation due to stigmatization by the government, agribusiness and media. A key class-related factor in their demobilization in 2009 was also their empathizing with soy growers with the acknowledgement that transgenic soy monoculture is vital to their survival. Furthermore, many peasants choose to use transgenic seeds freely distributed by the Ministry of Production as an ‘insurance policy’ to minimize the effects of spraying on their crops. Worthy of mention is how this brings up the complicated relationship between agrarian communities and the state (McKay et al., 2014), especially when state interventions that seemingly generate favourable effects on the reproduction of agrarian communities can undermine food sovereignty (see Gürcan, 2014b for examples to positive state interventions with favourable effects on the reproduction of agrarian communities). Lapegna (2014, pp. 16–18) adds that the familiarity of the Monte Azul locality with high usage of agrochemicals in cotton production makes it easier for peasants to cope with harmful spraying practices necessitated by transgenic soy monoculture. With reference to the previously addressed discussion on the variation of the forms of food sovereignty according to historically peculiar conditions, the legacy of cotton production and its effects on agrarian mobilization illustrate the fact that ‘current structural and institutional situations [are] conditioned historically’ (Borras et al., 2015, pp. 613–614).

As admitted by Wald (2015a, p. 325), ‘in spite of the importance of the agricultural sector to the Argentine economy and the recent proliferation of conflicts in the countryside, published English-language social research’ is considerably scarce. Navé Wald’s (2015b) study of agrarian mobilization in the province of Santiago del Estero represents one of the first academic articles that exclusively study the case of the Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero-VC (MOCASE-VC or the Peasant Movement of Santiago del Estero-Vía Campesina) in the English-speaking literature. Wald’s research is predominantly descriptive with its scope limited to understanding how MOCASE-VC as a food-sovereignty movement and one of Argentina’s largest peasant movements organizes its production activities. He argues that the greatest challenges to production by marginalized farmers are ‘insecure land tenure, scarcity of water, unavailability of credit, and land loss and exposure to agro-chemicals in connection with the advance of the agricultural frontier’ (Wald, 2015b, p. 103). MOCASE-VC’s emphasis on collective action does not seem to overshadow its activities in other crucial areas related to peasant production, which runs counter to Agarwal’s (2014) claim that food-sovereignty movements engaged in collective action tend to be merely ‘agitational’ and ‘sporadic’.

Elsewhere, Wald (2015a) provides a bird’s eye view of the class structures of Argentina’s campesino sector, which represents the least capitalized section of small producers rather than entrepreneurial and middle-sized farmers. He argues that the marginalization of this sector constitutes a chief determinant leading to increasing mobilization in the countryside. According to him, another facilitating factor is the re- establishment of civil liberties in the 1980s, having led to the re- emergence of ‘marginalized and hidden campesino communities’ (Wald, 2015a, p. 331). Based on interview data, subsequently, Wald describes that this re-emergence resulted in the constitution of a national movement that is also engaged in transnational organizing. Wald’s findings also complement Brent’s (2015) research on the mobilization of peasant and indigenous cultures in expressing class grievances and conveying movement demands. Wald depicts how MOCASE-VC has developed a political identity of ‘peasantness’ and devoted its efforts to turning their claim of peasant lifestyles and indigenous territory into a national agenda of recognition and incorporation (Wald, 2015a).

A similar descriptive account on the Movimiento Nacional Campesino Indígena (National Indigenous-Peasant Movement or MNCI) and its constituents including MOCASE-VC is presented in Zoe Brent’s (2015, pp. 686–688) research on land grabbing in Argentina. According to Brent, Argentina is undergoing a radical territorial restructuring process. This process is spearheaded by agribusiness and the mining industry. It is, however, administered via the state apparatus, which actively supports transgenic soy monoculture, privatizes land and evicts the peasant population. All of this is sustained through the discursive legitimization of mainstream development strategies. Paradoxically, the national strategy of exportation of primary commodities goes hand in hand with a firm rejection of neoliberalism, albeit only in appearance (Brent, 2015, pp. 676–682). Brent’s portrayal of how the Argentine state economically supports agribusiness despite an anti-neoliberal rhetoric evokes the complexity of relationships between the state and agrarian movements in struggling for food sovereignty (McKay et al., 2014).

In sum, the Argentine case provides a more in-depth explanation of how social-class approaches to food sovereignty can address its problem of conceptual ambiguity. As a mobilizing slogan and strategy, it is possible to partly attribute the conceptual ambiguity of food sovereignty to the character of Vía Campesina, a bearer of food sovereignty, as a ‘movement of movements’ rather than a unified movement. However, food sovereignty as a research framework could be improved into an operationalized conceptual tool. In line with the previous section’s call to caution, therefore, the Argentine case attests to the ways in which the peculiarity of broader political and economic contexts shapes the form and content of food-sovereignty struggles. Food-sovereignty struggles in Argentina are thus heavily shaped by the expansion of extractive capitalism and soy monoculture. Similarly, the Argentine case validates the previous section’s call to caution regarding the need to understand and take account of intra-class conflicts, as demonstrated in the conflict between soy-producing medium-scale producers and poor peasantry, as well as the exclusion of indigenous movements. Furthermore, the Argentine case reveals that food sovereignty draws its strength from the shared struggle of the classes of labour, whose understanding can help to resolve the conceptual ambiguity of food sovereignty concerning the tensions between local and national interests, rural and urban movements and states and progressive movements. The literature on Argentina points to a minimum of four sets of conditions for the strength of institutional presence towards agrarian class formation, as opposed to political intermittency: the classes of labour’s politicization of their socio-economic dissatisfactions, leadership strength, alliance-building capacities and state interventions that facilitate agrarian mobilization by intensifying agrarian grievances (besides the fact that it could also inhibit agrarian mobilization through cooperative or repressive methods).

Evaluation and Discussion

As discussed in this article, conceptual ambiguities reside at the centre of major discussions on food sovereignty. A key point to derive from this ‘integrative’ synthesis is that the form and content of struggles for food sovereignty are interlocked with social classes and class alliances. In most cases, food sovereignty alliances seem to be deployed at the intersection of struggles for peasant livelihood, anti-racism and environmentalism. It would be too simplistic to label these alliances as ‘agrarian populism’, because they rather point to tangible struggles waged by the classes of labour. Moreover, food sovereignty does not always overlook the potential effects of agrarian class differentiation on popular struggles. This crucial question was explicitly addressed when it came to frictions between the poor peasantry and the entrepreneurial farmers of the relatively well-off Pampa region in Argentina. Yet, class differentiation or heterogeneity is not always the case, which brings to fore the importance of agrarian class formation in light of food sovereignty. This is particularly evidenced in the constitution of Paraguayan small farmers into ‘peasantry’ to oppose the pro-soy latifundios in unity. This class-analytical lens also has the potential to resolve controversies related to where the boundaries of inclusion and localism (or even the sovereignty of local communities) lie in struggles for food sovereignty. From the point of view of agrarian class formation, it is tenable to exclude those who refuse to reclaim small farming or confront the imposition of transgenic agriculture. Indeed, class formation is far from being a guaranteed outcome. Another possibility is class ‘de-formation’ (rather than formation), as illustrated in MoCaFoN’s demobilization due to its members sympathizing with transgenic agriculture.

Such a class-centred approach—that is epistemologically irreconcilable with liberal pluralism—does not contradict the principle of diversity and democratic choice per se. A similar principle applies to the place of local sovereignty in the multi-scalar architecture of food sovereignty. In class-analytical terms, the boundaries of the ‘local’ end where those of the ‘national’ (i.e., nationally converging interests of the classes of labour) begin, although defining national class interests is not a straightforward task. MOCASE-VC as a provincial grouping and MNCI as a national peasant organization epitomize how national class interests can be represented away from the claim of ‘agrarian populism’ and ‘localism’. Far from neglecting urban consumers or necessarily contradicting with their material interests, therefore, agrarian movements take on a greater relevance when they cease to insist on their narrow corporate interests and seek permanent alliances, based on their long-term, fundamental interests with other agrarian communities and urban movements through collective action. These alliances are concretely manifested in Argentina’s MOCASE-VC and other agrarian movements such as MMAL and MBI. Judging from these experiences, it would be equally simplistic to brand collective action for food sovereignty as sporadic and agitational. Finally, the diversity of agrarian struggles in Argentina indicates that fixed formulas to assess food sovereignty, profile its target population and regulate relationship with the state would prove ineffective at best. Instead, movement priorities in each of these areas are expected to be shaped by the balance of social forces and historical conditions that are peculiar to the geography that hosts agrarian mobilization. In this direction, operationalization of food-sovereignty assessments would need to be adjusted to the peculiarity of individual cases.

In the final analysis, based on the literature on food sovereignty and Argentina’s agrarian mobilization, it is possible to frame food sovereignty as a social mobilization outcome that potentially leads to class formation. Such outcomes can be best deciphered through a class- analytical lens that takes account of the multi-scalar and multifaceted nature of agrarian struggles at the intersection of social conflicts around production (and reproduction). The literature on Argentina demonstrates that peasants’ awareness of their hardships generated by soy extractivism is an important factor in agrarian mobilization in the name of food sovereignty. However, the literature also highlights that material grievances do not directly translate into agrarian mobilization by themselves. Collective class action is fully activated towards class formation when a number of mediating determinants come into play. State intervention appears as a key factor that shapes the course of agrarian mobilization, as observed in the state’s promotion of transgenic agriculture among peasants. Agrarian agency is no less important than contextual mediating factors. Several accounts draw attention to how leadership mechanisms and alliance-building efforts determine the outcome of agrarian struggles in Argentina. In a similar vein, cultural re-peasantization and re- indigenization strategies serve peasant communities to politicize their socioeconomic dissatisfactions in encouraging and motivating sustained mobilization on a larger scale. As such, one could argue that the literature contributions seem to bring important advances in resolving the conceptual ambiguities of food sovereignty when it comes to the question of class differentiation, intermittency, democracy, state–movement relations, local–national tensions and urban alliances. An important theoretical challenge that remains to be addressed, therefore, is to formulate a comprehensive framework that can take into account the multi-scalar and multifaceted character of critical agrarian movements, starting with class grievances and the cultural mobilization of these grievances through re-peasantization and re-indigenization, state intervention, leadership formation and movement alliances, among others.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.